Montford Area Historic District

Highland Hospital burned in 1948. Nine patients died, Zelda Fitzgerald among them. The hospital had stood off the northern end of Montford Avenue since 1909 — founded by Asheville psychiatrist Robert S. Carroll as Dr. Carroll's Sanitarium, renamed Highland Hospital in 1912. Local tradition holds that a plaque for Zelda marks the site at 75 Zillicoa Street now. The hospital itself is gone.

But the neighborhood that grew up around it, between 1890 and 1920, endured. Six hundred buildings, most of them homes, added to the National Register in 1977. George Willis Pack made it happen. The lumber tycoon moved to Asheville from the Midwest in 1885 and took over what had been a languishing real estate venture — the Asheville Loan, Construction, and Improvement Company's subdivision north of Battery Park. He's remembered as benefactor of the Asheville Library and the city's principal public square, but he also donated the land for Montford Park at the southern end of Montford Avenue.

What got built reflects the cosmopolitan reach of turn-of-the-century Asheville. Queen Anne houses with turrets and mixed textures. Shingle-style homes in earth tones. Colonial Revival gambrel roofs. Richard Sharp Smith, supervising architect of the Biltmore House, opened a practice afterward and left his signature here: gambrel roofs, pebbledash walls, heavy porch brackets. The Rankin House at 192 Elizabeth Street is Montford's oldest home — Greek Revival built around 1846 with Italianate embellishments.

The people who bought lots were middle-class — lawyers, doctors, businessmen, a few architects. Early city directories show whites and blacks, working class and professionals. Some appear in Thomas Wolfe's *Look Homeward, Angel*. Nina Simone studied piano in Dr. Carroll's home on the hospital campus, with Carroll's wife as her teacher.

Longtime residents say the adjacent neighborhood of Stumptown was demolished by urban renewal in the 1970s. Montford endured. Today it's home to bed and breakfasts occupying the restored houses — a streetscape built for people who carried out the day-to-day work of the city, still standing.