Exploring the Valley
Discover the hidden gems, local legends, and can’t-miss experiences in Black Mountain and the Swannanoa Valley as we dive into the perks of Chamber membership and uncover what makes this mountain town a must-visit destination. Whether you're a local business or just passing through, there's something cool waiting for you!
Exploring the Valley
The Disco Ball Barn That Launched A Thousand Ideas
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A place can hold more history than we realize until someone walks us through it with names, dates, and stories that snap the whole landscape into focus. That’s what happens when we sit down with Leigh Maher, longtime event producer at Lake Eden in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and one of the people who helped shape what so many of us think of when we hear “LEAF Festival.” From a childhood in a Western Massachusetts mill town to a post 9-11 flight that unexpectedly changed his life, Lee connects the personal and the practical in a way that makes community feel tangible.
We talk about how LEAF grew from a bold, multi-genre vision into a cultural arts education powerhouse, and why festivals are never “just music” when they are done with care. Lee shares what it takes to curate spaces that spark curiosity, protect local small businesses, and create traditions families return to for generations. Then we zoom out even further into the layered Lake Eden history: apple orchards, E.W. Grove’s quarry and planned community dreams, and the Black Mountain College era that brought progressive education and world-changing art into the Swannanoa Valley.
Finally, Lee lays out what comes next with Lake Eden Reunion, a new gathering designed around play, family camp energy, and an experience-first approach while Western North Carolina continues recovering after Helene. If you care about community festivals, event safety, historic venues like the Black Mountain College barn, and what it means to keep a place alive, this one is for you. Subscribe, share this with a friend who loves these mountains, and leave a review with your favorite Lake Eden memory.
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Welcome And Why Lee Matters
SPEAKER_01Lee Maher, how are you today? I'm doing pretty well, I am really glad you're here today. And uh you and I met after the storm with Swannanoa Grassroots Alliance. I think I celebrated one of your birthdays with you. Well, you and me and 40 of our closest friends. But that's where we met originally, and then it was a long time there where we didn't see each other, and now we see each other just off and on. It's the weirdest thing, just different places. But I recently went on a tour of the place where you call home. We'll talk about that in a minute. And we reconnected and I said, You have got to be on the podcast. So I'd like to start.
SPEAKER_00I've come across town to a different part of the our little local community that I have never driven on these streets before. Really?
SPEAKER_01Well, good. I'm glad I could expose you to some culture. There we go. Anyway, I like to start with what's your story? Where are you from?
SPEAKER_00I am originally from a small town in western Massachusetts, right up near the Vermont border, that honestly has always reminded me of Black Mountain in size and configuration, although also has a lot of connection to Swannanoa, to be honest. And the beacon plant in Swantanoa, it just took me years to really figure out this connection that I felt. So my hometown was an old textile town. Yeah. All these old abandoned textile mills. The beacon plant in Swantanoa that's in Beacon was in Beacon Village, that physical plant, the bricks from that plant actually came from about an hour and a half from where I grew up. And they put that entire building on a train and brought it down here. So there's this connection. And quite honestly, my hometown, when the mills all closed, and then when I was in high school, there was a big GE plant locally on another corporation where my dad worked called Spreg Electric, and they both closed, and it really left this gap in the town. And even to this day, 40 years later, half the half the storefronts in town are empty. It's a town with these beautiful bones and structure, and it looks like this quintessential kind of New England little mountain town, but there's never been any kind of industry that ever came back and fulfilled some of that gap. In fact, the population has been dwindling since I left. And so when I look at kind of when I would drive around pre-Hulene, around Beacon Village in Swannanoa, and see these storefronts empty and see what obviously had been a thriving community once upon a time, it very much resonates. I saw the same thing in Marion years ago before they kind of started to come back, and now downtown has little breweries and things, but it used to be a dribble drive drive down Main Street in Marion. It was all empty. And that reminds me of where I come from. And so it's been an interesting thing, which as we talk, will hopefully people will hear that has led me to a lot to a passion for small, locally owned and operated family businesses. Bingo. I grew up in my mom's store. And that's how I learned about business as soon as something like little fingers could get over and reach the cash register over the counter, and I stocked the shells and those things. So that was my childhood. And then when I graduated high school, I went to Boston, went to a school called Emerson College for media and communications. Uh lived in Boston for about eight years. And then I moved to when the cum the magazine I was working for called Global Rhythm Magazine was moving from Boston to New York City. I moved to New York City and lived in Brooklyn for about a year, worked in Manhattan. And then uh and that's and it was actually five weeks after 9-11, after watching The Towers Fall, when I had already booked a trip to come. We would sponsor festivals and events around the country. And I was the business manager, general manager and distribution for the magazine for 10 years there. But we would trade off about who went to these different events around the country to teach people about world music, try to sign subscriptions, try to promote the magazine, and uh in exchange give advertising and publicity. And uh the this woman, Jennifer Pickering, who had been running the Leaf Festival, Lake Eaton Arts Festival at the time, had met my publisher and invited us to come to here. And I just remember being on that plane, like I said, this was just shortly after our world had pretty drastically changed up there and thinking, what the heck am I doing getting on an airplane to go to North Carolina to talk about world music right now? That's right. I didn't honestly know there were mountains in North Carolina, I thought it was all flat tobacco country. And I got there, I came into what then was Little Asheville Airport, and she had someone pick me up. It might have been the Porta John guy because it was so funny in all the years,
A Mill Town Childhood And Small Business
SPEAKER_00and uh bring me out and out to Lake Eden, and really kind of just couldn't believe that these people were so nice. Part of the agreement was they had to provide me transportation and lodging. So they put me in the Monovista Hotel, which back then was a very different place than it is today. It was really quirky and funny. Every room had a different flower theme, if I remember correctly. I would take all the roses and stuff them in the closet because I was a little overwhelmed every night. And uh instead of renting a car for me, they just gave me one of their cars. Oh, and I was like, Who are these people? And so that was the beginning of my sponsorship here at Lake Eden. And you'd sometimes you just have to be aware of what your sponsorship brings. So there's now suddenly I live here, and it's been twenty-something years now.
SPEAKER_01You're married to this cute girl. There you go.
SPEAKER_00Just came with a long to-do list.
SPEAKER_01That's right. That's adorable.
SPEAKER_00But a yard and a barn and a lake. So you know, there's some there's definitely benefits.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Well, that's funny. So so Jennifer is one of the people that your wife was one of the first people that I for some reason I just was like, I want to be her friend. I I don't know why. I just I was relatively new here and didn't have friends at all and didn't know anybody except for people in the little part of the area that I live, and just thought she was great. And there was this guy that came with her every time, and he was quiet and didn't say anything. And you know, anyway.
SPEAKER_00That's kind of you just defined kind of our roles. Yeah. She was the magnet and connector. Uh that is why the the thing that has existed for so long when she created Lake Eden Arts Festival 30 years, 31 years ago now on the property is just her just absolute willingness to embrace and reach out to anybody to see what what they have and how they can blend in to fulfill kind of a mission idea. And but just she's a connector. She always she's like, Oh, you do that. I know this other person, and I've I've watched it for decades now. Her pairing people together in ways that the rest of us wouldn't necessarily see, but move on to become this long-lasting part of their lives, right? Separate from us entirely.
SPEAKER_01And that is like my goal in life is to be like that. And I and I like to think that I'm like that. I'm getting there. I was definitely like that in another town, but you have to learn the town and the people and the resources and the pieces parts before you can do that. And she's already done that, and so that's it's just a way of life for her.
SPEAKER_00That's right. And the rest of us are just trying to hold keep up. My job has always been to put some structure around it on. That's right. Uh, when she meets people and tells me that this person has this amazing idea or this fantastic talent or whatever, and then I find a way to incorporate it and wheel it back in to bring it into a structure so that I can present it in a way in the middle of all the other things that are being presented. And that's why for people that had come to the Leaf Festival for so many years, they it could be almost overwhelming at first because there's something everywhere.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00We would fill every little pocket of that property with something, something unique, something different. And I've always really enjoyed that kind of curation of the space and thinking about they're gonna turn a corner and now they're going to be faced with something they've never been faced with before. And I want them to be curious about it, I want them to engage with it, but I want them to understand like this is something different. And so that's the kind of curation model when you're when doing events that have it's been one of my favorite parts all along.
SPEAKER_01That's cool. Well, I need a lee then. That's what I need. Need a lee. Well, okay. So embarrassingly enough, I just found out what Leaf stood for seconds ago. That's hysterical. Yeah. I like didn't put it in the world.
SPEAKER_00We moved away from it when we started becoming more of a a regional nonprofit. Originally, Lake Eden Arts Festival, uh, Lake Eden Arts Festival was a family business. Right. We started as a private business. Jennifer had moved back to the property at Lake Eden after being away for a couple of years, and but there was a previous festival on the grounds at Lake Eden called the Black Mountain Festival. Okay. It went through several name changes. It was Black Mountain Music Festival, Black Mountain Folk Festival. They I think through ownership, they kept changing the names here and there, but there had been a festival on the property for years before. And they had gotten into conversations about the family acquiring that festival and Jennifer turning taking over it and trying to turn it into her own model. But those broke those conversations broke down. Yeah. And so she decided to just go ahead and start her whole thing. And named it Lake Eden Arts Festival originally. And people started picking up on the acronym Leaf from there. But we formally changed the name when it became a nonprofit in 2004, which is coincidentally when I came in, I was part of that original structure, because it was 2000, 2000, 2003 and 2004 when we started dating, and then I moved down here and we turned it into a nonprofit, and that was the Leaf organization at the time, DDA, Lake Eden Arts Festival, and that became Leaf Global at first Leaf Community Arts, then Leaf Global Arts, and you go through this as you're changing, and it built up and grew. But you know, that whole model of how it began, it was because we were throwing, she was throwing this multicultural event that honestly people always told her, you it'll never work because you have to have a theme. You have to have one genre. And it's not Jennifer Pickering.
SPEAKER_01She said, Hold my cup of water.
SPEAKER_00I want all the genres all at the same time. I want it all. And so that really was the nature of how the thing formed in the way it did. And you had built a lot around the contra dance traditions that had been going on with Black Mountain Festival. So there was things like the drum circle. There were there are things that had come from that other festival that blended in that got incorporated, and then it grew as the organization became what we believe the largest provider of cultural arts education in Western North Carolina. And we were working in th about 12 to 13 different countries with uh culture keepers there, helping them sustain their local indigenous cultures. But that all grew out of this idea that she had for exp bringing the world to the place and exposing as many people as possible to all these different cultures. And when since we've now stepped away from that, we're that's where as we're creating something new.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, can you tell me more about that? Because we don't want to talk all about what used to happen. But tell me about that.
SPEAKER_00So it's been a wonderful part of our lives, but we have moved forward now. And we So traditionally, as I mentioned, so even before the Leaf Festival, there had been the Black Mountain Festival on that third weekend of October. And so there have been generations of families, and I know this because they keep telling me. And it was one of the hardest parts about stepping away when the time came for that, was so many people saying, We really, really have loved, like my children grew up here, and now their children are growing up coming here to this place and engaging. And one of the beautiful things with those families that come, they may come from regionally, from Wilmington, from K Charleston, from Greenville, from Atlanta, from different places. And these kids would only see other families and kids here at Lake Eden, sometimes once a year, sometimes they would come both may spring and fall. Different families had different traditions. But they had grown up for years and years and years with these other people twice a year in their lives, and now they're like adult friends that remain in contact. And now their children have been coming. And we have literally three generations in a rare occasion, four generations of families that could be present on property with other families of that same ilk. So they would come and say, This has been so important to us, we just can't believe that our children won't get the same experience. So for for us No pressure. For us, that was that was big, you know.
How LEAF Grows From One Bold Idea
SPEAKER_00You you you feel like you feel like you're letting people down. Right. And you because and that's a gift to be able to be in a position where that has you feel like what you're the work you're doing is has had impact on people's lives in that way. And you that seems important, and we want to make sure that we're continuing to provide that place for people to engage with each other, with the space, uh, with our area. One of the one of the things that, as I said, I'm I've always believed in small business and how important that is in a community. I believe family-owned and operated business is a bedrock of a community. So I've always really tried to also make sure that as we were, one, the services that we were hiring to produce our events at Lake Eden, but also as people were coming and going from the property to make sure there are people that will tell me, oh, we always stop at this restaurant and get dinner on our way out, and three families will meet there. And that's our closure to the weekend, or on our way in. We always buy our supplies at this one place, or we always buy a gift from this. And those kind of traditions, hopefully, the people that are coming, and many people aren't campers, and they don't want to stay in a rustic cabin at the camp Rock Mount next door. So they'll end up staying at the hotels in town and Benaven. Hopefully, they'd fill up tanks of gas. And so wanting to be a good member of the business community and our local economy has always been really important to me personally. Right. I know I've sometimes messed up some traffic for people, and I apologize every time and really hard on. I sp I promise I spend months trying to design those traffic layouts. And sometimes small things break. But we we we do focus on it, but uh we think about how it impacts business, how it impacts people, and try to flow things in a way to provide the least level of impact around that, but also the most beneficial to, like I said, to our local economy that we want people to participate in that way and spend a little of their time and money. We we live next to So the uh with the our our the place, the family's time at Camp Rockmont and Lake Eden really began in the 1950s. And I don't know how much you want me to tell the history story of Lake Eden. I can keep going for a while.
SPEAKER_01So I told you I want history, so you're doing it.
SPEAKER_00So uh I enjoy this story just because I think it relates to the the growth of this area in a lot of ways. There's a lot of connection to it. Some of the history a lot of people do know, but I think there's parts of it that a lot of people don't aren't aware of. I wasn't aware of necessarily. Everything, and this is part of the story that we're kind of trying to tell in this new event we're calling Lake Eden Reunion this October. It has a name now. Yes, it has a name. Lake Eden Reunion. Yeah, I realized I hadn't said that. That I actually want to take a portion of the barn that was the Black Mountain College Barn and tell the different periods of history of the place because it relates to our our whole valley and region. We've spoken to the Swannanoa Valley Museum before, and they have they have they have led us to believe that the region we are in, specifically the valley, was originally shared hunting grounds. And so no one particular group of people used it as their homes necessarily, but they were it was different, they all had access to it for that. Uh then we know in the late 1800s the property that is now Lake Eden was actually a family-owned apple orchards. And I have one grainy old photo that I got from a member of that family years ago. And it wasn't until the early 1920s when E.W. Grove, who people know of as the developer who built the Grove Park Inn and the Grove Arcade, some of the most iconic places in the Asheville area, had this plan for what's considered the first intentionally planned community in America, Grove Mont. And to build his signature building style, he needed a quarry to get the stone, to build the foundations and the walls and the fireplaces that are really, if you go into any of his buildings, it's such an iconic part of his design. So he carved out Lake Eden to get the rocks, to build the buildings. And the idea was if you bought a membership, if you bought a home in Grovemont, you would get kind of membership in this country club, this resort at Lake Eden. Uh his old brochures, because he passed away and they never finished in the 1927. The Grove Foundation put the property up for sale, and there's these old beautiful pictures, and they talk about the healing waters of Lake Eden. And they built 14 of the original houses over in Grove Mont. It's always kind of funny when I go over to Grovemont, I see that stone wall around the square, and I think that was the lake once publicly.
SPEAKER_01That used to be the lake.
SPEAKER_00And so we there's so that when you're at Lake Eden, the big dining hall, the big lodges, several of the smaller lodges, we have one called Mountain Stream and another lodge, and another one called Meadows Inn, that those were EW Grove buildings from the 1920s. But the property had uh stalled out and in the 1930s, there's uh some information that at one point for about a year or two, somebody tried to operate a girl a girls' camp there for a little while. But it really wasn't until Black Mountain College, this progressive new school had formed and they were renting the Blue Ridge Assembly right across the valley from us. And they had a lot of very, very progressive ideas where student and faculty were working together to manage the school, but they had to move out every summer when the Blue Ridge Assembly was having their other programming. And they also really, really wanted to start a farm. So they found the Lake Eden campus, and for the first year or so, they were actually all jumping in the truck and riding over as part of the work program to farm at Lake Eden, but didn't actually move to the property till about a year and a half later. So for that sh first period of time. And but the farm was really the initial aspect reason they came over to Lake Eden. And then they finally brought the whole campus over and it was great because now they had their own campus. But they this was a bunch of artists, writers, uh poets, and things like that. And so a lot of it kind of got built in very artistic, but not necessarily the most engineered ways, we'll we'll say. But so the that era from the 40s and 50s, you know, people know some of the signature names that were there during that time. And you had Albert Einstein, who was on the board of directors and was there for taught at summer sessions. You had Buck Mr. Fuller there who was there for several years and built the very first geodesic domes in the world on the property there. And then there's some history that a lot of people don't know. A woman named Alma Stone Williams in, I believe, 1943, was the very first African-American student to attend a white school in the south of the United States, here at Black Mountain College in our local community. And so what's interesting is that a lot of the people that attended there or taught there weren't really yet famous, but became luminaries in their field, people like Merce Cunningham for people that love contemporary dance, or Gropius or Roshenberg and all the Trombley and all these different artists that are now in museums all around the world, were here in our local community. That's all Lake Eden Road was a dirt road back then, so it was pretty remote. And I always think that as I'm walking around, how remote this place must have felt back then. They they write in the books, they're like because it's interesting to live in a place where there are at least a dozen books and three documentary films and a museum in Ashville, all based on that history. That's true. So there's it's all really well documented. But they talk about going to Asheville once a month was a big deal. Like they would all load in the truck and it'd be like more than an hour or so, because there wasn't Highway 40 or even 70, it was old US 70. And so they felt very isolated and remote in that place, and they were always nervous about how the town people in Black Mountain would feel about the progressive ideas that they were doing over there. They wrote all about it in in their uh their newsletters and such, and they kept notes, meticulous notes on everything.
SPEAKER_01Of course they did.
SPEAKER_00And then but so it wasn't until about 1956 that the college they had operated a long for a long time, funded by the GI Bill. A lot of soldiers, and which is interesting, they had such a connection to World War II. So many of the professors came, evacuated Nazi Germany to come teach. When the Germans closed this famous school called the Bauhaus School in Germany, a lot of those professors, Joseph Albers, Annie Albers, a lot of those professors came and taught at Black Mountain College because it was a safe place for them. But a lot of the students were coming because they had been the GI bill had meant you got the soldiers got out of the war and the government provided for an education stipend for them, but they didn't know what to do. And so the there was a certain appeal in this kind of unstructured school in a quiet place where they could, you know, a lot of them in nowadays with words where you call trauma and and and and those sort of things, people at that time they just had come and through a horrific experience, and this became a safe place for them. But as that funding kind of wore out in the 50s, that's where the college really ran into some financial difficulties. And this is all documented too. They wrote down where they got all every penny point. That's really cool. So it was in 1956 when the c they were starting to shrink down, and that's when my father-in-law had come in with a group of investors with the idea to turn the campus into a summer camp. And it took about a year and a half. They originally the th the college just moved up into the upper area of the ground, which is now our property, and the camp started right next door. So you had this Christian boys' camp, Camp Rockmont from 56 to 57, operating right next door to this super progressive school, Black Mountain College. And then in 57, the college closed down for good and it all became Camp Rockmont. The family sold off the camp about before my time, about 35 years ago. So we we no longer own Camp Rockmont, but we're neighbors and they used they're now in summer camp session. So as I this morning I heard bugles outside and the kids were setting up for Capture the Flag. So I we you live next to the sounds of summer camp. There's dinner bells and all those things, and they use part of our property for their programs, and then we were always able to the longstanding agreement where we would use the Camp Rockmont in connection with our property for these larger events. Because we could never have hosted something as large scale as some of these festivals without the facilities that the camp provides. We're we're very fortunate. That's part of why it's always been such a family-friendly event, because there are showers and bathrooms and real facilities and a giant kitchen and a huge gymnasium that becomes a ca- we build a wooden dance floor on. It's one of the craziest projects we do that four to five hundred people are all dancing at in one time in that gymnasium because we build the wooden floor over the rubber gym floor. So and then you have the beauty and the nature and the natural aspects of it. We're very fortunate about what you can see from the property part of it. So this is actually looking at the old campus, a Blue Ridge Assembly. But then uh you look in the other direction and you're looking up at just towards Mount Mitchell in that region, and we're right behind what they call I believe it's the Craggy Mountain Range right behind us and and Allen Mountain right in front of us. So we're and then honestly, it's always slightly ironic that the Grovestone Quarry, this is the part that always makes me laugh. It took me years to connect the fact that the Grovestone Quarry was the E. W. Grovestone in Rock Quarry. That's because he had built Lake Eden. Holy cow. So it just I was like, it was kind of like, oh my god. No, I've still got to do that. So we're next door to a quarry that I believe is something like 3,000 acres, that won't get developed. Right. So I oddly enough, being next to a quarry protects us. So we've always been really grateful that we have this. It was really about 20 years ago when I first was in my early days there that when we were trying to figure out a way to make to sustain the property, that we created the Lake Eden retreat model, which is our family business hosting private weddings and retreats and family reunions, and we turned more of the cabins and cottages into vacation rentals because the when the family had sold the camp, they kept 100 acres. But every couple of years the money would start to run out and they would sell it off two acres at a time. So we were down to 70 acres. Now I say down to my mom's half an acre lot
Lake Eden History From Orchards To College
SPEAKER_00in an apartment house. But that 70 acres felt like something worth preserving because once you Develop it, you never get it back. Once you do make that step, it's gone. It becomes something different. And it really felt important to find a way to make it sustainable. And so hosting these types of things, I've now hosted, I can't these words always make me shake my head, close to 400 weddings out there at Lake Eden. I never saw myself in that world, but we found we could do that well, partly because we have the infrastructure from doing festivals and bigger events. So that hundred-person wedding does not scare me very much.
SPEAKER_01When uh Jennifer took me on the tour, I got to go on a tour. The next day my legs hurt so badly. Anyway, it was good for me. But when she took me in there, we went in the barn and she was like, This is a barn that was built right after World War II by the col the Black Mountain College students. We went in there and I go, Oh my gosh, I want to get married. This is amazing. And she looked at me and I was like, not really. I'm just kidding. But we have a breakage for that. I know. She was like, went into sales mode. I'm like, wait, stop. I am not getting married. I just think this is the coolest place. I mean, what a great. I mean, barn weddings are a cool thing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00That's like that's where the receptions, yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But I'm telling you that that is like, I had no idea. First of all, I didn't have any idea of all the things that were there to begin with. But then that barn, I was like, this is this just fascinating. I mean, it was it was beautiful. And there's even a disco ball in there. Yeah. I mean, come on.
SPEAKER_00The disco ball is actually left over from our wedding party in there about 18 years ago. They got stuck up in the old hay bailer.
SPEAKER_01I figured it wasn't there when Black Mountain College built it. It just didn't fit with the cows or whatever else was in there.
SPEAKER_00One fun thing is uh there's a book out just from the l from the last couple of years about the architect they brought in, A. Lawrence Coker, who it's it's called A. Lawrence Coker, American Architect. And so they had brought him in to help them design new buildings for the campus. So the f the most famous building being the studies building we all call the ship, the giant building next to the lake. But there's also uh the Yallowitz Cottage we now call Sequoia that was built for Heinrich Yallowitz, who was a German conductor who who evacuated the Nazis to become the music teacher of the school. But he also designed the barn. And his whole model was light, sustainable building out of locally sourced materials. So most of the wood in the barn was milled off the property. And the students and faculty built it there on the ground, all the barn buildings. They one by one, they kept adding the milk house, the silos, they they constructed it. And so so when you when you're in there too, you're you're in a place that was built from the place. And so I've always really loved that. The barn project was, I think the family thought I was crazy when I asked for permission to go in there and try to do something with it. It was used for a couple of months every summer for the horse program when the camp would rent it from us. But the tu you know, it was falling in. There were holes in the floor and everything. So I started with a crowbar and tearing some things apart and brought a str uh some friends in, a structural engineer, and then met a gentleman who specialized in barn restoration and brought him in, and we managed to make it a safe place. But in those early days, it was Jennifer called it my redheaded mistress because I spent so much time over there.
SPEAKER_01I was gonna say, Jennifer, who is this boy you have brought home?
SPEAKER_00And uh so the barn became and amazingly, when we first I started doing it thinking it was a way we were only doing tented events at the time, a way that we could uh use it for more events and parties on the property, but also during the festivals, you know, there was a part of me I I was a musician when I was younger and always dreamed of, you know, my own rock and roll moment. But I so I was kind of creating my own personal roadhouse in a lot of ways. It was an event venue that was also kind of fun to think of as a roadhouse. It turns out it was surprisingly good acoustically. And since then, some really pretty famous people have played in that little barn. It's not a huge space. I mean, one of the ones I love to name-drop is uh we had Billy Strings back when he was 16 years old, who now sells out arenas. He played in that barn. He played a mainstage set and then he did a set in the barn. But we've had the Guthrie family, and just there have been a lot of really prominent artists that have have performed in there, and and it's it's an i it's a space where you're it's you're engaged directly with the artist and you're in this legendary. We built a bar and restrooms, all the things you need to do to do a venue. But so that's always just been a fun. In fact, now I have dreams of in the future being able to create different ways to have performances outside of festival time there at the barn where artists could come and it could be like a recorded live session. Uh for those of us who are older, remember when MTV had music, the the uh unplugged series. I've always pictured being able to do something like that at the barn at Lake Eden and inviting these artists to come in and do these recorded sets in there.
SPEAKER_01Have you met Peter Counsel from PC Productions? He's fantastic. The two of you need to get together. I'm gonna have to make that connection happen because you two probably could talk music and sound and all the things that I can't talk, but but you need to hang out with him.
SPEAKER_00And that's how so much of it happens is you have an idea, and then you you really need someone else that has the ability, the tools, the expertise, the whatever idea into action. And so the two pairings, I mean, like I said, that's what Jennifer is so good for so long, is saying, Oh, this person has this idea and this person over here has this. And then we put the two together and things happen, magic happens. So you have ideas and you get to play with them. That's one of the things I'm really enjoying about. I didn't know I was going to be creating a new event this year. We had a couple of years ago participated in the creation of the Black Mountain Blues Festival paired with the White Horse, and we we were no longer involved with that first year, but that was interesting to create something in downtown Black Mountain that I had never kind of worked with that landscape before, had driven through it thousands of times. Of course, but viewing it from that perspective and trying to see it as how can you curate this space. We had done one in downtown Asheville for six years called Leaf Downtown, where by city estimate, we were putting 20 to 30,000 people uh each time into the park there in the center of town. And people would always say, Oh, it's the new Belchair. But we were very conscious to try to learn from the the lessons of Bel Share from somebody, the store owners who said they would close down their shops when Bel Share was there because they couldn't they there was always going to be a booth in front of them and there was a bad weekend for them. So we very consciously tried not to put any of our stuff in front of active businesses. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Seems pretty basic. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And it's it was like surprising to get some of that feedback where they had to pay if they didn't want a booth in front of their store. And so we really didn't want that connection, right? And that was a free event to the public. Part of our the whole mission of that was to create a space for the diverse communities of our area to come to downtown to reconnect with downtown and be have it be an accessible event. So it really had to be in a public space because any private space, and that's where we ended up having to not do it anymore because the city really had some changes and was wanting us wanting these types of events to occur in private space. But you can't ask a venue owner to take their venue offline for the weekend so you can throw a free event. You'd have to make it a ticketed event. But that one ends the mission of each.
SPEAKER_01I know this place called Lake Eden. You should probably take it. You should take it there.
SPEAKER_00Well, we have to do it. But this was specifically for downtown Asheville.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00This, yeah, this one, the Lake Eden reunion, it's been really interesting because we're not trying to just throw a different name on something that's occurred before. There are points of it and parts of it that resonate and you want to continue. There will be a fire and drum circle up on top of the mountain. We are going to do the dance hall, which is there are people that will come and they will spend three days in that dance hall and they will barely step outside. They bring their separate shoes just to go in. They that's a passionate crowd, so we're we're super happy to keep that tradition going. There will be the poetry and the healing arts. But so much of it is a part a part of the thing that you'd create the space for, but don't necessarily curate in the same way, is a sense of play. And what we've been saying lately, what I've been feeling, is for so many of us, the world can feel very heavy on a local level from what we've just recovered from, but just in general, in society, things can feel very heavy, and we sometimes lose the ability to just play separately from the all those other parts of life we feel we should be concerned with. And so I'm really trying to get creative in ways so instead of it being a traditional festival lineup where it is music all day and stages switching one-to-one, we want the a large part of it to be about the experience of being, being at this place that resonates with them, but being with their friends and families, whether they are close neighbors here or people that they only see at these destination events, coming together again and having that space for play. And part of it, I mean, I'm I can't go into a lot of details because we're still working out, you know, we're agreements with some people, but I'm talking to a local restaurant about doing a hot wing challenge in the dining hall, which is just kind of funny and things that would not necessarily have fit in within the nonprofit mission of the previous events we were doing, but I get to kind of have a little sense of humor with this one. And I'm talking, I play in some sports leagues in town and I play in a bocce league, and I've played in the volleyball league. Well, we have sand volleyball courts and we have pickleball courts, and we I built a bocce court on our property and a root ball court in honor of the root bar that got lost. And so we want to have like these little mini tournaments in education, learn about root ball and this sense of play by day, where people are going around and really just being and physically inactive. A lot of times it's a summer camp too. So there's all these camping type activities that parents send the children to. But I want to make it so that parents and kids, the families, can go do these things together. Family camp. Family camp. And very much. And then in the evening, afternoon and evenings, then you get a perfor some performances. We we're really having a lot of regional and local acts with a few headliners. And we're we're gonna be dropping those names pretty soon. We're actually looking to have the tickets on sale for this thing by the end of the week. Just one. Well, no, I mean a lot of a lot of the local ones will be coming out. Uh we
Saving The Barn And Building A Venue
SPEAKER_00It's okay.
SPEAKER_01You don't have to. I won't do that to you.
SPEAKER_00I'm just it's uh we we're very close to it. We just want to make sure that we we kind of have it rounded out before we start announcing it because in the festival world, people can make a lot of judgments about the lineup. Right. And while that's important to us and really excited about so many of the artists coming, they may not be the big flashy, splashy names because we're focusing this more on the experience with some great entertainment. And this one, you know, honestly, we're still I know we are still very much as an event business venue recovering from the Helene. Sure. Uh the Swannanoa area. People drive through that on their way to do a wedding tour. And that's part of their experience, and they're thinking about how their guests are gonna feel for that day. And so it's important, you know, selfishly, to help our region recover because that's all part of how people experience coming to the place. And also just the name got out there, people are like, oh, Western North Carolina, there's all the rumors about how destroyed we are. And it was brutal, we all know that. Sure. Uh, but we're still here. Right. And but it we're still very much a recovery. So we want to make sure that we're honoring all of those, all that. Uh we've we've done things like change up some things, we make uh volunteering more accessible to different people, people that maybe couldn't don't aren't planning to come for a whole weekend or don't have two five-hour shifts or a 10-hour shift to uh to uh put out. So we're doing reducing it down to four-hour shifts, and you can work one shift and come for a day, or two shifts and get a camping pass for the whole weekend, making more inroads for people to be able to participate. And we need those volunteers because as a small event that you're you're not doing giant concert stuff, you need people to to participate, whether it's just helping serve concessions, direct a car here and there in the parking lot, all the little things that go to putting an event together. Because it takes a lar you know, it takes a lot of people to turn a campus like that. We our production uh joke is always, well, we build a town and tear it down ten days running, that's right uh in and out. And so we you you take out all this stuff and you you you see it in 3D in your mind, and then it becomes real in 3D on the grounds. And so that's a large part of it. But it takes a lot of hands to pick things up and put them down someplace else, and then to pick them up and put them back where they started afterwards.
SPEAKER_01You're sort of like the masters, you're sort of like Augusta. Like they change it every year, they read they rebuild the whole everything, the whole community, or well, I guess there's a golf course. I don't know. One time there was a nine-hole golf course on the property.
SPEAKER_00You're kidding. Oh no, if you if I walked you around and started pointing out where the tra the traps and the and the tea boxes were, you you would see it. You would be like, oh, that's a green over there, isn't it? Like, yeah, that's what it used to be a green. There was also a BMX course, there's an adventure course. Yeah, there's this the place has been a lot of things over the years, which is kind of fun. Yeah. And so as you're going around, I'll see that landscape. And I'm like, okay, let's put it. We actually stopped calling the big field the golf course. All the old timers always tell the golf course because our insurance people freaked out. I'm like, no, there is no active golf course. We just call it now, it's the Eden Field that's by the lake. So it's funny. There's now there's a disc golf course that gets erected for the camp time every year. I'm even thinking about putting, I can't do a whole one of those during a live event because I'm afraid people get knocked in the head too much. But I'm thinking about doing one hole that people could practice because also part of it, uh, we used to do this thing called the instrument petting zoo for years that have been created by our our kids village people that I loved the idea of it because instruments are always seen as like this rare. Don't touch that. And I was like, no, no, touch it. Pick it up. Okay. Bang on it, blow on it, whatever. We want so that you you demystify it, you you so that kids people can feel more familiar with it. So next time they see one, they're they're comfortable around it. Uh and so that may be the same for somebody that's doesn't feel athletic. I've never thrown a disc golf. Right, right. I like that. I'm like, no, pick it up and try to throw it. Just see what happens. See what happens. And break some of that stigma that you might have, your your own fears of your own ability, your fear of being judged. Like, no, go ahead, roll the ball in the bauchery court, right? Go for it. Uh go step in the volleyball court. You don't have to be good at it. Yeah. Just give it a try. Because trying opens up your experience just a little bit and do it in a safe way and a safe place. Like, this isn't about judgment, it's about touching it, it's about exploring it, experiencing it. So we want really want this event to feel very experiential. And that might be and play is thing activities, but it's also picking up instruments and playing at your campsite. And we have some couple of great communities that traditionally just do that. I've had actually carved out places on the ground for them. Like this is where you guys are gonna camp because I know you're gonna sit there and play music around your fire pit for three days, and I'm gonna I'm gonna dedicate a little area over here where you're gonna disturb the least number of people, but have your fun. And also I put it at a place that I get to pop by from time to time because I don't get to go into the events all that much. I'm I'm fortunate that these events in the festival world, I belong to a group called the Event Safety Alliance on a national level because we had a couple of our own uh wet real significant weather issues. And uh this event, this organization of national producers of events formed because they realized the event industry was lacking in codes, in safety standards. And there had been a couple of really prominent disasters in events, and they wanted to bring the industry together to make safer patterns. So I I've been able to take certification courses in things like crowd psychology and weather planning, and the ri it's pretty interesting, they have these national conferences. But we had our own issues with that, and so making a smaller event that's more accessible. So what I learned was people in my role in bigger events are sitting in a room surrounded by screens. They're crowd managers, they don't get to engage in the event. And our events at Lake Eden, and I'm so familiar with the property, I can at least I have like three of my mobile landing points. So when people say, I hadn't seen you all weekend, and I my joke was I was probably within 50 yards of you at least 10 times. But I had never I don't go into the crowd very much or into those areas because I need to be able to be the responsible party to get step back a lot of ways and let people know where our where our assets are to resolve issues and things. So but fortunately at Lake Eden, it's just small enough where you do get to experience it. And these really smaller ones that we've been doing, I get to take walks and talk to people. Sunday has always been my favorite day for I I call it put on a silly shirt. Because, you know, I might have barked at somebody during the weekend. So you I find they take my apology better if I'm wearing a silly shirt when I go up to them on Sunday and go around and see people and thank them for being there. And I I love my Sunday walks during the weekends. And because those are the moments where you get to engage and see people and and hear some stories. I'm a big story collector. So you get all those little stories and parts of it. You know, everybody wants to hear from you the really wild stories, but some of those get saved for private moments. The oral storytelling tradition.
SPEAKER_01Well, I so first of all, I was completely wrong. Jennifer is not the loud talk talking one. You're not the quiet one who never says anything because I've just learned I'm completely overwhelmed. I will probably listen to this podcast more than I've listened to any of the other ones of Exploring Valley because there's so much I learned and I've already forgotten.
Lake Eden Reunion Plans And Recovery
SPEAKER_00Yeah, sorry about that. I can automate it and I can TB.
SPEAKER_01No, the whole time I'm thinking he's he could talk for three hours about this, and this is awesome. How do I make this into like something other than this podcast that's only 30, 40 minutes? But but I also you've also helped me be less uh freaked out, stressed out, whatever about sour wood because apparently it's nothing compared to all this stuff, this gigantic festival. And my third point is why are you not on my Sourwood committee?
SPEAKER_00You know, I have wondered why no one has asked me over the committee. You just did. Not that I don't want, not that I want to over your committee, but I have often thought, I can't believe no one's asked me yet.
SPEAKER_01I can't believe it either. Like like you like I'm asking right now, right now, will you join our committee?
SPEAKER_00Like, hmm, just so interesting. Well, you know, uh because of the family business, a lot of times I've rarely ever gone to Starwood because oftentimes Saturdays are wedding days at Lake Eden. So I'm often working on the weekends where these things are occurring. And in in a don't any event is complicated. In a town event, the planning and processing, I find them easier to do in live time when we did the downtown Asheville one. I was in and out of that thing in 54 hours. Like I said, out at Lake Eden, that event took me 11 straight days. Right. Right. So the production element of urban events and festivals is actually easier on me. You go in, you load out, you've had this master plan. The lead up to it and all the permitting and conversations and road traffic closures and all that stuff, that is a lot.
SPEAKER_01Yes, it is.
SPEAKER_00But so don't discount.
SPEAKER_01I'm not discounting. I'm just saying, like, Cheryl, it could be a whole lot bigger, but like more and and we are an arts and crafts festival. Yeah. We have one topic. We have music, but we're not a music festival. Yeah. We have food vendors, but we're not a food festival. We're we're an arts and crafts festival. 8,000 things going on at one festival. And I think that's really cool and exciting. So so while I could, my guess is that that our time is way over and that I need to wrap this up, but I could sit here and listen to you for six more hours without complaining. But I really, really appreciate you being here. I'm trying to figure out how to make a history lunch and learn with Lee Maher. Maher. I just learned how to say your name like minutes before this started. Called you mayor for two years. I know Terry personally.
SPEAKER_00It's been happening so for so long in my life.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, there you go. Anyway, but thank you so much for coming. I really, really appreciate it. I'm going to figure out a way to get you and Jennifer together with I mean, y'all are together already. I meant like with me. Like I want to learn more. I'm excited. It was that was cool. I cannot wait to listen to this one 50 times.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I next if we do something else that I'll I'll have more awareness of what our timeline is. I didn't tell you. We recently presented at a safety conference down in New Orleans, and I I was doing multiple sessions at a time, each one 11 minutes and so we kind of timed. You got it figured out. You know, for two straight days, I was doing all these safety lessons and development and teaching people how to creatively have a philosophy on creating events. But you you get in a cycle of how exactly how much information you can share. And I just went off on a whole history of the case. That's okay.
SPEAKER_01It was exactly what I asked you to do was history. I wanted that because when you gave me the tour, well, when Jennifer gave me the tour and we ran into you, I think we ran into you for four minutes. And while I learned a lot from Jennifer, don't hear that wrong. I was like, in four minutes, I just learned the history of Lake Eden. And yeah, this is awesome. So thank you very much for coming. I appreciate it. I would let you go on for three hours, but I'm pretty sure that they won't let me do that.
SPEAKER_00The attention span for most people isn't that long, anyway.
SPEAKER_01My attention span is not, but I have I've managed to pay attention this whole time, which is the soon came out, so that's great. Oh, that is good, and I appreciate that. So yeah. Anyway, thank you very much for coming. I appreciate you.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for having me.
Final Thoughts And Farewell
SPEAKER_01Thanks for joining us on Exploring the Valley. Until next time, keep celebrating the pride of our community and discovering the magic of the mountains. In the meantime, you're free to move about the valley.