Published in VERVE Magazine | View full article (PDF)
March is Women’s History Month. That gave us an excellent excuse to delve into Asheville-area archives for a little research project of our own. We were looking to compile a list of the most fascinating women in Western North Carolina history.
We had a few in mind at the start—like author Wilma Dykeman, considered by many to be the voice of Appalachia—or North Carolina’s first female legislator, Lillian Exum Clement Stafford. Then, after spending a few hours in the library, we found Samantha Bumgarner, one of the first people in the country to record banjo music, and Thelma Caldwell, the first African American woman to become executive director of a YWCA in the South. On our hunt, we reached out to historians, librarians and people who knew the ladies we chose. Some cheeky librarians at Western Carolina University nominated two murderers (we’re saving them for a future story).
The original plan was to honor three women, but we ended up with ten. Who’s on your list?
Wilma Dykeman
1920-2006
Wilma Dykeman lived her entire life on either end of the French Broad River, dividing her time between Newport, Tennessee, her husband’s birthplace, and Asheville, hers. Her first book, The French Broad, launched an incredible literary career of both nonfiction and novels. Appalachian life was central to Dykeman’s work. In an interview with the Knoxville News-Sentinel, Dykeman said: “I got to know the mountain people that I cherish so.”
Dykeman never shied from tough topics, like religion and the environment. She was a passionate environmentalist and published The French Broad in 1955, seven years before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. “Before anyone knew about sustainable development, Wilma Dykeman defined it,” says Karen Cragnolin, executive director of RiverLink, which named its West Asheville RiverWay development project after Dykeman. (Photo courtesy of the NC Collection at Pack Memorial Public Library in Asheville)
Samantha Bumgarner
1878-1960
On a trip to New York City in 1924, banjo player “Aunt” Samantha Bumgarner of Jackson County became the first female country music artist in the nation to have her music recorded. Her father discouraged her from the fiddle, the “devil’s box,” so Bumgarner picked up a banjo as a teen and played until a year before her death at age 82. At a 1935 folk music revival in Asheville, a young Pete Seeger caught a Samantha show and said of it, “I lost my heart to the old-fashioned, five-string banjo played mountain-style.” Pam Meister of Western Carolina University’s Mountain Heritage Center curated an exhibit, Women’s Work: Stories from the Appalachian Women’s Museum, which features Bumgarner and runs through June. (Photo courtesy of Special Collections at the Hunter Library at Western Carolina University)
Sprinza Weizenblatt
1895-1987
Sprinza Weizenblatt was born in Romania and raised in Austria but moved to Asheville in 1927. She studied to become an opthamologist in Vienna and was the only opthamologist in Asheville when she moved here. Though Weizenblatt shunned publicity, the Wellness Center at UNC-Asheville is named after her, and sometime in the late ‘80s, she made a $500,000 donation to UNCA, the largest donation in the university’s history at that time. (Photo courtesy of the R. Henry Scadin Photographic Collection and the D.H. Ramsey Library Special Collections at UNC Asheville)