Craig Associates, PC

About Asheville

Asheville ( ASH-vil) is a city in and the county seat of Buncombe County, North Carolina, United States. Located at the confluence of the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers, it is the most populous city in Western North Carolina, and the state's 11th-most-populous city. According to the 2020 census, the city's population was 94,589, up from 83,393 in the 2010 census. It is the principal city in the three-county Asheville metropolitan area, which had an estimated population of 417,202 in 2023. == History == === Origins === Before the arrival of the Europeans, the land where Asheville now exists lay within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation, which had homelands in modern western North and South Carolina, southeastern Tennessee, and northeastern Georgia. A town at the site of the river confluence was recorded as Guaxule by Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto during his 1540 expedition through this area. His expedition comprised the first European visitors, who carried endemic Eurasian infectious diseases that killed many in the native population.The Cherokee had traditionally used the area by the confluence for open hunting and meeting grounds. They called it Untokiasdiyi or Tokiyasdi (ᏙᎩᏯᏍᏗ in Cherokee), meaning "Where they race", until the middle of the 19th century.European Americans began to settle in the area of Asheville in 1784, after the United States gained independence in the American Revolutionary War. In that year, Colonel Samuel Davidson and his family settled in the Swannanoa Valley, redeeming a soldier's land grant from the state of North Carolina made in lieu of pay. Soon after building a log cabin at the bank of Christian Creek, Davidson was lured into the woods and killed by a band of Cherokee hunters resisting white encroachment.