ASHEVILLE 131 
both congregation and church. But if the Baptists 
had difficulty in getting started, their turn came 
later, for their doctrine so appealed to the people 
outside the town, or their zeal was so great, that in 
a few years practically the whole rural population 
was Baptist, or '* babdist" as the country people 
always say. 
From 1840 to i860 was the golden period, as we are 
told, of Buncombe's history, when comfort reigned 
and hospitality was the rule. Big state-coaches ran 
daily from Asheville to the three nearest railroad 
points, sixty miles away, for the railroads of those 
days stopped when they encountered the bulwarks 
of the mountains. Then came the Civil War, when 
the old order passed away and the whole South was 
prostrated for a time. Deserters from both sides 
took refuge in the mountains. Desperadoes of the 
worst sort lived in caves and raided the country. 
Nevertheless, by 1870 Asheville had grown to fifteen 
hundred inhabitants, with eight or ten stores, and 
that influx of Northern travel had begun which was 
to give it its next wave of prosperity. 
In 1876 the first railroad triumphantly scaled the 
Blue Ridge, coming up from Spartanburg, South 
Carolina, ascending at the south of Tryon Mountain 
by way of the Pacolet Valley. But this feat so ex- 
hausted its resources that it was ten years before it 
got from Hendersonville to Asheville. Meantime, 
the state of North Carolina, in 1881, built a railroad 
that, approaching the mountains from Salisbury by 
way of Morgantown, followed the course of the first 
