The Asheville Urban Trail is a 1.7-mile self-guided walking tour through the streets of downtown Asheville where public sculptures tell the story of Asheville’s history. Station #5 on the Trail is the “Immortal Image”, a reference to the frieze of a face carved into the capital of one of the Drhumor building’s columns.
Drhumor is pronounced as “drummer”; however, locals often call the structure the Good humor or Dr. Humor building. Built in 1895, it is thought to be the oldest standing commercial building in downtown Asheville. Architect Allen L. Melton designed the grand Romanesque Revival building, and Biltmore Estate stone carver, Frederick Miles, was commissioned to carve the remarkable limestone frieze above the first-floor exterior as well as columns and their capitals. The original owner was William J. Cocke, an attorney who studied at the University of North Carolina and at Harvard. The building is said to have been named for an Irish lake on which the ancestral home of the Cocke family was located.
Immortal Image is the carved face of an Asheville florist named Cyrus T.C. Deake, also called “Old Man Deake.” Although he reportedly operated the florist shop with his wife and brother, he apparently had a lot of free time and spent it watching the stone carver as he worked on the frieze. Miles was so struck by the man’s interesting countenance that he immortalized the image in his carvings. Deake was about 70 at the time his face was carved onto the Drhumor Building’s frieze. He was described as a Santa Claus figure because of his white hair and beard, and his portly figure. He died on November 11, 1908 in Asheville, North Carolina and is buried in the Riverside Cemetery, final resting place of author Thomas Wolfe.
The stone carver, Frederick Bullen Miles (1860-1921), was born in Shaftesbury, England, son of a master builder who specialized in construction of churches. He was apprenticed as a stone carver and sculptor and attended art classes at the School of Art in South Kensington. Thereafter, he began work as an architectural stone carver in London. In 1892, married to Maud Squinnell, the family immigrated to Asheville, North Carolina where he was employed as part of a large field of artisans hired to finish out the Biltmore Mansion for industrialist George Vanderbilt. Miles, like many other Biltmore artists, landscapers, craftspeople, and architects, remained in Asheville to work on other commissions. He gained some degree of fame for his work in Asheville and other Southern cities. He died in Nashville, Tennessee and is buried in Spring Hill Cemetery.
While it is the Deake carving that is singled out for the Immortal Image, Miles’s Drhumor Building work features several carved faces amid the ornate carved stone frieze featuring British royal lions alongside angels, mermaids, shells and other creatures from nature and mythology. While the other faces have been called allegorical, some in addition to Deake’s, may have been those of other Asheville locals.