Day trips from Asheville, NC- to Cold Mountain

This day trip had three stops starting with the Alison-Deaver House in Brevard, NC, the second stop had nothing to do with the Civil War was at Looking Glass Waterfall in the Pisgah National Forest, and the final stop was the view of Cold Mountain from a stop on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The return to Asheville was on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Brevard

Alison-Deaver House- 35.2763074, -82.7007846. Excerpted from the marker- This was the home of William Deaver and his wife, Margaret Patton Deaver. It was the scene of a tragic shooting in February 1865, a consequence of the tumult that the Civil War created among North Carolinians. When the war began, a few Transylvania County men enlisted in the Union army, but most joined the Confederate forces. Deaver’s son James Patton Deaver (1843-1889) enlisted for a year in June 15, 1861, in the 25th North Carolina Infantry. Mustered in as a sergeant, Deaver was promoted to lieutenant in 1862, before being discharged. He was commissioned a captain in the 14th Battalion North Carolina Troops on April 14, 1864, and provided homeland defense and procured military supplies. Deaver, like other Confederate commanders in the area, was ordered to arrest armed Confederate deserters and Union partisans who were hiding in the mountains, forming gangs called “bushwhackers,” and plundering civilians. On the evening of February 24, 1865, when Deaver was home on leave but at a neighbor’s house, such a gang surrounded the Deaver home and called, “Captain Deaver!” Seventy-year-old William Deaver, once a Buncombe County militia captain, stepped through the doorway into the gloom and said, “I am Captain Deaver. Who is it?” The outlaws fired, killing him and then escaped despite the efforts of James Deaver to track them down.