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Robert Morgan interview airs Sunday on UNC-TV

Edneyville News

Ask Matt ... why apples grow where they grow

Q. Is there any particular reason that most orchards are located east of Hendersonville and very few west, north or south of the city? There are only three commercial orchards south of Hendersonville with Sky Top in Flat Rock being the largest. In the past, there might have been more but we all know that orchards have given way to houses.So why are apples grown on the east end of the county? “Apple trees need two things – good soils and good topography,” said Marvin Owings, Henderson County’s Cooperative Extension Director. The east side of the county has both. In the Mills River basin the soils are good but low lying, and fruit trees can’t tolerate moist ground, what Owings calls “wet feet.” Fortunately, that’s not a problem for tomatoes. Another reason there are fewer apple orchards on the west side of the county is because of cold air drainage. This condition occurs in the spring growing season when cooler air drops off the hills into the valleys. Apple trees grow better on the upper slopes or on flat mountaintops. Owings said that conceivably, one can grow apples on a steep mountain side if you have good soil, but then orchard maintenance becomes more difficult. It’s hard to operate equipment on steep slopes and tractors are essential for pruning, spraying, fertilizing and of course, picking.Another contributing factor to orchard location has nothing to do with soils or climate. Basically, orchards begat orchards. There are more orchards in Dana, Fruitland and Edneyville because of their proximity to local fertilizer businesses, packinghouses and storage units. Owings said that there are basically two kinds of storage facilities — cold storage and what is called controlled atmosphere storage. Three of Henderson County’s 20 apple warehouses have controlled atmosphere where the level of oxygen is reduced and carbon dioxide is increased. He calls this “putting the fruit to sleep.” A controlled storage facility can preserve an apple for 12 months or more. That’s why you can get crisp and delicious apples in December. * * * * * Send questions to Askmattm@gmail.com.   Read Story »

Etowah News

MOREHEADS LOOK BACK: Swift plunges into religious studies

It’s not often that Henderson County sends a Morehead scholar to UNC at Chapel Hill. It’s rarer still for the county to send two. Four years ago, Catherine Louise Swift, of West Henderson High School, and Andrew H. Wells Jr., of Hendersonville High School, each won the prestigious four-year scholarship, now called the Morehead-Cain. The award is a full scholarship covering all costs including housing and meals plus a summer enrichment program. Both Swift, the daughter of Rebekah Ellsworth, and Wells, the son of Dr. Andrew Wells and Katherine Wells, were inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. The Lightning caught up with Swift and Wells after graduation to find out about their college experience and what they plan to do next. * * * * * Catherine Swift smiles easily when she talks about her experience as a Morehead-Cain scholar at UNC at Chapel Hill. You’d never know how much death is a part of her life.“My personal experience includes growing up in Elizabeth House,” she says. Instead of going home after school, she went to Four Seasons hospice’s end-of-life care facility, where her mother, Rebekah Ellsworth, was director.Catherine’s father, Tom Swift, suffered under the long and certain death sentence of ALS, sometimes known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He died in January 2013, in Catherine’s freshman year at UNC.“Conversations (at home) were often about death in some way and I spent a lot of time in hospice facilities,” she says.Swift’s personal experience gave her an almost insatiable curiosity about how people respond to imminent death — both the dying and the loved ones — and how a third-party counselor can help ease that transition.Under a special program in UNC’s honors college, Swift designed and taught a course called Modern Perspectives on Death and Dying. In the two-hour class once a week, she led 12 students through the curriculum and guided class discussion in a study of “how different people look at death and dying in different ways,” she says. “There’s not a right way and a wrong way. I was hoping to get at some of those things you can’t get through textbooks. One thing I tried to do in the class was bring in their own ideas and their own questions.”The Morehead’s summer enrichment program starts with a challenging outdoor leadership experience and continues through fully funded experiences in public service, personal exploration and private enterprise.Swift’s Morehead summers took her to exotic places.The summer after her freshman year she flew to India to work in the city of Ahmedabad, an experience she recalls as the most meaningful of her four Morehead summers.“You actually did work that people want and need,” she says. “Everyone who works there has become part of this family. They start every single day with an all-religion prayer … in nine different religions or something like that.”If the leaders were spiritual, the work was practical.“They had a preschool,” she says. “They had boarding school for orphans. They feed tons of kids in the city. They had health programs, they had programs for the elderly.” * * * * * Her third and fourth Morehead summers each brought challenges.After her sophomore year, she signed on as an intern for Spirituality & Health magazine, which had editorial offices on the island of Maui in Hawaii. Two weeks before she left Chapel Hill, she got word that the magazine was scrapping its print version.“That was kind of weird walking into a company that was in the midst of shutting down,” she says. She still had a job, working for the online version. “It was interesting to see how things can shift.”The summer between her junior and senior years, she took an internship with a nonprofit in Ecuador. It was not as good an experience as India had been. She found the nonprofit organization to be dysfunctional.“It was kind of the opposite experience,” she says. “I learned how to trust my moral compass. I learned to deal with conflict… I worked really hard. I learned a lot of Spanish. So that was an interesting summer.” * * * * * Growing up, Swift attended Blue Ridge Christian Church and a United Methodist Church and sometimes attended St. James Episcopal with her father, who was an active member.At Carolina, her course of study presented itself naturally.“I just really fell in love with religion and studying religion and how people interpret religion in their personal lives,” she says. “I just loved every single class in religious studies. It combines anthropology and history and literature and the social sciences and psychology and brings them all together to try to understand this thing, religion, that touches every single person.”Four years of studying the religious imagination left her with an informed objectivity.“I can’t say that any religion is right,” she says. “I think they all have a lot of truth in them and they all have a lot of bad in them.”Asked what she’ll miss the most about UNC, she says her friends and professors.“Honestly, the best part of it was the people,” she says. “It’s an incredible family, incredible mentors…. The professors at UNC generally are just incredible and the religious studies department has some of the rock stars of religious scholarship worldwide.”Although she’s delaying graduate school for a year, she’s moving to Pittsburgh, where her married sister, Emma Swift Lee, lives.She plans to participate in a Clinical Pastoral Education program. Used primarily by seminary students, the program trains hospital and hospice chaplains in spiritual care of victims of trauma and their families and in end-of-life counseling and support. Swift plans to begin pursuing a masters degree in social work in the fall of 2017.   Read Story »

Hendersonville News

MOREHEADS LOOK BACK: After UNC, Wells hits the trail

It’s not often that Henderson County sends a Morehead scholar to UNC at Chapel Hill. It’s rarer still for the county to send two. Four years ago, Catherine Louise Swift, of West Henderson High School, and Andrew H. Wells Jr., of Hendersonville High School, each won the prestigious four-year scholarship, now called the Morehead-Cain. The award is a full scholarship covering all costs including housing and meals plus a summer enrichment program. Both Swift, the daughter of Rebekah Ellsworth, and Wells, the son of Dr. Andrew Wells and Katherine Wells, were inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. The Lightning caught up with Swift and Wells after graduation to find out about their college experience and what they plan to do next. * * * * * Andrew Wells, mock trial star, math whiz and varsity football player, would not ordinarily reside in the same sentence with the word lazy.But Wells does it himself.“Freshman fall,” he says, “is probably the best I will ever be at ping pong and the laziest I ever was as a student. I was taking 13 hours, four classes and L-fit (lifetime fitness).”He’s talking about what became a four-year blood rivalry with one of his best friends.“We played like an hour or two almost every weekday,” he says. His ping-pong rival, the son of medical doctors from Turkey who were pediatric specialists at UNC Hospitals, was from Chapel Hill.“That family sort of became our surrogate home base,” Wells says. “Every Sunday night for the last two years of college we would all go over there and watch ‘Game of Thrones’ together. He had read all the books and I had read all the books, and he had a giant TV with HBO.”Wells’ workload picked up when he chose economics as a major. He decided on the major because he enjoyed Econ 101.“And secondly I wanted to do it because it was only eight classes,” giving him flexibility to explore other subjects. “That actually turned out to be a much more important reason because after taking Econ 101 my enjoyment of the economics department deteriorated significantly.” * * * * * After his freshman year, Wells flew to London, where he and moved into Winston House, a UNC Honors College-owned home in the middle of London.“All the classes were centered around the experience of living in London,” he says. “That was the best part. I took a literature class that was called the Literature of London. The only books we read were based in London, so you could walk around the settings of the all the books.”He worked as an assistant to a liberal Democrat member of Parliament from Cornwall.“It convinced me that I had no interest in going into politics,” Wells says. After his sophomore year, Wells plunged into a job that was “the most formative experience of my college career in terms of what I’m interested in doing.”He worked for the criminal law internship program in Washington, D.C., a program where public defenders sent students out to “gather as much evidence as you can about these crimes that had just occurred.” Working as investigators for a public defender representing juveniles, Wells and his partner, a rising senior at Penn State, drove around poor neighborhoods tracking down defendants and witnesses and investigating cases.“I went from having to wear a suit and tie and walking into the House of Parliament to going into D.C. and being told how best to interact with people in Anacostia,” he says. * * * * * Back at school, Wells had joined the student attorney general’s staff. He worked his way up from managing associate to deputy attorney general on the honor court. His honor court work, counseling students on their cases and later working on the prosecution side, “was the thing that was the most constant outside of school,” he says.The summer after his junior year, he worked for Frontline Solutions, a nonprofit in Durham that works with teenagers in the African-American community.“Literally my first day of work was the shooting in Charleston,” he says. * * * * * His single best experience at Carolina came at the end, in dramatic fashion.On his very first day at Carolina, Wells met the seven guys who would become his best friends. By junior year, they all rented a house together off Cameron Avenue. Senior year, about February, as the Tar Heels were starting to gel into a contender, the housemates rolled the dice and bought plane tickets for the Final Four in Houston.“However it happened, it actually worked out,” he says. “We got to go. We ended up being in the front row of the student section. We were all together.”With 4.7 seconds left in the game, Marcus Paige hits the miracle shot to tie the score. Pandemonium. It looks like overtime for sure and every Carolina fan on the planet has no doubt the Tar Heels will win in the extra period. There’s a TV timeout. Every seat came with an orange seat cushion. In the delirium someone flings a cushion high into the air.“The entire stadium just took their seat cushions and started throwing them,” Wells says “Orange disks are flying everywhere. People are hugging each other, people are crying. It was the most jubilant sports experience I’ve ever had, made that much more poignant that it didn’t last. Never going to forget that.” (Three seconds later, Villanova’s Kris Dunn ruined the moment for Carolina fans.) * * * * * Wells’ post-graduation plan had its seed in his first Morehead summer experience, in the National Outdoor Leadership School in northern Wyoming.“It was a perspective-expanding experience,” he says, “understanding that I can do this, understanding that there are lots of things I really didn’t think I could do or would enjoy doing.”Three years later, the seed sprouted in “a casual conversation” with a housemate, a close friend from New Hampshire named Ian Gallager.“I say, ‘Ian, got a crazy idea for you. Wanna hike the Appalachian Trail after we graduate?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, yeah I do.’ Now it’s coming in much sharper focus.”(Wells and Gallager left on June 20 from Maine. Hiking southbound, they plan to finish by Thanksgiving.)Wells took the Law School Admission Test in early June, and he plans to enroll in law school in the fall of 2017. Wells’s father, Andrew, is a radiologist, and his mother, Kathryn, is a lawyer. When he’s asked how he tilted toward the law over medicine, the son chuckles.“The first inclination that I wanted to go to law school was I believe when I was 11,” he says. “Me and my sisters had just finished a particularly enthusiastic argument, and my mom sat us all down and she says, ‘I have faith in all of you. You can do whatever you want but just please don’t go to law school.’ And my 11-year-old mind says, ‘Yep. Guess that’s what I’m doing.’”He cites his mock trial experience under Jerry Smith at Hendersonville High School, too, and his work on the UNC honor court and his Morehead summer experiences. Those things “created a path that looks far more structured than when I was on it,” he says.   Read Story »

Henderson County News

LIGHTNING EDITORIAL: Council misses an opportunity on post office

The Hendersonville City Council inexplicably stepped back from the batter’s box when it had the opportunity to take a couple of swings at an important development decision.   Read Story »

Henderson County News

'Walk a Mile in Our Shoes' returns this fall

Safelight is bringing back the “Walk A Mile in Our Shoes” fundraiser in Downtown Hendersonville on Tuesday, Sept. 20, just prior to a comedy performance by Pam Stone at Flat Rock Playhouse Downtown.   Read Story »

Hendersonville News

Publix buys land for new store

Publix has completed the purchase of seven acres of land for the supermarket it plans on Greenville Highway, its first grocery store in Hendersonville.   Read Story »

Henderson County News

'Dirty Dancing' impact goes beyond spending

Main Street shops and restaurants and hotels were among the recipients of nearly $1 million in direct spending from the remake of Dirty Dancing, which brought a large production crew and about a dozen stars to Hendersonville.   Read Story »

Henderson County News

Local rider places in junior cycling nationals

Isabella Brookshire, a rising junior at Asheville School rising junior and 2016 Junior Team member from Hendersonville, earned two podium finishes after competing in the USA Cycling Amateur Road Nationals in Louisville, Ky., last weekend.   Read Story »

Henderson County News

Pisgah Drive man sentenced for kidnapping

A Hendersonville man was sentenced to three years and eight months in prison after pleading guilty to second degree kidnapping, possession of a firearm by a felon and possession of stolen goods, District Attorney Greg Newman announced.   Read Story »

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