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Friday, 13 August 2010 |
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By Sarah Williams
Shiloh is an historically African American community inhabited since the late 1880s.
Older residents refer to this area as “New Shiloh.” Shiloh evolved and prospered around three cornerstones, its churches, its schools, and its people.
According to oral and church histories, Old Shiloh was located north of the Biltmore Estate. When George Vanderbilt bought the land for his mountain home, he moved the entire Shiloh community, including Shiloh Church and the church cemetery, to its current location.
In the early nineteen-twenties the first two-room school for African American students in Shiloh burned down. In 1927 a six-room elementary school was built on a five-acre site on Shiloh Road next to Shiloh Church. Public money built the school; and the Rosenwald Fund, founded by Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck & Company, made a large monetary contribution.
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Friday, 13 August 2010 |
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This picture captures (in part) the parcel of land owned by Mt. Zion Community Development Corporation designated in the Brownfield assessment. Photo: Urban News
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Staff reports
Cleanup will support mixed-use redevelopment.
Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church of Asheville will reap big dividends from the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to approve Mt. Zion’s application for a comprehensive brownfield assessment and cleanup, and to assign a national environmental remediation firm, Tetra Tech, Inc., to begin work on a two-acre distressed parcel in The Block, the historic commercial center of Asheville’s African American community. Studies of the parcel, the former site of a foundry, done in the 1990s indicated evidence of underground storage tanks and other residue from industrial operations.
The June 30 announcement by EPA’s Region 4 staff in Atlanta was seen as a major advance in federal leadership on environmental justice issues. Environmental justice is one of many social equity issues adding color to national discussions within the sustainability and Smart Growth movements, yet brownfields in African American communities were not included in a July 2009 brownfield workshop held in Asheville, nor during an official brownfields tour arranged by local and regional governments for federal visitors in February 2010.
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