Happy Thursday, Buncombe County!
💡 Buncombe Fact: The Young Men’s Institute on Market Street was built in 1893 for the several hundred Black masons, carpenters and plasterers who were building Biltmore at the time. Isaac Dickson and Dr. Edward Stephens asked George Vanderbilt to fund it, and Richard Sharp Smith, the supervising architect on Biltmore House itself, drew the plans.
In today’s edition:
Three days of Goombay in Pack Square
Eleven West Asheville gardens open their gates
Twelve hours of music at the Grey Eagle
Five nights of music in Black Mountain
The bookstore on a bus is getting a building
A coffee shop named after the water department
Let’s get to it.
— Sean Kolina
🥁 Goombay Returns to Pack Square
Pack Square is having a month. A week after Boomtown packed it out, the park fills again for Goombay, the YMI Cultural Center’s festival of African, Caribbean and Affrilachian food, music and dance. Three days, no ticket, and it runs between the park and the YMI building two blocks up on Market Street.
The part worth knowing if you run something small: YMI’s Pathway to Goombay program takes $250 off a vendor booth for makers and food businesses based in Buncombe and seven neighboring counties, which is a real door rather than a gesture. There is also a 5K through the historic East End for anyone who wants to start the weekend moving, and a welcome station at the corner of Market and Court Plaza. The itinerary is still firming up, so check the schedule before you build a day around one specific hour.
📍 Where: Pack Square Park and the YMI Cultural Center, 39 S. Market St., Asheville
📅 When: Friday, September 11th – Sunday, September 13th
💲 Price: Free | 5K registration $25
🌻 Eleven Gardens Open in West Asheville
Once a year, eleven households unlock the gate and let the neighborhood walk through the back yard. The West Asheville Garden Stroll is in its seventeenth year, it is free, and this year it sits in the Hall Fletcher neighborhood between Ridgelawn and Riverview. There is the expected stonework, terracing, water features, chickens and pollinator beds, and then a run of things you would not predict: treehouses, a greenhouse, a sauna, a catio, and a chapel. Pick up a guide at Hall Fletcher Elementary and visit in whatever order you like, since it is self guided and goes ahead rain or shine.
📍 Where: Guides at Hall Fletcher Elementary, 60 Ridgelawn Rd., Asheville
📅 When: Saturday, September 12th | 10am – 3pm
💲 Price: Free
🎨 Twelve Hours of RADish Fest
RADish Fest takes over the Grey Eagle for twelve straight hours on Saturday, with more than twenty local bands, DJs, comedians and painters across two stages, the Underground inside and the Goodwill Garden out on the patio. Tuba Skinny closes the Underground at 8:30pm with New Orleans jazz and early blues, and a DJ set runs the room out at ten. The thing worth knowing is that you do not need a ticket to get something out of the day: the makers market and the workshop tent in the parking lot are free to everyone from 11am to 4pm, and the workshops cover block printing, songwriting, improv and sketchbooking with no experience required.
📍 Where: The Grey Eagle, 185 Clingman Ave., Asheville
📅 When: Saturday, September 12th | 11am – 11pm
💲 Price: $43.69 advance, $50 at the door | Makers market and workshops free
🪕 Five Nights of Music in Black Mountain
The taproom stage at Pisgah Brewing has music five nights this week, and the only money anyone asks for is a suggested five dollars on Friday. The one to build an evening around is the Bluegrass Open Jam on Tuesday, where whoever turns up with an instrument plays and the line between the audience and the band is a folding chair. Around it: Tuxedo Junction on Thursday, Supatight on Friday, a Sunday jam with Mike Barnes, and trivia to close things out Wednesday. It sits off Highway 70 on the Swannanoa side of Black Mountain, which makes it a short drive from town and an easy night out from the valley.
📍 Where: Pisgah Brewing Company, 2948 US Highway 70, Black Mountain
📅 When: Bluegrass Open Jam Tuesday, September 15th | 6pm, plus music Thursday, Friday, Sunday and Wednesday
💲 Price: Free | $5 suggested Friday
Around the County
Buncombe is a lot bigger than downtown, so this is where the rest of it lives.
🌳 Weaverville’s bookstore on a bus is getting an address. Willbloom Books has run as a traveling pop-up out of a mint green bus since last October, parking around WNC to find out whether a town with no bookstore wanted one. Owner Lindsay Johnson signed a lease on September 1 at 58 Weaver Village Way and plans to open the permanent shop before Thanksgiving. Read more
🌳 The state minigolf championship is in Arden on Saturday. Lakeview Putt & Play hosts the USPMGA North Carolina Open with a $2,500 pro purse and a rolling start at 9am, days ahead of the Biltmore Championship bringing the PGA TOUR to town. Two very different putting surfaces, one county. Tournament details
🌳 An Asheville documentary is heading to Japan. Paul Bonesteel’s film about George Masa, the Japanese photographer whose pictures helped make the case for Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Appalachian Trail, screens in Shizuoka, Tokyo and Iiyama later this month. Screening list
One to Know
A quick one every Thursday. Our full small business features run on Tuesdays, so think of this as the short version, and it is never paid and never sponsored.
☕ Woodfin Coffee Department
Lucy Crown spent twenty years planning for local government, a good stretch of it on the greenways people now walk without wondering who drew them. She retired in June. She and her husband Jared had owned a small building on Elkwood Avenue for about a decade and rented it out to a run of other people’s businesses, and this year they decided to run it themselves.
Woodfin Coffee Department opened in May with no announcement at all, which is why the first customers were neighbors, then the YMCA and yoga crowd from up the road. It is a coffee shop by day and a wine bistro Wednesday through Saturday nights. The coffee is Dynamite Roasting, the pastries come from Annie’s Bakeshop and Lost Mountain, and the name comes from the Woodfin Water Department next door. Lucy grew up on Cherry Lane a quarter mile away and still lives beside her parents.
📣 Know a business that belongs here? Hit reply with a name and we’ll check them out!
Other fun notes…
😋 Weekly Appalachian inspired recipe: Apple Stack Cake — thin molasses layers with dried apple filling between them, from back when a wedding cake got built out of layers the neighbors each carried in.
🎵 Who we are listening to: The Local Honeys - Dead Horses — “My first job was tending to the horses. Now that I’m in the veterinarian field this song makes my heart heavy: ‘this little girl inside me is chomping at the bit, she cannot save the all.’” Catch them at RADish Fest on Saturday.
💛 Local Nonprofits. Friends of the WNC Nature Center — the 501(c)(3) that has backed the 42 acre Nature Center on Gashes Creek Road since 1974, funding the habitats behind the black bears, the wolves, the otters and the red pandas through memberships and the gift shop.
🙏 Positive News Around the Globe: New Yorkers ate three million oysters and the shells went back into the harbor, where they are being used to rebuild the reefs. Read Article
✨ A gate left unlocked, a jam with an empty chair, a park with no ticket booth. Three different ways of saying come in.
🗳️ One quick question, and it genuinely shapes what goes in here:
What actually gets you out of the house on a weekend?
As always, we read every reply and truly appreciate hearing from you. If there’s something you’d like to see more of locally, let us know. Thanks for being part of the Buncombe County Digest community.
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