On your right, picture a tall gray granite obelisk rising from a square pedestal, with a sharp pyramidal tip and polished panels carved with the single word “Vance.”
This spot held one of Asheville’s most visible landmarks for well over a century... and one of its most argued-over ones too. In eighteen ninety-six, local leaders formed the Vance Monument Association to honor Zebulon Vance, a Buncombe County native who served as governor, congressman, and then a U-S senator until his death in eighteen ninety-four. The architect they chose was Richard Sharp Smith, the same gifted designer tied to Biltmore, and he gave his work for free. He drew a plain, sturdy obelisk, inspired by the Washington Monument, because the committee wanted something strong rather than grandly decorative.
The money came from all over, but mostly from George Willis Pack, the New Yorker whose name still lives on in Pack Square. He gave two thousand dollars, nearly two-thirds of the whole fund, a contribution worth many tens of thousands of dollars today. Schoolchildren, volunteers, and a Ladies Auxiliary joined in too. Twenty women went door to door selling tickets for a charity performance, and another fundraiser gathered the city on the fourth of July at Battery Park Hill. It feels very Asheville somehow... a monument raised not by one hand, but by a whole crowd of determined neighbors.
The groundbreaking, on the twenty-second of December, eighteen ninety-seven, carried its own ceremony and theater. Masons laid the cornerstone in public, a rare honor, and tucked a copper box beneath it. Inside they placed a Bible, city records, coins, school rolls, and local newspapers, including The Colored Enterprise. More than a century later, when conservators opened that box in twenty fifteen, they found the only known surviving copy of that African American newspaper. Even buried objects can wait patiently to tell a fuller story.
Construction had its own drama. One polished granite panel showed a natural white streak only after it was buffed, so Smith rejected it. A capstone weighing more than six tons needed eight mules to haul it from the station. And when a rope slipped high above the square, a telephone worker named Will Ward climbed one hundred feet by hand in ten minutes to lash on a new line. The next week, during another lift, the boom groaned, timbers cracked, the crowd scattered, and one poor man tripped over an apple vendor’s baskets, sending apples rolling everywhere. Still, no one got hurt, and by May of eighteen ninety-eight the seventy-five-foot monument stood complete. If you want to see how completely it once ruled this square, that old downtown view makes the scale clear.
But this story does not end in admiration alone. Vance had owned enslaved people and publicly defended slavery in deeply racist terms. Over time, many Asheville residents asked what it meant to keep his monument at the city’s center, especially at a site tied to the sale and punishment of enslaved people near the old courthouse and jail. After years of debate, protests, vandalism, and a period when the obelisk stood shrouded, the city removed the granite shaft in May of twenty twenty-one. If you glance at the later image in the app, you can feel that absence for yourself.
What remains here is not just memory, but a question Asheville is still trying to answer with honesty.
If you’d like the venue note in the app, it lists hours of nine to five Tuesday through Saturday, closed Sunday and Monday.
When you’re ready, continue on toward the Asheville Art Museum, carrying both the monument’s rise and its reckoning with you.
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