Chestnut Hill Historic District

The neighborhood that begins one block north of downtown came together in 1884, when the Connally Addition went in on farmland at the base of Beaucatcher Mountain. Asheville was mid-boom — the railroad had arrived in the 1880s, money was following, the city's reputation as a tuberculosis retreat was pulling professionals and health-seekers alike. What had been frontier woods became a compact streetcar suburb before 1910, and it held.

Two hundred thirty-eight buildings contribute to the district — most of them single-family houses, most built inside of thirty years. The Queen Anne style is here, and Colonial Revival, and Craftsman bungalows. The architecture ranges from local vernacular to nationally sophisticated versions of the period styles. North Carolina Attorney General Theodore Davidson built a grand Queen Anne. The neighborhood housed professionals, laborers, people drawn to the mountain air.

It was listed on the National Register on March 17, 1983. The district runs roughly from Hillside to Merrimon Avenue. It's a residential neighborhood that survived the city's growth intact — mature trees, old sidewalks, the bones of Asheville's first wave north.