Resources

Setting Goals

At first, my grandiose thought was to write a history of Brevard that was more detailed than anything I had seen before.  After making several outlines showing what it would have to include and then dividing items into sub-tasks (early land use, original population, residential and commercial design, construction, occupants over a period of 160 years, and interesting stores - to name a few), it was apparent that the job would be overwhelming.  I was most interested in the downtown area and focusing on the Main Street Historic District was an ideal solution.  The downtown district has about 47 buildings today, with 14 of them designated as "non-contributing" buildings and the rest structures that contributed to its establishment as a historical district.  Non-contributing buildings are those within the bounds of the district that have been significantly altered over the years and therefore no longer contributed any historical influence to the study that justified it.  Some properties that had commercial buildings in the past are now vacant, but the history of buildings that used to stand on those lots might be interesting to historians and should therefore be included.

It was decided that the goal would be to write as much as possible, give available resources, to document the history of Brevard's Main Street Historical District by describing details about its commercial structures from the largest pool of resources available today.

For each commercial building in the district, whether it only existed in the past or is still standing in the present, the information to be collected would include:

• The names that the building was known by in the past and present,

• When it was constructed, details about its construction, and the original owner and contractor

• The original occupants of the building

• Occupants of the building over the years, from it completion until the present

• Interesting stories about the building and its occupants

• Photos, both vintage and present-day

• Information about the establishment as it is today

In the past, almost all data about downtown Brevard's commercial buildings has been available in small chunks:  a newspaper article, a resident's written memories, photos given to the local library, books that showed vintage photos alongside modern photos and briefly describing its past and present, and short bits in a few of the area's history books and scrapbooks.  

Old photographs of the area are mostly available online, but I have long believed that many, many more are probably sitting in boxes or in the attics of old homes.  Viewing the photographs is not only interesting because it's fun to look into the past, but because of the holes in written history that they might fill.  

Sources of Information

Since the inception of this project, I have tried to consider ways to help future local historians by providing as much data as possible about available history resources.  Hopefully, they will have a good head start after reading this section of the site.  Resources for all material will be given at the end of each article to further refine searches for information about specific buildings or properties.

Here are the main resources used to compile the data for this project.  I've attempted to be less formal in some of the descriptions to help other researchers find their way and avoid some of the problems I encountered.

Newspaper Articles

Without a doubt, newspapers are the main source of information about the past.  Before computers and scanners, historians had to manually search back issues looking for clues.  Today, most historical newspapers and articles are digitized and searchable.  It only takes a minute or two to locate every article over the span of many decades that contained a specific phrase. 

The biggest benefit to this research project was that almost every issue of newspapers produced in Transylvania County have been scanned and digitized (using searchable formats) since the late 1800s.  Finding old articles about an old local department store is as easy as searching for "Patterson's", resulting in over 460 viewable old newspaper pages with that word highlighted on each of them. The ability to do this is extraordinarily helpful.  

The main local newspaper over the years, as it is today, is the Transylvania Times. However, it was only within the past few months (winter of 2025) that the State digitized issues from 1975 to 1996.  While this increased the workload to prepare this work (imagine waking up one day to discover that you now had 21 additional years of history for about 40 buildings to research), it precludes any detailed study for the later years.  At about 20 pages/issue, two issues/week, the yearly page count might be in excess if 2000 pages.  There are 29 years of un-digitized papers, meaning that one would have to manually scan close to 60,000 newspaper pages to find information on a specific topic.  I'm unwilling (and, quite literally, unable) to do that, so this collection of history will lack a lot of data from that time period.  Perhaps a future historian can add to his work and fill in the blanks.

Transylvania County newspapers that are available and searchable online include:

• Brevard College Newspaper, with 1,114 issues from 1935-2020

• Sylvan Valley News, later the Brevard News, with 1445 issues from 1900-1932

• The Echo (Pisgah Forest), 176 issues from 1940-1954

• Fotofax (a Dupont employee publication), 102 issues from 1968-1988

• Olin Mathieson News (Ecusta Paper Corporation publication), 201 issues from 1955-1979

• Olin Profile (another Ecusta publication), 27 issues, 1980-1985

• Transylvania Pioneer, only one issue in 1887

• Transylvania Times, 5,819 issues online from 1931-2017

Of these papers, the Sylvan Valley News, Brevard News, and Transylvania Times were the sources for almost 100% of the research in this collection. 

See https://www.digitalnc.org/newspapers/ to search all of these newspaper sources.

Photographs

The Transylvania County Library maintains many notebooks full of vintage photographs. They also have photo sheets (photos made from sheets of negatives), and negatives.  Almost all of the photos they have of buildings in the Main Street Historic District are available online at DigitalNC.  All you have to do is type a search term (like "Courthouse") in the Collections search box and click on Search.  Try different variations of your search terms (like "Court House") to possibly view more results.

Some of the photographs may still be protected by copyright. If you want to publish a photo to the public, you'll need to complete a form at the library and have it signed by them.  Visit the Local History & Genealogy section of their website.

Some older photographs may be too hazy, have scratches, or be too pixelated to study or publish. These may be excellent candidates for enhancement by one of many available artificial intelligence photo enhancers/editors that are available on the Internet.  In addition to AI enhancement, I enjoy the extra detail that seems so appear when an older photograph is colorized.  There are also many software packages that perform colorization.  My usual process for older photos is to AI Enhance then save.  Increase the resolution, then save.  And finally, colorize and then save.  There are many photographs on this site that have had these done to them prior to publication.

Books

There aren't many books that will help with the study of local history for Transylvania County.  Ones that I've used are included in the Resources section of each building's page. 

The "main" books for researching the downtown area are:

• Transylvania: The Architectural History of a Mountain County, by L.A. Phillips and D. Thompson.  This book is a collection of data that was gathered during the 1991 architectural study of the County.  It was commissioned by the Transylvania County Joint Historic Preservation Commission and published in 1998.

• Then and Now BREVARD, by Susan M. Lefler.  This book, and other like it, are a fun read and a great glimpse of history using now-and-then photographs of buildings and other areas.  Each set includes a description of the photos and interesting information.

• Brevard (Images of America Series), by Susan M. Lefler.  Provides many interesting details about Brevard's history.

Although not primarily about downtown Brevard, Mary Jane McCrary's book titled Transylvania Beginnings is the gold standard of books for Transylvania History.  I have heard that she spent seven years writing the book, which includes a very large genealogy section.

All of these are available in the library.  I have seen Susan Lefler's books for sale in quite a few stores, and sometimes you can get a copy of the Phillips/Thompson book at the Transylvania Heritage Museum on East Main street.

Websites

When researching the local history of Brevard or Transylvania County, you'll find that most places that don't mention Brevard in their titles will have quite a lot about the town included in their material.  The places with the most information are unquestionably the library's Local History pages and some of the pages on the Transylvania County website. 

• Transylvania County Library: Local History & Genealogy.  A very nice site with links to DigitalNC for online research, and a very good section of articles in their "Picturing the Past" local history blog.  The blog articles obviously took a great deal of research, and the detail was very much appreciated.

• Transylvania County:  Main Street National Historic District.  Well put-together pages about the district, including may sub-pages about the buildings downtown.  This site is another great source of background information.

Architectural Study (1991) Documents

In 1991, the Transylvania County Joint Historic Preservation Commission (JHPC) commissioned a study of the county to determine the possibility of specific buildings, residential and commercial, and areas to be designated as historic buildings or districts.  The process of submitting forms to not only begin a study, but to finalize everything should there be a selection, is daunting.  The study took many months and included a lot of forms, photographs, handwritten notes and maps, and typewritten conclusions.  Many of these were the basis for the book Transylvania: The Architectural History of a Mountain County.

The way to access these documents is through the DigitalNC site (Transylvania Library subsection).  Search for "Commercial Buildings" in the Collections search box.  When a result comes up, like "Commercial Buildings VII", select it and you'll see photographs they took for that section of town.  Under the Preview bar at the top, you'll see that you can choose to view PDFs or Images.  Choose PDF to see a PDF.  Scroll down to the Files section to find links to all photos and all PDF documents (there may be more than you saw at the top).  There's a lot of good information in these files, including hand-drawn outlines of the buildings and their notes about their histories.

Tax Records

Transylvania County's Hub Site gives you access to tax and land records.  For the purpose of studying history, we want to go to this page, scroll down to "Featured Web Applications" and Explore Tax & Land Records. Then do these things:

• Select OK on the pop-up screen.  

• Keep zooming in and scrolling until the area you want is clearly on the screen and you can see individual buildings with numbers on them.  When you get close enough to a building you want to research, you'll see little "house" icons with a number beside them.  These are the street addresses.  

• Select one of the "houses" and you'll see a little box pop up.  

• Select the little right-arrow at the top of the box to see the next box.  This new box will show you the current owner, land value, and more.

• If you select the "Click here" beside "Appraisal Card", a new window will open where you'll see a lot of details about the building's structure. 

• Of particular importance, note the Deed Book and Page number.  Write this down, because you'll need it to begin your deed search.

Deeds

Researching deeds can give you a lot of information, but it can be a lot to decipher.  You'll see actual copies of the deeds that were signed with a property changed hands, hopefully piecing together a chronological history of property ownership. 

For all of the details about deeds, including how to read them and how to conduct searches, see the Deeds page on this site.

Plat Books and Files

Using the same process as we did for Deeds, you may be able to find drawings of buildings and properties.  If a deed or anything else mentions something in a "Plat Book" or "Plat File", put the book and file numbers in the appropriate fields after you select (see Deeds above) Book/Page and, in the Book Type field, select either "PF - Plat File" or "PB - Plat Books". 

Telephone Directories

Telephone directories are a valuable resource.  Most Transylvania/Brevard telephone directories are available online from 1947 through 1997.  They are searchable.  The best way to find them is through the same process as for photos (via DigitalNC). Search for "Telephone Directory".  I was doing so many searches that I initially wasn't satisfied with the speed of searches from using the simple one on for each directory.  Instead, I took the time to download many of the entire directories (I probably downloaded 40 of them).  Then I installed a program for the PC called "SeekFast".  Once it setup (indexed) the books in the folder on my computer, I could search for something like "3 E Main" and it would return all occurrences of this before I could blink my eyes - no kidding.  I am now able to find anything that was at 3 East Main street over many years - and do it very quickly.

Telephone books really helped to place businesses and know where they were over the years.  However, addresses changed a lot and it was often difficult to know exactly what building housed a business.  As a matter of fact, sometime between 1997 and 2025, the addresses on East Main street actually "flopped"; that is, the even addresses and odd addresses changed sides of the street!

Sanborn Maps

Sanborn Maps are an extremely valuable resource to learn about the early history of Brevard.  See the About Sanborn Maps page for a lot of details about these.