Editor’s Note: Western North Carolina is rich with untold stories—many resting quietly in local cemeteries. In this Tombstone Tales series, we explore the lives of people from our region’s past whose legacies, whether widely known or nearly forgotten, helped shape the place we call home.
ASHEVILLE, N.C. — In the Beth Ha-Tephila section inside Riverside Cemetery, a quiet stone marks the grave of Carrie Cone Long, a woman whose life tied Asheville’s Jewish community to one of North Carolina’s most influential business families. Long’s marker stands among generations who built the congregation and the city around it.
Long was born Caroline “Carrie” Cone in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and was a daughter of Herman Cone and Helen Guggenheimer Cone. She was sister to Moses and Ceasar Cone, the textile industrialists whose mills reshaped Greensboro and the wider region.
In 1884, Carrie married Moses David Long, a businessman who would later become an officer of Asheville Cotton Mills. The couple settled in Asheville by the late 1880s…