ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) —
Joshua Darty has a unique perspective of Asheville history, honed from family stories and maps and documents, some more than 100 years old.
Darty’s desk in the manager’s office at Riverside Cemetery is as meticulously kept as the 87 acres he watches over. But his time there is coming to an end. His last day at the desk where he’s worked for more than 11 years is Aug. 1.
“When I first started here, I didn’t know where I was working,” Darty said with a laugh. “I had applied at Parks and Rec and they gave me an address — 53 Birch Street. I pulled up here and thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is a cemetery.'”
That was about 18 years ago when he landed a job as a landscaper.
“I fell in love with this place from Day 1,” he said.
Over the years, Darty has worked with about 60 crew members to care for the grounds and the thousands of people interred there.
“I’ve had great crews the whole time I’ve been here, really wonderful people,” he said.
Darty and his wife will be moving overseas, where she will be working as a librarian.
“I’ll maybe do some fill-in teaching, kind of take a step back for a while,” Darty said.
A brief history of the cemetery
Riverside Cemetery in the city’s historic Montford District is more than a burial place. The park-like cemetery, founded on Aug. 4, 1885, by the Asheville Cemetery Co., is a place of history, a place where visitors may walk or ride, take photos or paint or journey into the city’s past.
Asheville Cemetery Co. sold the burial grounds overlooking the French Broad River to the city of Asheville in 1952.
About 3 1/2 miles of paved roads wind through hills dotted with angels, crosses, tombstones and mausoleums, many are truly works of art. As of last week, some 14,203 people were interred at Riverside. About 3,000 are in unmarked graves, Darty said.
Riverside Cemetery holds the graves of numerous historic figures, ranging from authors Thomas Wolfe and William Sydney Porter (O. Henry) to educators, including Queen Carson, who was Asheville’s first female public school principal, and Isacc Dickson, the first African American to be appointed to an Asheville City School Board.
Among the generals and politicians buried at the Asheville cemetery are Robert B. Vance, Thomas Clingman, Zebulon B. Vance, Jeter C. Pritchard and Locke Craig.
George Masa, a Japanese photographer who documented much of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and James H. Posey, a bodyguard to Abraham Lincoln, are also buried there.
It’s estimated that more than 30,000 people a year visit the cemetery, Darty said.
Darty’s job
Keeping track of who is buried where, what spaces are open and what work needs to be done can be complicated.
“The records here are meticulous,” Darty said thumbing through a book of burial records that dates to 1885.
The ink on some of the cemetery’s paperwork and maps is faded, while on others it is easy to read.
“What’s on some 100-year-old maps, what the stone says and what’s in the earth are three different things,” Darty explained. “You just have to interpret as you go.”
According to the city’s website, the cemetery averages about 50 services a year. And in a place surrounded by nature, some of those services get unexpected visitors.
“Lately, we’ve had a lone turkey who has been visiting,” Darty said.
The bird was on hand to pay his respects at a recent service.
“He kept following me. I had to shoo him out of the way so the procession could come in,” Darty said.
Bears, chipmunks, deer, rabbits and squirrels are among the other four-legged visitors to the cemetery.
But what about visitors of the spooky sort?
“I have not seen anything,” Dary said of ghosts. “Some of the other guys who have worked here have claimed to see things.”
One worker said he saw something several times in the same place when arriving at the cemetery.
“Turns out it was his headlights hitting a shiny headstone,” Darty said.
The cemetery had its own crew, a group of about eight or nine self-sufficient people, Darty said.
“They could take care of the grounds, fix tombstones and wind up being tour guides when someone would ask them where a certain grave was,” Darty said.
The city has pulled that crew and now sends a larger workforce to the cemetery once a week, Darty said, describing a move that made his decision to leave a little easier.
“I’m going to miss the people, the visitors who come in here,” he said. “I can’t really make their day better, but I can make sure the place where they come is as beautiful as it can possibly be.”
The stories
Not everyone at Riverside is famous. Some are just regular people.
To hear Darty talk about Riverside is to hear stories about the people — the visitors, those whose final resting places are under the tree-shaded expanse and their families.
“I’ve really enjoyed getting to help visitors, hearing their stories, being able to tell them to other people,” Darty said. “They have so many great stories to tell.”
Those stories even made their way into a book, “Asheville’s Riverside Cemetery.”
“I was approached about writing the book. Actually, they asked if I knew anyone who knew enough of the history to write a book,” Darty said. “And I thought, who better to write it than me? I spent years researching and writing.”
On a stroll through the grounds Monday morning, Darty pointed out a cross from Zebulon Vance’s second wife’s family, explaining it’s a replica of the St. Martin’s Cross at Iona Abbey in Scotland.
“It’s at the top of the hill, so one of the best spots in the cemetery,” he said launching into the story of the man who was buried three times in the same cemetery.
On April 14, 1894, Vance had a stroke, went into a coma and died at his home in Washington D.C.
Vance was buried, presumably, beside his first wife, Harriette, in Riverside Cemetery in the Vance family plot. Turns out the body of the first Mrs. Vance, who died in 1878, had never been moved to Riverside, although there was a plot for her.
Weeks later, Vance’s second wife, Florence Steele Martin Vance, had his body moved to her family’s plot in Riverside Cemetery.
“His family didn’t know about her plans to move him to the Martin plot, and certainly didn’t approve. And that started a fight over where he should be buried,” Darty said.
TOMBSTONE TALES: ‘AMERICAN GODFATHER’ BURIED AT RIVERSIDE
According to reports at the time, Vance’s children, who were all born to his first wife, successfully petitioned the court to move his body back to its original burial site.
Harriette Vance’s remains were moved to the plot adjacent to Zebulon not long after.
Florence Vance died in 1924. She, too, is interred at Riverside Cemetery in the Martin family plot, where the cross known as Martin’s cross is.
“She was right. It is a beautiful spot,” Darty said. “Just look at the view from up here.