Montford Area Historic District

Montford is a large, mostly wooded residential district on the slopes north of Battery Park Hill in Asheville, built mainly between the late 1880s and the 1920s. It holds well over six hundred buildings, most of them houses in Queen Anne, shingle, bungaloid and Colonial Revival styles, often combining wood shingles, pebbledash, stucco and stone. The Asheville Loan, Construction, and Improvement Company began the subdivision in 1889, and lumber merchant George Willis Pack later drove most of its growth. Richard Sharp Smith, who supervised construction of Biltmore House, designed or inspired many of the larger houses, and the neighborhood's original granite curbing and brick sidewalks survive. Its residents were largely professionals and businessmen, many of them newcomers to the city, and the district is regarded as Asheville's leading middle class neighborhood of its era and as its most intact.