Beneath the flagpole at the center of the Quad, on the campus of UNC Asheville, lies a layers deep history. Engraved into an oversized granite medallion are Pisgah and the Rat, plush evergreens and the Latin motto: "Levo Oculos Meos In Montes." The motto, taken from Psalm 121, “I lift my eyes to the hills,” and the imagery therein, tell the story of two seals: UNCA’s and the city of Asheville’s.
The giant medallion also tells the story of a boy’s first train trip up Old Fort Mountain and his everlasting love of Western North Carolina — leader among leaders, champion for education, Asheville Citizen Times editor and general manager (1920-54), D. Hiden Ramsey.
For it was Darley Hiden Ramsey himself, namesake of UNCA’s Ramsey Library, who chose the motto: “I lift my eyes to the hills,” and as Ramsey’s fellow newspaperman Walter S. Adams wrote in “The Citizen and The Times” in 1939, “It is doubtful if anyone could quite understand this man without understanding somewhat his peculiar attachment to these mountains and their people.”
In 1903, when an extra engine was added to the rear of a train at Old Fort, the giddiness of 11-year-old Hiden Ramsey, his six brothers and one sister, exceeded containment, and to their otherwise patient mother’s chagrin, their chatter ricocheted around the railcar. As they passed through one tunnel after another, the children were traveling into their future.
When roadmaster Simeon Clay Ramsey was assigned Southern Railway’s Asheville division, the railroad man and his wife Lucy relocated their bursting-at-the-seams family from the Piedmont of Greensboro to the heart of the BlueRidge — Asheville’s downtown Woodfin Street. For one son, Darley Hiden Ramsey, the journey and its destination — Asheville — would be prophetic.
In a handwritten account of his early years, written for his grandsons, Hiden Ramsey recalls that day in 1903: “I was nearly beside myself when the first dominating peaks came into view … the great Swannanoa Valley and the truly lordly mountains.” Repeating the journey hundreds of times across a lifetime, D. Hiden later wrote “the trip never lost its interest, its thrills for me.”
In his youth, Hiden joined neighborhood boys in “tramps” to Craggy, an 18-mile journey. “Leaving at dawn we were usually able to reach the top by mid-afternoon.” The boys carried a frying pan, coffee pot, Boston baked beans, bacon and bread. With no sleeping bags, they tended campfire through the night. Hiden and company soon lengthened their tramps. Craggy the first night, Balsam Gap the next and the highest peak of them all, Mount Mitchell — the prize.
A train ride back to Asheville from Black Mountain completed the “swing around the circle.” Hiking and camping deep into his middle years, the statesman and scholar considered camping trips on the Craggies and Black Mountains “some of the most agreeable recollections of my life.”
In 1916, as newly elected commissioner of public safety, 24-year-old Ramsey motioned to his fellow commissioners “that the City offer a cash prize of $10 for the draftsmen and architects of the City for the best design for a City Seal.” As reported in Asheville City Hall’s “Going’s On," September 1975, young Ramsey also submitted the motto “I will lift my eyes to the hills.”
In June of 1916, West Asheville engraver Harry Sage took the city’s prize for his rendering of Pisgah and the Rat (how Mount Pisgah and its flanks were commonly referred to because they were said to resemble a rat), evergreens in the foreground and Levo Oculos Meos In Montes. A remarkable rendering of Sage’s design can be found at either end of the loggia entrance of architect Douglas Ellingtons’s exquisite Asheville City Hall (1928). Today, Asheville’s City Seal replicates the easily identifiable roofline of City Hall, an homage itself to Asheville’s mountain surround.
In the 1930s, engraver Sage refashioned his Asheville City Seal into a seal for Asheville-Biltmore College, today’s UNCA. As seen at the center of the Quad at UNCA, the original imagery for the city seal remains: Pisgah, evergreens and the Latin motto.
Standing atop the steps of Ramsey Library, Mount Pisgah in view, D. Hiden Ramsey’s words resonate, “I know as a fact that I could not live with any large measure of happiness anywhere else except somewhere in this mountain country. I like to look at the mountains. I like to climb them. I like to be among them. As for the mountain people, I think they are the finest folks in the world.”
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Leslie Ann Keller is an artist and writer from Asheville. She is married to Graham Ramsey, grandson of D. Hiden Ramsey.
