Most Asheville itineraries loop through downtown, West Asheville, and the River Arts District and stop there — which means most visitors miss Riverside Cemetery, a free, 87-acre Victorian garden cemetery in the historic Montford neighborhood, just a short walk from downtown Asheville. Founded in 1885, it was designed from the start as a "garden cemetery," meant to double as public parkland rather than function purely as a burial ground — which is why it reads more like a rolling, tree-lined park than a typical graveyard.
It sits on the French Broad River in Montford, one of Asheville's most architecturally distinct neighborhoods, where Victorian, Colonial Revival, and bungalow-style homes sit side by side. The cemetery itself holds real literary weight: it's the burial site of two major American writers, Thomas Wolfe and O. Henry, alongside Civil War-era graves, a section of German WWI sailors, and several of Asheville's founding families. There's enough history packed into the grounds that the city provides a self-guided walking-tour map right at the entrance.
Riverside is also a living example of Asheville's more recent history — parts of the grounds sustained damage during Hurricane Helene in 2024 and have been under active restoration since, which is worth knowing before you visit, since some sections may still be closed off during repair work. If you time a visit for a spring or summer evening, Montford has another reason to linger: the Montford Park Players, a long-running outdoor Shakespeare troupe, perform free shows most weekends at the nearby Hazel Robinson Amphitheater.
For a different side of Asheville than the downtown-West Asheville-River Arts District loop most visitors default to, build in an hour at Riverside Cemetery, check current access if you're visiting a specific damaged section, and see if a Montford Park Players show lines up with your dates.
What makes Riverside worth the detour isn't just the names on the headstones, it's the design itself — the winding paths, mature trees, and river-adjacent setting were laid out intentionally so that Asheville residents in the late 1800s would have somewhere to walk, not just somewhere to mourn, and that intent still shapes how the space feels today. It's the kind of place you can spend twenty unhurried minutes in or a full unhurried hour, depending on how much of the self-guided walking-tour map you want to follow. Montford as a whole rewards slowing down for the same reason — its mix of architectural styles didn't happen by accident, and a walk through the neighborhood on either side of a cemetery visit gives a good sense of a part of Asheville that has nothing to do with breweries or gallery crawls, which is exactly the point.
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