It’s interesting what surfaces from time to time.  This week, Rob Neufeld at the Asheville, N.C. Citizen-Times went digging through news archives to research the origins and history of the man-made Beaver Lake.  The small-town newspaper of the now-submerged town of Baird’s Bottom ran the following item in 1923, as summarized by Neufeld:

Before 1923, there had been no Merrimon Avenue running through Baird’s Bottom. A concrete road with an asphalt surface was completed in the Beaverdam area in June.

The north part of the town, from Carolina Wood Products Co. to Baird’s Bottom had had a reputation as a rough district. The 1922 film, “The Conquest of Canaan,” shot in Asheville and based on Booth Tarkington’s novel of that name, depicted raunchy characters living in an area called Beaver Beach.

“Ye’re an offence in the eyes o’ Martin Pike and all his kind because ye stand fer the Beach, are ye?” says Mike Sheehan, an employee of local millionaire Judge Pike, to Joe Louden, the book’s pariah hero.

“You know it!” Joe answers. “If they could wipe the Beach off the map and me with it —” and he doesn’t finish his sentence. Sheehan indignantly interrupts him with assertions that Pike would never wipe out Beaver Beach.

Neufeld seems to be suggesting that Tarkington’s fictional Beaver Beach was somehow based on Baird’s Bottom and the Beaverdam area; but Beaver Beach was an original feature of the 1905 novel on which the film was based, and it’s doubtful that Tarkington ever spent any time in Asheville or its environs.