USDA Forest Service

About forestry service, 28734, Franklin, NC, US, North Carolina

Asheville ( ASH-vill) is a city in Buncombe County, North Carolina, United States. Located at the confluence of the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers, it is the county seat of Buncombe County. It is the most populous city in Western North Carolina and the state's 11th-most-populous city with a population of 94,589 at the 2020 census. The four-county Asheville metropolitan area has an estimated 422,000 residents. == History == === Origins === Before the arrival of the European Colonists, the land where Asheville now exists lay within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation, which had homelands in modern western North and South Carolina, southeastern Tennessee, and northeastern Georgia. A town at the site of the river confluence was recorded as Guaxule by Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto during his 1540 expedition through this area. His expedition comprised the first European visitors, who carried endemic Eurasian infectious diseases that killed much of the native population. The Cherokee had traditionally used the area by the confluence for open hunting and meeting grounds. They called it Untokiasdiyi or Tokiyasdi (ᏙᎩᏯᏍᏗ in Cherokee), meaning "Where they race", until the middle of the 19th century. European Americans began to settle in the area of Asheville in 1784, after the United States gained independence in the American Revolutionary War.