thumb|Asheville City Hall. This building epitomizes the Art Deco style of the 1920s.

thumb|The Biltmore House on Biltmore Estate, which is the largest house in America, with more than 250 rooms, was built as a private residence complete with indoor pool and bowling alley. Modern guests, who also come to see the adjacent gardens, enjoy a similar view to this 1902 photo.

Asheville is a city in and the county seat of Buncombe County, North Carolina, United States.GR: 6 The population was 68,889 at the 2000 census. It is the largest city in western North Carolina, and continues to grow. As of 2006, the Census Bureau estimates that Asheville's population is 72,789 Population Finder: Asheville, North Carolina. U.S. Census Bureau, 2006 Population Estimates. Accessed February 10, 2007.. Asheville is a part of the four-county Asheville metropolitan statistical area, the population of which was estimated by the Census Bureau in 2006 to be 398,009.

History

Before the arrival of Europeans, the land where Asheville now exists lay within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation. In 1540, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto came to the area, bringing the first European visitors in addition to European diseases which seriously depleted the native population. The area was used as an open hunting ground until the middle of the 19th century.

The history of Asheville, as a town, begins in 1784. In that year Colonel Samuel Davidson and his family settled in the Swannanoa Valley, redeeming a soldier's land grant from the state of North Carolina. Soon after building a log cabin at the bank of Christian Creek, Davidson was lured into the woods by a band of Cherokee hunters and killed. Davidson's wife, child and female slave fled on foot to Davidson's Fort (named after Davidson's father General John Davidson) 16 miles away.

In response to the killing, Davidson's twin brother Major William Davidson and brother-in-law Colonel Daniel Smith formed an expedition to retrieve Samuel Davidson's body and avenge his murder. Months after the expedition, Major Davidson and other members of his extended family returned to the area and settled at the mouth of Bee Tree Creek.

The United States Census of 1790 counted 1,000 residents of the area, excluding the Cherokee. The county of Buncombe was officially formed in 1792. The county seat, named “Morristown” in 1793, was established on a plateau where two old Indian trails crossed. In 1797 Morristown was incorporated and renamed “Asheville” after North Carolina Governor Samuel Ashe.

The Civil War

Asheville, with a population of approximately 2,500 by 1861, remained relatively untouched by the Civil War, but contributed a number of companies to the Confederate States Army, and a substantially smaller number of soldiers to the Union.Fact: date=August 2007 For a time an Enfield rifle manufacturing facility was located in the town. The war came to Asheville as an afterthought, when the "Battle of Asheville" was fought in early April 1865 at the present-day site of the University of North Carolina at Asheville, with Union forces withdrawing to Tennessee after encountering resistance from a small group of Confederate senior and junior reserves and recuperating Confederate soldiers in prepared trench lines across the Buncombe Turnpike; orders had been given to the Union force to take Asheville only if this could be accomplished without significant losses.Fact: date=August 2007