What’s in a 'Name Game?'
A year of Buncombe County history told through the pandemic
Fred McCormick
The Valley Echo
March 24, 2021
Mary McPhail Standaert started the Buncombe County Name Game in March of 2020 as a way to mark the passage of time during the COVID-19 pandemic while sharing local history. She ended the series on Saturday, exactly one year after her first social media post. Photo by Fred McCormick
As the sun came up on the first day of spring, Mary McPhail Standaert pressed send on a social media post. The picture, depicting the retired research scientist and her husband Joe standing high above the valley below, was from a world that existed in the recent past.
March 20 marked exactly one year to the date since Standaert debuted “the Buncombe County Name Game,” a regular series of emails and social media posts to track the passage of time during the COVID-19 pandemic while sharing local history through the lens of the vast postcard collection she and Joe have acquired since 1987. The last communication in the series served as a sign-off for the project.
“Today is the final post as we look forward to life with COVID-19 vaccinations,” Mary wrote. “With a nod and tip of the hat in the past tradition of Jimmy Durante: ‘Good night Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.”
Five days into the isolated lifestyle that would come to define most of the year for people around the world, Mary signed on with the first of 100 straight days of posts highlighting the history of the area. The Buncombe County Name Game, as it would be called, opened with a look at the call letters for local ABC television affiliate, WLOS.
The acronym, short for “Wonderful Land of Sky,” harkens back to a 19th century romance novel — “Land of the Sky” or “Adventures in Mountain By-Ways” — by Frances Tiernan, published under the pseudonym Christian Reid.
“There’s always a gee whiz moment when people hear these kinds of things,” Mary said. “I remember having that same kind of moment when I read that book.”
A postcard from the 1930s entitled “Summer Sports on Lake Susan, Montreat, N.C.” depicts a typical day on the water in the conference center when a diving platform was a feature of the lake. Image courtesy of Mary McPhail Standaert
The Standaert’s shared passion for local history began in 1987, a few years after they bought the lot on which they would eventually build their Montreat home. Upon walking into the post office, they saw a request for old postcards from the area.
“We were living in Florida and started going to big postcard shows, where we would spend the day like collectors do,” Mary said. “We compiled a pretty good collection.”
The couple amassed 2,500 - 3,000 postcards that depict life in the mountains long before smartphones and social media began documenting popular activities and destinations through selfies and high-definition video clips. Roughly 700 - 800 images are set in Montreat.
“People wonder why we have so many postcards,” Mary said. “You don’t find that many of a place like Greenville, S.C., and that’s because Buncombe County has always been a vacation destination.”
The Standaerts co-authored two books within Arcadia Publishing’s Postcard History Series — one focuses on the history of Montreat, the other of the Swannanoa Valley.
Years of research and curating a collection of historic postcards set the foundation for the Buncombe County Name Game.
“The best postcards tell stories, and I found the most popular ones were the ones that evoked a sense of time and place,” Mary said. “People love to see those images.”
In a simple format of numbered posts containing 170 words or less, Mary delivered daily tidbits of Buncombe County history while tracking the days of social distancing.
The information she shared focused primarily on the names of local communities and landmarks in the early days.
In her second post, Mary cites a 1928 Asheville Times article which reports Col. Henry Hoagland suggested the name Oteen for the east Asheville community, stating at the time that it came from an American Indian word meaning “chief aim.” The moniker was appropriate, according to Hoagland, because it was the chief aim of the patients in the newly constructed army hospital — now the Charles George VA Medical Center — to get well.
A man sits atop a wood cart in the rural Swannanoa Valley community of Riceville in 1907. Image courtesy of Mary McPhail Standaert
A little more than a week into the project, Mary began including images with nearly every post. A 1907 image of rural life in Riceville accompanies information about Joseph Marion Rice, from whom the community took its name. Visible from the mile marker 374 on the Blue Ridge Parkway, Riceville was reportedly where the last buffalo in the Swannanoa Valley was killed near the beginning of the 19th century.
The Buncombe County Name Game drifted down social media timelines every day through the first three months of the project, and included many of the stories behind names that are widely recognized throughout the region.
Mary tells the tale of how an Asheville bacteriologist was recognized for his “Swat That Fly” campaign in the early 1900s to control the insects that thrived in a time when horse-drawn carts and open food markets were the standard. Today, anyone who has cheered for the Asheville Tourists at McCormick Field may not realize it was named in gratitude for the work of Dr. Lewis McCormick.
The postcard shared in April of 2020 of a bustling Black Mountain Depot in 1915 is an image that often sparks imagination, and conversation, according to Mary. It was this stop on the railroad, once a key destination for conferees of Montreat and the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly, that gave the town its name. But, the image of thick crowds milling around in their suits, dresses and hats, captured by Herbert Pelton, transports a familiar landmark like the Old Depot back to another time.
Photographer Herbert Pelton captured this postcard image of the Black Mountain Depot in 1915. The Old Depot, which still stands in the center of town, once welcomed as many as 10 trains per day. Image courtesy of Mary McPhail Standaert
“That postcard really grabs people,” she said. “Pelton was an artist, and his work really captured the stories of the time. If you showed me a few postcards, I could certainly pick out which one is by Pelton.”
The Name Game included 197 posts in its 365-day run, and while Mary’s initial intent was to teach others about local history, she discovered new things herself. A Jan. 28 post includes an image of the Allen School in Asheville, which was a boarding and day school for African American girls from 1887 - 1974. Its alumni included Tryon native Nina Simone; NASA mathematician and Congressional Gold Medal recipient Dr. Christine Mann Darden and Black Mountain native and author of “Lige of the Black Walnut Tree” Mary Othella Burnette.
“I want to work on having the Allen School included on the African American Heritage Trail being developed by the Buncombe County Tourism Development Association,” Mary said. “I’m also going to work on getting a state marker there.”
Revisiting the stories from the past was a cathartic experience in the midst of a historic time for Mary, who found it appropriate to end the series exactly one year after it began. She labeled her final post of her and Joe standing at the peak of Lookout Mountain, “Once Upon a Time,” a nod to how much has changed in the year since she began the Buncombe County Name Game.
“It just felt right,” she said. “We’re re-entering a life with COVID, and we’re all figuring out if we’re going back into life as it was, or if it’s something different.”