Happy Thursday, Buncombe County!
💡 Buncombe Fact: Every mission patch NASA astronauts have worn since 1970 was made in Weaverville. A-B Emblem has been the astronaut office’s exclusive supplier since February 24th of that year, and for decades the commander of each mission would fly a T-38 into Asheville and drive out to the plant to turn his sketch into thread. The commander still designs the patch. He just emails it now.
In today’s edition:
A hundred artists take over Main Street in Weaverville
The PGA TOUR is back for the first time since 1942
Free fishing poles and bait, tonight
Whimmy diddles and Jack tales on the Parkway
Oompah and a festbier in Black Mountain
A Greek wine bar opens in West Asheville
The man who bought the guitar shop, then bought the building
Let’s get to it.
— Sean Kolina
🖼 A Hundred Artists Take Over Main Street
Weaverville closes Main Street to cars on Saturday and fills it with booths. Art in Autumn is in its nineteenth year and brings more than a hundred juried artists, which is more than you will get through in one pass. Painters, potters, jewelers, woodworkers and glass artists line the street, and the music runs all day under the covered garage at Jonathon’s, opening with Mitch Hampton at 10:30 and closing with Steelin’ Time at three.
It costs nothing to get in and nothing to park, which the Weaverville Business Association has managed to hold true for nineteen years. Leave the car at Weaverville Primary School or one of the marked church lots and walk in. The shops, galleries and restaurants along Main stay open through the day, so this is less a two-hour errand than a reason to spend a whole Saturday seven miles north of Asheville. Judges hand out a thousand dollars for best of show, so the work people bring is not casual.
📍 Where: Main Street, Downtown Weaverville
📅 When: Saturday, September 19th | 10am – 6pm
💲 Price: Free | Free parking
⛳ The PGA TOUR Is Back After Eighty-Four Years
The last time professional golf came to Western North Carolina it was the Asheville Land of the Sky Open, and the year was 1942. The Biltmore Championship runs Thursday through Sunday at The Cliffs at Walnut Cove, and tickets are sold by the day, so you pick a day and go rather than committing to the whole run. Three things the name does not tell you: it is in Arden rather than out on the Biltmore Estate, two kids fifteen and under get in free with each ticketed adult and you claim them at any gate rather than in advance, and Saturday has already sold out short of resale. Parking is separate from your ticket and the Thursday and Friday lots are gone, so the simplest way in is a rideshare to the drop at MA Paper and Packaging on Vista Boulevard, where a shuttle runs to the course.
📍 Where: The Cliffs at Walnut Cove, Arden
📅 When: Thursday, September 17th – Sunday, September 20th | Tickets sold by the day
💲 Price: Two kids 15 and under free per adult | Saturday sold out, resale only
🧵 Whimmy Diddles and Jack Tales on the Parkway
The Southern Highland Craft Guild has run Heritage Weekend at the Folk Art Center for forty-six years and has never charged for it. Craftspeople work the old trades in front of you, blacksmithing and broom-making and natural dyeing, some of them using no electricity at all. The centerpiece is the World Gee Haw Whimmy Diddle Competition at two o’clock Saturday, which has run every year since the Folk Art Center opened in 1980, and everyone who enters gets a Moon Pie. A whimmy diddle is a mountain toy cut from two rhododendron sticks; rub one along the notches of the other and the propeller spins right, which is gee, or left, which is haw. Ash Woody of Swannanoa opens Saturday at ten with Appalachian Jack tales, and Davy Arch tells Cherokee stories at eleven on Sunday.
📍 Where: Folk Art Center, Milepost 382, Blue Ridge Parkway, Asheville
📅 When: Saturday, September 19th – Sunday, September 20th | 10am – 4pm
💲 Price: Free | Free parking
🍻 Oompah and a Festbier in Black Mountain
Lookout Brewing throws its seventh Oktoberfest on Saturday, and the appeal is the scale of it. This is one small taproom on a side street off State, not a field of rented tents. Das Oompapa’s Band plays four to seven, the festbier comes out alongside a Schatz Lager can release, and there is no cover to walk in. Custom steins are the reason to turn up early rather than late, and festive dress is encouraged rather than required, which in Black Mountain means roughly a third of the room will commit to it.
📍 Where: Lookout Brewing, 103 S. Ridgeway Ave., Black Mountain
📅 When: Saturday, September 19th | 12pm – 9pm
💲 Price: No cover
🎣 Free Poles and Bait at Azalea Park
The city stocks Azalea Park Pond and then hands you everything you need to fish it. Family Fishing Night runs this evening, poles and bait are provided, and Asheville Parks & Recreation brings someone out to walk beginners through the basics. The Wildlife Resources Commission waives the license requirement for the night, so nobody over sixteen needs to have sorted that out ahead of time. Ninety minutes, no cost, and about the lowest-effort way there is to get a kid outside on a school night.
📍 Where: Azalea Park Pond, 395 Azalea Rd., Asheville
📅 When: Thursday, September 17th | 5:30pm – 7pm
💲 Price: Free
Around the County
Buncombe is a lot bigger than downtown, so this is where the rest of it lives.
🌳 West Asheville has a Greek wine bar now. Ontos opened in August at 16 Allen Street, tucked behind One World Brewing West, pouring natural wine, Greek beer and ouzo cocktails with small plates to go with them. The name is Greek for “really” or “truly.” Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Take a look
🌳 Enka’s wrestlers got their rings. Enka High took the NCHSAA 5A team wrestling state championship last winter with 83 points, and three individual titles came with it: Maddox Crooke at 106, Jacobie Morrison at 113 and Sheppard Homan at 126. The rings were handed out at halftime of a home football game. Read more
🌳 The airport moved where your ride picks you up. Asheville Regional opened a dedicated lot for rideshare and taxi pickups on September 1, so arrivals no longer meet their car at the curb. Worth knowing before you ask someone to come get you. Ground transportation
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.
🎸 Acoustic Corner, Black Mountain
David Zoll started at Acoustic Corner as a part-time employee, twenty-five hours a week, teaching lessons and playing gigs around the edges of it. Twenty years later he bought the place. The shop sells and repairs guitars, banjos, mandolins, ukuleles and violins, and rents instruments to people still deciding whether they will stick with it.
The part worth knowing came less than a year into owning it, when an email landed saying someone was coming to appraise the building. He assumed the landlord was selling and that he was about to lose the shop he had just spent two decades earning his way into. So he went and got a commercial loan and bought the building himself. It is the old McMurray Chevrolet dealership on Montreat Road, and the showroom he sells out of takes up 900 square feet of a building more than five times that size.
📣 Know a business that belongs here? Hit reply with a name and we’ll check them out!
Other fun notes…
😋 Weekly Appalachian inspired recipe: Leather Britches — green beans strung on thread with a needle, hung to dry until they wrinkle like an old pair of pants, then soaked overnight and simmered for hours. The end of the garden, put up for winter.
🎵 Who we are listening to: Flipturn - Sad Disco — “The hardest part of going to work is realizing I’ve got to turn off this hidden gem for mainstream music.”
💛 Local Nonprofits. Asheville Museum of Science — the 501(c)(3) on Patton Avenue that grew out of one man’s mineral collection, opened in 1960 as the Colburn Memorial Museum and reopened under its current name in 2016, with exhibits tying astronomy, geology, weather and paleontology back to the landscape right outside the door.
🙏 Positive News Around the Globe: A 91-year-old who goes by Greybeard on the trail became the oldest person ever to walk the whole Appalachian Trail, finishing after 359 days and 71 falls. Read Article
✨ A hundred booths on one street, a toy cut from two sticks, and a man who took 359 days to finish the trail at ninety-one. Nobody around here seems to be in much of a hurry.
🗳️ 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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