Church History

The Headline from the Bristol News Bulletin on Thursday Afternoon, March 11, 1948 read 

The story continues: 

Miss Marthina DeFriece Among Nine Victims

Early Morning Blaze Destroys the Highland Hospital Which Housed 20 Patients; All available Firemen and Equipment Combat Blaze

Bristol Herald Courier

Friday Morning, March 12, 1948

Page two headline 

Miss Marthina DeFriece, 24, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Frank W. DeFriece of Bristol, Tenn., and eight other women perished early yesterday morning as fire destroyed the central building of the Highland Hospital for Nervous Diseases, two and one-half miles from the heart of Asheville, N.C.

The fire was the third in less than a year to occur at the hospital, a unit of Duke University in Durham, N.C.  It is believed to have started in the kitchen and to have spread rapidly to an elevator shaft and thence to the roof of the four story wood and stone structure.

In the early days of Marthina Memorial Chapel, worshipers met near the location of the current building

This section will be updated with more History in the coming weeks, beginning with the newspaper accounts of the Asheville Hospital fire that took the life of the church's namesake, Marthina DeFriece on March 11, 1948.