FLETCHER, N.C. (828newsNOW) —
EDITOR’S NOTE: Everyone has a story — some more well-known than others. Across Western North Carolina, so much history is buried below the surface. Six feet under. With this series, we introduce you to some of the people who have left marks big and small on this special place we call home.
Humorist and journalist Edgar Wilson “Bill” Nye, 1850-1896, is buried in the Calvary Episcopal Church Cemetery in Fletcher.
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Before standup comedians projected from the stage, American funny men had another way of spreading their satire, self-deprecation and chaotic clownery. With pen and paper, men like Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain wrote their jokes instead of delivering them live. Considered the last of the great joker writers, Edgar Wilson “Bill” Nye, an American humorist and journalist, is buried in Fletcher, just outside of Asheville.
Nye was born in Maine to a farming family. Because of the harsh soil, the Nyes moved to River Falls, Wisconsin, when Bill was only 2. Wisconsin is where he would spend his formative years.
The Nyes were farmers, except for Bill, who continually harbored discontent with the backbreaking work. He chose a very different toil for his career, one of his mind: lawyering.
But Nye struggled with studying for the bar, so, in the interim, he took up freelance journalism to pay the bills.
After short stints at Wisconsin newspapers, Nye headed west. He popped up in the frontier town of Laramie, Wyoming, in 1876, where his career found its footing.
Nye’s judicial aspirations came to fruition in Laramie. He finally passed the bar and enlisted as a justice of the peace, but that career was short-lived.
Laramie offered Nye another opportunity. He began writing for the Laramie Daily Sentinel, a return to his journalistic roots. Yet, Nye wasn’t writing news like he was in Wisconsin. Now, he was a humorist.
What is a humorist? A predominately defunct career today, humorists were writers and artists who made comedic content for newspapers, writing satirical articles and curious cartoons. Humorists exist now predominately as cartoonists, although with the rise of the internet, a new wave of humorists has arisen such as the writers for The Onion.
Nye found his purpose as a humorist. His columns and drawings, focusing on an exaggerated version of life in the West, were republished as far as California and Texas.
Nye delighted himself in mocking the heightened rhetoric of other journalists. After his contemporary J.H. Hayford at the Laramie Daily Sentinel overexaggerated the beautiful climate in the town of 2,500, Nye responded in the Boomerang, “The sun was hidden by clouds and also by flying fragments of felt roofing and detached portions of the rolling mill and machine shops.”
Nye married Clara Francis Smith, a music teacher, on March 7, 1877, in Laramie. They had four children together.
After a few years working for the Sentinel, on March 11, 1881, Nye printed the first edition of the Laramie Boomerang, which is still in circulation today. Around this time, Nye began publishing collections of his articles in books sold across the country.
According to the Laramie Boomerang, their curious name came from Nye’s mule. “Initial efforts to drive the creature off were unsuccessful, thus resulting in the name,” the Boomerang’s website states. “When local Republicans decided they needed a new political organ in Laramie, they backed the establishment of a newspaper and hired Nye to head the outfit. Nye accepted, named the sheet after his beloved mule …”
After heading the Boomerang for a few years, New York City was the next stop on the humorist’s American tour. Nye picked up a gig with Pulitzer’s New York World in 1886 from which his articles received national publication.
After five years in New York City, Nye wanted to settle down. He chose the mountains of North Carolina for the wealth of natural beauty. Nye moved to Arden in 1891.
Former Civil War Governor of North Carolina Zebulon Vance, for whom the Vance Monument in Asheville once venerated, welcomed Nye to Asheville with a banquet on Dec. 29, 1891.
For the final years of his life, Nye spent much of his time on a lecturing circuit around the country, a tour which he reportedly hated, but fetched a pretty penny for the ailing author. Some reports list his earnings from writing and speaking at $30,000 per year, around $1 million today.
Edgar Wilson “Bill” Nye, the nationally published humorist, died in his home in Arden on Feb. 22, 1896, of complications from meningitis. Nye was buried in Calvary Episcopal Church Cemetery, in Fletcher.
In his book, Postscripts, famed short story author O. Henry, who is buried in Asheville, wrote of his friend, “Bill Nye, who recently laid down his pen for all time, was a unique figure in the field of humor… He knew human nature as a scholar knows his book, and the knowledge did not embitter him. He saw all the goodness in frailty, and his clear eyes penetrated the frailty of goodness… The world has been better for him, and when that can be said of a man, the tears that drop upon his grave are more potent than the loud huzzas that follow the requiem of the greatest conqueror or the most successful statesman.”
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