Asheville, North Carolina: The Clerk Who Jumped the Gun

Asheville, North Carolina, was still legally Morristown in 1795 when the county clerk started writing Asheville in the court minutes, caught himself and changed it back. The new name honored Samuel Ashe, who had just become governor, and people were using it before the paperwork caught up.

A slip of the pen

F. A. Sondley, whose history of Asheville and Buncombe County came out in 1922, went through the old Buncombe County court minutes and found the moment. In 1795, Samuel Ashe of New Hanover County was elected governor of North Carolina, and “in his honor the name of Morristown was changed to Asheville.” But the new name, Sondley says, “became common some time before any legal action upon the subject was had.”

By October 1795 it was so common that the clerk, opening the minutes for that term, began to write Asheville “but before completing it he recollected himself and finished it out as Morristown.” In April 1796 he did it again. This time he wrote the whole word, Asheville, then “passed his pen through the word” and wrote Morristown. That crossed-out word is about as close as you’ll get to watching a town change its name in real time.

The legal change came a little later. Sondley couldn’t pin it down closer than “July, 1796, or October, 1796, or in January, April or July, 1797.” The federal place-name database gives 1797.

Who was Samuel Ashe?

Sondley sums him up in one long sentence. Ashe was born in North Carolina in 1725, went to Harvard, became a lawyer, sat on the council that ran the state early in the Revolution, served as a judge of the state’s highest court and then, from 1795, as governor for three years. He was on the court when it decided the case of Bayard v. Singleton, which held that an act of the legislature was void because it went against the constitution.

Morristown, a name nobody can explain

The older name is the real puzzle. Sondley quotes the county court’s order of April 1793 that the courthouse site “be named Morristown,” and admits, “Nobody seems to know why the name of Morristown was bestowed upon the place.”

He did offer a guess, and he was clear that it was one. The committee choosing the site had split evenly between the north and south ends of the county, so the legislature added an outsider, William Morrison of Burke County, who cast the deciding vote. Sondley thought the town might have been named for him, with the name cut short because Morrison plus “town” was too long for convenience, and that the losing side’s resentment might explain why the name didn’t last. He offered it “as a conjecture in the total absence of any record or tradition.”

The federal database tells a similar story with a different spelling: it says Morristown was named “likely for William Morris who cast the deciding vote.” If you look at the 1793 certificate Sondley copied into his book, though, it’s signed “William Morrison,” and nothing in writing from 1793 says who the town was named for. The Asheville part, at least, isn’t a mystery.

Sources & further reading

• F. A. Sondley, Asheville and Buncombe County (1922). The court order naming Morristown in April 1793, “Nobody seems to know why” (pp. 71–72); the split committee, William Morrison’s deciding vote and Sondley’s conjecture (pp. 72–73); Samuel Ashe, the clerk’s slips of October 1795 and April 1796, the possible dates of the legal change and Ashe’s career (pp. 89–90).
• GNIS feature 1018864 (U.S. Geological Survey). Settled 1792, incorporated 1797; Morristown “likely for William Morris”; renamed Asheville in 1797 for Samuel Ashe.