The Downtown Asheville Historic District, with a period of significance from the 1840s to c. 1940, encompasses the central business district and closely associated areas of Asheville, North Carolina. Asheville rose to prominence in the 1880s following a railroad connection, and as the then-largest city in western North Carolina, it became a regional center of commerce, convalescence, and tourism. The district is composed of roughly thirty blocks of the city’s commercial core dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly the significant 1920’s period.