Historic James Vester Miller Trail

About James Vester Miller (1860 – 1940) 

Born in Rutherford County, N.C. to an enslaved mother, Louisa Miller, and a slavemaster father, James Vester Miller learned his craft by working at brickyards and construction sites, eventually apprenticing with the city’s best brick masons. His exceptional brickwork caught the eye of Asheville’s leading architects, including Richard Sharp Smith, the supervising architect of the Biltmore House. Later, Miller formed his own construction company, Miller & Sons, and won contracts in the competitive, White-dominated construction industry. Moreover, his career spanned the Jim Crow years, often described as a low point of African-American history − an era of systemic disenfranchisement, lynchings and rigid segregation codified into law. He built a 15-room home in the Emma community of west Asheville, and reared 6 children with his wife, Violet. Four of his sons became master bricklayers; a fifth became one of Asheville’s first Black physicians.

Miller's Work Shines in Asheville's East End

The James Vester Miller Walking Tour focuses on Asheville’s “East End,” the African-American neighborhood closest to Asheville's Pack Square in downtown. As Asheville’s economy steadily grew and boomed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the segregated East End expanded to become a thriving community of homes, schools, churches, businesses and nightclubs.

The 1920s were the Golden Age of the East End. On Eagle Street, the Wilson Building offered office space to African-American businesses and professionals, and the YMI (Young Men’s Institute) was home to a “colored library,” classes and events. Stephens-Lee High School, the pride of the neighborhood also known as “the Castle on the Hill,” was the only public high school for African Americans in western North Carolina. Businesses across the neighborhood included barber shops, beauty salons, a movie theater, a pharmacy, an ice cream shop, flower shops, clothing shops and professional offices. Much of the area, including Stephens-Lee High School, was demolished in the 1970s and 1980s as a part of the urban renewal effort which swept the entire United States. Following years of redlining practices and a failure to enforce building codes, many of the structures in the East End were in need of repair. In what amounted to a landgrab, these as well as maintained homes, deemed to be “dilapidated” were razed to clear a so-called “blighted” area. Against the wishes of the majority in the neighborhood, the East End’s main artery, Valley Street, was renamed South Charlotte after the sister-in-law of slaveowner James W. Patton