Bear Creek in Asheville in Buncombe County, North Carolina — The American South (South Atlantic)

Olive Tilford Dargan

1869-1968

Photographed by Mike Stroud, May 19, 2012

1. Olive Tilford Dargan Marker

Inscription. Writer of fiction and poetry. "Fielding Burke," her pen name. Author of Call Home the Heart and Highland Annals. Home, 1925-68, was 1/4 mile N.

Erected 1994 by Division of Archives and History. (Marker Number P-78.)

Topics and series. This historical marker is listed in these topic lists: Arts, Letters, Music • Women. In addition, it is included in the North Carolina Division of Archives and History series list.

Location. 35° 34.862′ N, 82° 36.098′ W. Marker is in Asheville, North Carolina, in Buncombe County. It is in Bear Creek. It is on Haywood Road (Business U.S. 19/23) near Balsam Avenue, on the right when traveling west. Touch for map. Marker is in this post office area: Asheville NC 28806, United States of America. Touch for directions.

Regionally, this marker is in North Carolina’s Mountains. It is also in the American South,

specifically in the Upper South,

in Appalachia,

and specifically in Southern Appalachia. Globally, it is in North America,

the Western Hemisphere,

the Western World,

and the Anglosphere.

Historically, it finds itself

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in what was once the original Cherokee Nation,

the territory of the Mississippian Culture,

one of the original Thirteen Colonies,

one of the Confederate States of America,

and the Antebellum South.

Other nearby markers. At least 8 other markers are within 2 miles of this marker, measured as the crow flies: "End of Car Line" (approx. 0.6 miles away); Sulphur Springs (approx. 1.2 miles away); Electric Streetcars (approx. 1.7 miles away); Lynching in America / The Lynching of Hezekiah Rankin (approx. 1.7 miles away); Welcome to the River Arts District (approx. 2 miles away); The Asheville Black Cultural Heritage Trail / Asheville's Black Newspapers / The Flood of 1916 (approx. 2 miles away); Unsung Builders of the Swannanoa Tunnel (approx. 2.1 miles away); America's First Black Union Represents Ashevillians (approx. 2.1 miles away). Touch for a list and map of all markers in Asheville.

Regarding Olive Tilford Dargan. A native of Kentucky, Olive Tilford Dargan (1869-1968), who lived just short of a century, was a writer of poetry and fiction, most active in the 1920s and 1930s. Her “outstanding contribution to literature,” one

Olive Tilford Dargan Marker on westbound Haywood Road image. Click for full size.

Photographed by Mike Stroud, May 19, 2012

2. Olive Tilford Dargan Marker on westbound Haywood Road

critic observed, “is her sympathetic delineation of the North Carolina mountaineers.”
On graduation from Peabody College in Nashville, Miss Tilford for several years taught school. In 1898 she married Pegram Dargan of Blue Ridge, Georgia,where she was teaching. They moved to New York City where both worked as writers. In 1915 Pegram Dargan was lost at sea. Mrs. Dargan then moved to a farm in Swain County near the Almond community. Up to that time she had written primarily plays, but in 1917 she published The Cycle’s Rim, a series of sonnets dedicated to his memory. That book was the last volume of poetry to receive the Patterson Cup (in 1953 the Roanoke-Chowan Award was created specifically for poetry). More books followed, poems, plays, short stories, in all thirteen volumes. In 1924, following the success of Highland Annals, a collection of stories set in the North Carolina mountains, the University of North Carolina awarded her an honorary doctorate of letters. That book was republished in 1941 under the title From My Highest Hill with photographs by Bayard Wootten.
In 1932 Mrs. Dargan published Call Home the Heart, the first

Olive Tilford Dargan image. Click for full size.

North Carolina Office of Archives & History

3. Olive Tilford Dargan

of three novels, under the pseudonym Fielding Burke.That book and its sequel A Stone Came Rolling (1935) used as characters mountain natives lured to textile mills by the promise of prosperity. These “social problems” novels were widely reviewed and commented upon. Richard Walser of North Carolina State University, the dean of the state’s literary scholars, in his standard and widely consulted Literary North Carolina (revised, 1986), wrote that, while others have written about textile strikes, “it remained for the equally sympathetic Olive Tilford Dargan to translate those convulsive times into vital literature” in her novels.
The farm home in Swain County burned in 1923 and in 1925 Mrs. Dargan moved to west Asheville into a log cabin which she called “Bluebonnet Lodge.” She would live there the rest of her life. (The house was razed by a developer in the 1970s.)
(North Carolina Office of Archives & History — Department of Cultural Resources)

Credits. This page was last revised on June 1, 2025. It was originally submitted on July 7, 2012, by Mike Stroud of Bluffton, South Carolina. This page has been viewed 784 times since then and 25 times this year. Photos: 1, 2, 3. submitted on July 8, 2012, by Mike Stroud of Bluffton, South Carolina.