Minister's Musing

Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

February 2007

I never cease to be amazed at the way the world is connected these days. But it seems now that the ubiquity of the internet has brought us a fascinating little bit of Unitarian history in Asheville that, if it’s not entirely new, is at least new to me.

Last fall I received an email from an American living in Helsinki, Finland, Jeremy Gould, who mentioned that in doing some family research he had been looking over the history timeline on our new web site. He noted that our narrative identifies the earliest Unitarian presence here as being in the 1930s, but in fact, he said, his great grandfather served briefly as a Unitarian minister in Asheville at around the turn of the 20th century. What especially fascinated me is that his great-grandfather, Henry Addison Westall, was an uncle of Thomas Wolfe. That’s right, THAT Thomas Wolfe, the celebrated novelist. Gould referred me to a memoir that his grandmother, who was also Wolfe’s cousin, Elaine Westall Gould, had written that told something of his grandfather’s ministry

I ordered the book (I found it on the internet, too) and, sure enough, Ms. Gould describes, if in only sketchy detail, some of the travails her father endured as a minister here. “It took some courage to occupy a Unitarian pulpit in the South,” she reports. Apparently no church was built at the time – the congregation met in rented quarters – and it doesn’t appear that Westall stayed here for more than a few years. The small congregation, she says, included mostly transplants from the North and was an educated crowd: “a doctor or lawyer or two, visiting teachers, scientists, artists and writers.” Westall’s departure apparently ended the Unitarian presence here until the 1930s. Knowing Asheville, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that, a few years after moving from here, Westall left the ministry and returned to Asheville to sell real estate. As to Wolfe, Ms. Gould says he did attend his uncle’s church on occasion, though apparently was not much impressed by it.

So, there you have it. I’m sure there’s more to learn about this episode and I hope we do. But it helps remind me that while the threads of history can get lost in time, the interconnected web being woven across the world is helping us to recover it.