In October, nearly 100 Reynolds family members gathered in Winston-Salem from points around the world to celebrate the centennial of Reynolda House and the Golden Anniversary of its designation as the Museum of American Art.
They found the country estate unchanged, almost in its original form, a phenomenal example of a small number of early twentieth century country houses still standing. The white stucco bungalow with green shutters, grand but unpretentious, sits at the edge of a meadow, little changed from 1917 when Katharine Smith Reynolds managed the young estate from an office on the first floor.
It’s with Katharine Smith Reynolds that the Reynolda House saga begins. At the turn of the century, she was a raven-haired beauty with dreams far beyond her birth in Mount Airy in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. As a college student at Greenshoro’s State Normal and Industrial School (now UNC-G), she had adopted the radical notion, espoused by its President Charles Duncan McIver, that educated women could change the world and she felt destined to do her part.
In a letter to her college roomate in 1899, she had written,“When I marry, I shall go to Europe on my wedding trip, and I shall bring home a wonderful work of art. And then I shall buy a great estate, and I shall have a thousand cattle on a hill and flowers all around.”
These were not the usual homespun dreams of a young woman in America at the close of the 19th century.
Her prescience was remarkable; within six years her dream had become a reality following her marriage to tobacco tycoon R.J. Reynolds. A distant cousin and 30 years her senior, R.J. was a lifelong bachelor until he became enthralled with the spirited cousin he had known since her birth. Their honeymoon, as Katharine had predicted, took them on a four-month tour of Europe, returning to Winston with two art works, portraits of herself and her husband, which hang today in the reception hall at Reynolda House.
The magnificence Katharine had seen in Europe must have seem distant in the summer of 1905 when she stepped off the train in the small industrial town of Winston. Moving into R.J.’s towering Queen Ann-style home in downtown Winston, Katharine focused on running their household efficiently and participating in community organizations while bearing their four children between 1906 and 1911. She also pressed her husband for better working conditions for his employees such as providing hot lunches and water fountains in his factories and a nursery where working mothers could leave their children.
Katharine Reynolds with Mary, Nancy, and Dick (c. 1911)
Meanwhile, she found the country house movement, born in the waning years of La Belle Epoque, an intriguing concept. She had read about Biltmore, George Vanderbilt’s country estate in Asheville; she decided their home would be similar, built for healthy living. Her own poor health, due to a childhood bout with rheumometic fever, inspired this focus on her family’s physical well-being.
A year after the wedding, with R.J.’s approval, Katharine began buying land, signing the deeds in her own name. The first purchase was 104 acres about two miles west of town. By the time she was the mother of four, she owned 660 acres — ample space for the cattle, gardens, and comfortable country home she envisioned.
While other wealthy Americans sought inspiration in European castles and manors, Katharine preferred a bungalow style (although to call Reynolda a bungalow is a total misnomer). She hired Charles Barton Keen, an architect from Philadelphia, to design an informal family home with an open floor plan and multiple porches. She installed stainless-steel counters in the kitchen and pantry for good hygiene. She built an outdoor swimming pool for exercise. And before the family even moved into the house, she established her own dairy, ensuring protection for the family from milk-borne illnesses.
Katharine began to dedicate herself to the farm with real passion in December 1912. She was acting superintendent, serving as an early agricultural extension office, testing new methods of crop rotation, soil analysis, and animal husbandry. Enacting her beliefs about social progress, she planned churches, schools, and modern housing, all in white stucco, for farm workers and the Reynolda staff.
The Palm House with the sunken Greenhouse Garden (1919)
She planned construction of the family home as meticulously as she had for the farm. The house would be part of the landscape, the front porch overlooking formal gardens and a meadow, the back porch over woods and a man-made lake.
An Aeolian pipe organ with 2599 pipes was installed to fill the home with music. Every bedroom had a private bath. Even when the family still lived in town, Katharine often brought their children — Dick, Mary, Nancy, and Smith — to the farm to play. Part of the summer was spent camping at the estate, pitching a tent and cooking over a fire.
Music from Reynolda’s Aeolian pipe organ was promoted as the equivalent of having a symphony orchestra in the home.
When the family moved into Reynolda in December 1917, R.J. was gravely ill with what was believed to be pancreatic cancer. He had spent much of the past year in hospitals, often far from home, and had returned in time to move into Reynolda for Christmas. His sojourn was brief; he died in July, seven months later.
Throughout the following sad period, Katharine and the children remained at Reynolda. It was her creation – the house, the farm, the vision. She continued to buy land for polo grounds, stables, fields, and orchards. She staged elaborate outdoor plays for the children, swimming in the summer and sledding in the winter during rare snows.
Katharine planned regular Sunday evening parties and dances for the Reynolda teachers and their dashing headmaster, J. Edward Johnston. Although he was much younger than Katharine, a romance flowered, leading to marriage in June 1921. Since Johnston needed a more impressive calling than teaching, the family moved briefly to New York where he trained to be a banker. Their first baby, a daughter, was born prematurely and died a day later. During a second pregnancy, risky due to Katharine’s age and poor health, they moved back to New York to be near better doctors. The baby, a boy, was healthy, but three days after his birth, in May, Katharine died of an embolism.
With Katharine’s death, the trustees would manage the finances, but who would care for the landscape, the farm, and the village as she had? Johnston and their baby moved away. The four children were left in the care of their uncle, Will Reynolds, who hired cousin-in-law Robert E. Lassiter and his wife to care for them at Reynolda.
Thus begins another chapter in the saga of Reynolda House. (To be continued in the spring issue of the Triangle Retirement Resource Guide.)