Remembering Eleanor Harper Whitfield
Eleanor Harper Whitfield taught three generations of Buncombe County children to love a good sentence.
She arrived at Fairview Elementary in 1961 with a cardboard box of paperbacks and a conviction that no child was beyond reaching. Thirty-four years later she left with the same conviction and a great many more books. Former students still write to say she was the first person who told them they could write.
Outside the classroom she kept a garden that was the quiet envy of her street, sang second alto in the Rockcliff Methodist choir for forty-one years, and made a peach cobbler her family has never successfully reproduced despite having the recipe in her handwriting.
She married Walter in 1959. They had fifty-one years together, three children, seven grandchildren, and a standing Sunday dinner nobody was permitted to miss without a very good reason.