Bainbridge: Here's how scenic Tryon carved its place in history

As the Spartanburg & Asheville Railroad laid iron for its tracks in 1875, it aimed for the Block House.

Marking the border between North Carolina and South Carolina as well as that between Greenville and Spartanburg counties, it had been a fort at the time of the American Revolution and later a stopping place for drovers and their herds on the way south.

(It was also a site of illicit cockfighting and moonshining.)

The Block House stood on a peak in the Tryon Mountains above the Pacolet River. Just below it was an “isothermal belt” nearly a mile long and a half-mile wide that created a temperate climate throughout the year. A reporter in 1877 claimed that fruit ripened there two weeks earlier than it did in Spartanburg.  

After the railroad reached that first terminus about 25 miles from Spartanburg in 1876, it went on through far more mountainous terrain to Pace’s Gap, about 6 miles away. It left behind a depot, a hotel, and a name-- “Tryon City.”

Because of the mild climate, the village that grew up around the tracks flourished as a winter resort. In the 1880s, the “Tryon season” was reported to be from the second week of January through the end of March, although its hotels and boarding houses also appealed to summer guests from both Florida and the Lowcountry.

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The climate also brought the first of its famous guests, Sidney Lanier, a 38-year-old poet (“The Marshes of Glynn,” among others) who died of consumption there in 1881.

By 1884, its pure air, water and splendid scenery had attracted two stores, a blacksmith shop, about a dozen houses, and a factory for making broom handles. Two years later, the newly incorporated town boasted of 400 inhabitants, three churches and a schoolhouse as well as several thriving stores.

Starting about 1896, the little town began to attract wealthy winter visitors from colder climates, especially from Michigan, who enjoyed the weather, scenery, and lively social life.

But Tryon City, as it was called until just after the turn of the century, also was the home of at least two cotton mills and was becoming an agricultural center with highly productive apple and peach orchards. So many vineyards had been established that some 100,000 pounds of grapes were annually shipped north in the 1890s. 

In 1913, Tryon Toymakers and Weavers moved there. That quite remarkable business was started as Biltmore Industries in Asheville in the late 1890s and was created by two sisters at the request of George Vanderbilt. He asked them to teach woodworking skills to mountain youngsters to “keep them occupied and out of trouble.”

Miss Yale and Miss Vance taught 12 local boys carving skills so that they could create and manufacture toys. The boys, who also attended school, were given carving tools and materials, and paid a living wage.

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Girls were taught to weave on handmade looms using dyes from mountain plants and wool from local sheep. With the backing of Vanderbilt, the sisters marketed those products, including carved animals (horses on wheels and Noah’s Ark were favorites), sets of wooden flowers, and scarves, shawls and blankets, throughout the north as well as at their Tryon retail shop.

The Tryon Toymakers helped to grow the North Carolina mountain craft tradition and brought prestige, including visits by three presidents’ wives, beginning with Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, to the resort village.

But it was the announcement in December 1921 of the creation of Lake Lanier just outside the town that brought a surge of people and prosperity. The $150,000, 175-acre project, funded primarily by local residents, included an inn and tea house and led to a housing boom.

Tryon in the twenties gloried in its Board of Trade, paved streets, water system, new depot, the park at Harmon Field where Tryon High School played its football games, private Lanier Library, two newspapers (one daily), a 750-seat cinema, and the Tryon Country Club with its “sporty” nine-hole course.  

Residents were proud of the newly (1929) opened St. Luke’s Hospital, while visitors hoped to regain their health at the Thermal Belt Tuberculosis Hospital.

Tryon was increasingly fashionable. Oak Hall Hotel, founded in 1888, the Mimosa Inn, and the new Pine Crest Inn offered elegant accommodations to the elite, while others stayed at the 10 local boarding houses.

Among the famed visitors were novelist Scott Fitzgerald, naturalist John Burroughs, and New York actor William Gillette, who had toured the nation as Sherlock Holmes for two decades. He eventually assembled an estate of almost 1,000 acres that in the mid-1920s was developed as Gillette Estates, where his home became Thousand Pines Inn.

In addition, seasonal residents erected dozens of fine homes. In late 1926, for example, The Greenville News noted that more than 100 houses, a dozen of which averaged $50,000, had been built in the previous year.                    

Horses ruled. Well before 1925, when the Tyron Riding and Hunt Club formed, more than 250 bridle trails had attracted riders and fox hunters. The club’s active social calendar included Horse and Hound shows, a steeplechase, and Thanksgiving and spring gymkhanas (informal meets with games including children), along with dances, tailgates, and parties at the Tryon Country Club. 

Tryon made few accommodations to the Great Depression, although a carved furniture store gave way to a canned foods factory, and a medieval festival with jousting and tilting was added to the summer calendar to attract visitors.

Tryon’s African-Americans did not attend the jousting. Most worked for white people or ran small businesses on the east side of town, often in homes without electricity or water. Their children, including musical prodigy Eunice Waymon, later to be famous as the singer Nina Simone, attended Tryon Negro School.

Tryon hasn’t changed much since World War II. The Blockhouse Steeplechase, initiated in 1947, has been a sold-out event ever since, famous for its luxurious tailgating. The town voted wet (by 17 votes) in 1952, making it the first in the region where liquor could be purchased. Schools and accommodations were desegregated in the early 1960s.    

Symbolizing its equestrian commitment, Morris the horse, the town’s charming black and white symbol, still stands at the town’s Trade Street intersection.

Now within commuting distance of Greenville and Spartanburg, Tryon is still prosperous, still charming (one of America’s “four loveliest resorts” according to The New York Times in 1962), a tad more liberal than its region, and still horsey.      

Questions? Comments? Write Judy Bainbridge@furman.edu.