The Riverside Cemetery encompasses 87 acres of rolling hills and flower gardens overlooking the French Broad River. Riverside Cemetery dates to 1885, when the Asheville Cemetery Company established the land as a municipal graveyard to answer the growing need for burial grounds. The City of Asheville adopted the cemetery in 1952. It is still an active cemetery with more than 13,000 people buried here, 9,000 monuments and 12 family mausoleums. Many of the graves in Riverside contain remains that were removed from other burial grounds and reinterred here. Once inside the large iron gates, you may take a self-guided walking tour through ancient oak, poplar, dogwood, and ginkgo trees.

Riverside is the burial place of noted authors Thomas Wolfe and William Sidney Porter, better known as O. Henry. You can learn about Confederate generals James Martin, Robert B. Vance and Thomas Clingman. Some of the names recorded in Riverside Cemetery are those of the city's most prominent citizens: Jeter C. Pritchard, T. S. Morrison, Thomas Patton, and Zebulon B. Vance. Individuals of note interred at Riverside Cemetery include: Isaac Dickson, the first African American to be appointed to an Asheville City School Board; Quenn Carson, Asheville's first female public school principal; George Masa, a Japanese photographer who documented much of the Blue Ridge Mountains and was integral in the establishment of Great Smoky Mountains National Park; James H. Posey, a bodyguard to Abraham Lincoln; and the remains of eighteen German sailors from WWI. Riverside Cemetery is maintained by the City of Asheville, Parks and Recreation Department and has been designated a Buncombe County Treasure Tree Preserve.

Information and photos courtesy of the National Register for Historic Places Asheville, NC Travel Itinerary, a subsidiary of the National Park Service.