Clingman Avenue Historic District

Clingman Avenue Historic District occupies about seven acres just south of Patton Avenue on the west side of downtown Asheville. Small lots, some perched on hills and others dropping steeply to the rear, hold 33 contributing houses and outbuildings and seven non-contributing buildings, with eleven vacant lots between them. Most are one-story cottages or bungalows, including hip roof, front gable and L-plan types dating from 1896 to the 1940s, along with a few larger two-story Queen Anne houses such as the 1896 C. C. Brown House. Two brick cottages on Yarrow Street, built in 1943, are exceptions to the predominantly wood frame construction. Built mainly as speculative rental housing, the neighborhood was first occupied by white tenants, including railroad workers and carpenters. From about 1911 onward African American renters and owners increasingly took over the houses, working as porters, maids, cooks and drivers. Directory research documents these occupants house by house, and the surviving buildings preserve the area's early twentieth-century character.