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.
Temperance “Tempie” Avery (?-1917) was born into slavery, serving in the Woodfin household for decades. After the American Civil War, N.W. Woodfin rewarded her faithful servitude with a plot of land where she could raise her family. Avery is remembered for her midwife practice, delivering the children of both black and white parents in Buncombe County.
Early Life
Tempie Avery’s life before the Woodfin household is forgotten to time.
Sources conflict on where and when Avery was born. Best estimates put her birth at some point between 1823-1827.
Where and when she was purchased by N.W. Woodfin, state senator and largest slaveowner in Western North Carolina, is also unclear. Buncombe County Library Special Collections believes she was sold to Woodfin in 1840 in Charleston, S.C.
As she later recounted to the Asheville Citizen, Avery said she was taken to Asheville by her then slaveowner Major Charles McDowell, for whom McDowell County is named. The reporter failed to include from where and when McDowell took Avery from.
No clues can be gleaned from her lineage either because her parents are unknown.
The Woodfin Household
Sometime in the 1840’s, Tempie married Silas Haynes and had several children with him. She remarried to Raleigh Avery around 1860 and had more children with him.
The Asheville Citizen wrote in a memorial for Tempie on Mar. 1, 1917, about Raleigh Avery, “…at the first opportunity, her husband with the other slaves owned by Mr. Woodfin, made good their escape across the East Tennessee line.” Avery refused to run away with her husband.
Her loyalty to the Woodfin’s during and after the war gained the respect of the family she served, so much so that the article’s writer reports that Anna Woodfin, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. N.W. Woodfin, took the final trip of her life to visit Avery’s home. Tempie died a few days after the younger Woodfin.
According to Buncombe County Library Special Collections, “The story was passed down in Tempy Avery’s family that during the war, Tempy saved the Woodfin family by hiding them from Union troops.” This may or may not be true. What is certain is Woodfin was forced to retreat in April 1865 when he chanced upon Union soldiers on his farm somewhere near what is today Riverside Cemetery. The Battle of Asheville followed shortly thereafter.
Woodfin honored Avery’s dedication to his household on Dec. 30, 1868, by directing his daughters to give the lot of land at 34 Pearson Drive to Avery to build a house of her own on. This location was on or near the location of the Civil War battle three and a half years prior.
After emancipation, Avery worked as a nurse and laundress to keep food on the table in her large household. She was best-known in Asheville for her midwifery skills, delivering both white and black children.
The Unknown Asheville Citizen Reporter
During the summer of 1914, an unnamed reporter turned up on Avery’s porch for an interview. His curious article, which meanders around without a clear narrative, was printed on Aug. 3, 1914. The peculiar penmanship was titled “Local Negress More Than 105 Years Old.”
According to the author, Avery was colloquially known as “Aunt” or “Mammy Tempie,” her house sat at 26 Pearson Drive and she was more than a century old, a fact that would later be disputed by the same newspaper in Avery’s obituary.
Yet the embellished age may have been Avery’s doing, not the reporter’s. “She stated she reckoned her age by the first falling of the stars, which occurred in the first years of the nineteenth century, and told many incidents of her early childhood.”
It is unclear what astronomical event Avery was referring to. A few candidates might include the 1811 Great Comet, which she likely would have been too young to remember even if she was alive, and the 1833 Leonid Meteor Shower, the much more likely option.
Upon his visit, the author noted five generations of the family lived in Avery’s household when he spoke with her on the front porch.
Expending few words on the subject, the author explained Avery became religious after the death of her first child. Her faith increased during a revival style “camp meeting in the Reem’s creek section.” She was a member of Zion A.M.E. church whose congregation met at her house “as she is too feeble to attend services at the church.”
Avery attested to the author her fealty to the Cherokees. The writer explained, “She stated that she had been on friendly terms with many of them” and “remembers well how sorrowful they were when they were sent to the Cherokee reservation.”
Avery’s Death
Avery died in her home on Saturday, Feb. 17, 1917. Her obituary the following day in the Asheville Citizen stated she was “…one of the oldest and most respected colored women of Asheville, died yesterday at her home at 26 Pearson drive. She was ninety years old and had lived in Asheville for the past seventy-six years.”
“Aunt Tempie, recalled by those children of Mr. And Mrs. Woodfin who are still here as their ‘very dear nurse,’ was unusually intelligent and in every way an unusual woman of fine characteristics,” wrote an Asheville Citizen reporter in memorial for the late Avery two weeks after her passing on Mar. 1, 1917. Avery reportedly had “untiring devotion, her spirit of utter and complete self-sacrifice…”
Tempie Avery Montford Community Center
Asheville Parks and Recreation designed and built the Montford Recreation Center in 1974, the first facility of its kind in the city that had not been a repurposed existing building.
The land on which the Montford Recreation Center was constructed was the same plot that Woodfin deeded to Avery more than a century prior. For that reason, 100 years after Avery’s death, the Asheville City Council voted unanimously to rename the facility the Tempie Avery Montford Community Center in 2017.
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