The architecture of The Frances Apartments is regarded as “one of the most fanciful and expressive” in the historic Montford District.

A visit to the Riverside Cemetery is like taking a journey back through history. Two famous authors, Thomas Wolfe and O. Henry, as well as Zebulon Vance, three Civil War Confederate Generals, two U.S. Senators, Biltmore Estate’s supervising architect Richard Sharp Smith, many of Asheville’s founding families and the remains of 18 German soldiers from the First World War lay there to rest. The Riverside Cemetery is also a wonderful public park with 87 acres of rolling hills and garden flowers, overlooking the French Broad River.

Highland Hospital was a psychiatric clinic, at which Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of famous novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, was a patient between 1936 and 1940, and periodically thereafter. When the hospital building caught fire during the night of March 10, 1948, she and 8 other patients tragically died in the inferno.

Completed in 1892, the magnificent Rumbough House was once the home of James Edwin Rumbough, who was also Montford’s first and only mayor, when the village of Montford became autonomous after its incorporation in 1893.

With its medieval castle-like look Homewood is probably one of the most unique buildings in Montford. It was the private residence of Dr. Robert Carroll, a psychiatrist and director of the adjacent Highland Hospital, and his wife Grace, a well-known pianist.