Tag: Feature

In beautiful Edenton, history lives and life moves on Sambo time

By Jim Moriarty   •   Photographs by Kip Shaw

Sambo Dixon wraps his hands around the full quiver of his historic peacock’s tail feathers and repositions the bird to a lookout perch at the top of the garden cupola next to his Edenton house, Beverly Hall. A place for everything and everything in its place. The bird registers its objection with a guttural squawk about half an octave above Harpo Marx’s horn. This was our starter’s pistol.

Trailing behind Dixon on a speed walking tour of Edenton leaves one feeling a bit like the pig at the end of the Michael J. Fox’s leash on a stroll through Grady in Doc Hollywood. There’s not a soul, from mayor to roofer, banker to gardener, who does not greet Edenton’s best-known lawyer when they see him on the sidewalk with his white hair, matching milky opaque eyeglass frames, sockless loafers and khaki slacks. There’s a certain familiarity in a small town attached to someone whose family, on one side or the other, has lived in the same house since 1820.

Dixon is a country lawyer who does a little bit of everything but concentrates on capital cases. His law office is behind Beverly Hall in a building once occupied by slaves. It was his grandfather, Richard Dillard Dixon’s, law office, too. A superior court judge, the elder Dixon was appointed by President Harry Truman to assist as an alternate judge in the Nuremberg tribunals. He tried four cases, including the so-called Doctors’ trial of 23 Nazis. Chief among them was Hitler’s personal physician, Karl Brandt.

Folks scoop up history in Edenton the way most towns recycle plastic. They did it when the old cotton mill closed, turning it into condos and the blocks of workers’ homes into cozy bungalows. Near the peacock’s cupola — the birds’ lineage, spiritually if not directly, runs back a hundred years itself — is an outbuilding Dixon found in Chapanoke, a tiny Perquimans County town, and moved to Beverly Hall as if it was a rusty old Dodge pickup on blocks. He rescued the 18th century house from demolition. “They were going to burn it,” he says as if the prospect was as distasteful to him as drowning puppies.

Dixon stops in front of Beverly Hall as a car rattles down King Street. “That guy, his name is James Bond,” he says, pointing at the car bouncing toward Broad Street, the town’s central business district. “His father buried guns under a church in Edenton during the Civil War.” A mental calculator does a mathematical whirligig and Dixon adds that Bond’s father had been a boy in the 1860s and that Bond, no youngster himself, was a late-in-life baby. We cross King and walk right into Pembroke Hall, a Greek-Revival home on the National Register of Historic Places built in the early 1800s. It’s OK. Dixon was one of the people who pooled the resources necessary to save it. He runs through the sequence of owners like a menu for Chinese food. Workmen are busy getting it ready for the new owner and pay little attention to Dixon, who wants to show off the unobstructed view from the back porches. “It has protective covenants on it,” he says of the vista of Edenton Bay. “There’ll never be anything built over there.”

We cut through Pembroke Hall’s expansive backyard with its ghosts of grand parties past, skip down a few cement stairs and make for the lighthouse beside the small in-town harbor. The wind is blowing off the bay, and it’s hard to catch every word from two strides behind. “Ten-year preservation project,” he says. Then I hear: “It sat at the mouth of the Roanoke River.” There’s something about 1886, which barely qualifies as old in Edenton. “It’s called a screw pile lighthouse because they screwed these things into the sound floor.” We climb up the twisting staircase to the top and duck through an opening onto a tiny catwalk. A workman follows us. He doesn’t want anyone falling through the hole in the floor. Dixon assures him of our agility. “Here’s my favorite part,” he says. “We’ve got the fresnel lens now. We’ll put that back in, hopefully sooner rather than later.” Dixon points across the bay. “That’s Queen Anne’s Creek and that’s Pembroke Creek. Right across Albemarle Sound is where they think the Lost Colony went. You been following that?” It’s known as Site X, discovered after an X-ray examination of a watercolor map drawn by Gov. John White in 1585 indicated the possibility of the existence of the inland location.

And we’re off again, walking down the salvaged parts of the old Chowan River Bridge, cut into sections and made into a breakwater, creating a small sheltered port for boats traveling up and down the Intracoastal Waterway. Behind the lighthouse is the old Edenton Ice Company building. John Conger Glover, formerly of Harris Wholesale Inc., wants to turn what had been his grandfather’s obsolete business into a modern brewpub. “We have a lot of young families now, which is a rarity in eastern North Carolina,” Dixon says.

He explains how even by the late 1700s, the bay was already too shallow to accommodate the larger ships. A hurricane in 1795 would close the ocean inlet completely and Edenton would stay forever small. “My crowd,” is the way Dixon singles out his ancestors. One of them, William Badham Jr., another lawyer, formed the Edenton Bell Battery. “They melted down the church bells and made them into cannons. Captured at the Battle of Town Creek. (One of them, anyway.) They weren’t found for another 125 years. You don’t see many bronze cannons,” he says.

The six-pounder is named Edenton, the 12-pounder St. Paul. The first was found on display at the Shiloh National Military Park and the second at Old Fort Niagara. They’re positioned outside the Barker House, the town’s visitor’s center. Dixon climbs the stairs. “Hey, how you doin’?” he says to a stranger coming out, the first person he’s seen that he doesn’t know. “First political activity by women in America,” he says of the Edenton Tea Party of 1774. “This was the lady. This was her house.” Like the lighthouse, Penelope Barker’s home was moved from its original location two blocks north to the spiffy spot on the water it occupies now. Outside there are more cannon. “These were brought over by a Frenchman on something called the Holy Heart of Jesus (Coeur de Saint Jésus) and nobody would pay for them so he got mad and sunk the ship. At some point they went out and pulled them up. They tried to shoot them during the Civil War when the Northern troops were coming in, and they said it was more dangerous to stand behind them than to stand in front of them.” He points to the scraggly cluster of cypress in the water a few yards away. “That’s the dram tree. Ships coming in would bring West Indian rum and put it in a little bottle and ships going out would make a toast,” he says.

We head toward the Colonial green by way of the path along the water. Two men are fishing. From a distance it looks like all they’ve caught are a couple of missionaries in white shirts and dark ties. Dixon even loves the water in Edenton. “It’s fresh water, too,” he says. “No barnacles. No sharks. No jellyfish.” He asks the men with the poles if they’ve caught anything.

“A mess of white perch,” one replies.

“Good enough to eat?”

“Oh, yeah.”

We cross the street and Dixon knocks on the side door of the house called Homestead. Frances Inglis tells us to come in. While her voice has the quaver of time and her frame is slight, she still has the stamina to command a division of volunteers in straw hats and gardening gloves armed with hand trowels to maintain the grounds at the Cupola House. Inglis played a central role in saving the Jacobean-design house, a National Historic Landmark built in 1758 and the first community-inspired historic preservation in the state of North Carolina. We take a quick tour of Homestead and its double porches. “See through and breeze through,” she says. On a table sits a signed letter from Orville Wright, framed along with a piece of fabric. The note, with handwritten corrections, reads:

As a token of my appreciation of your courtesy in surrendering a piece which you had of our 1905 plane, I present to you two pieces of the “Kitty Hawk” which flew at Kill Devil Hills on December 17, 1903.

I authenticate the above pieces as genuine parts of the original “Kitty Hawk,” plane. They are from parts broken when the plane, while standing on the ground, was overturned by the wind after the fourth flight of the day.

Inglis explains her family had a beach house at Nags Head. “My father had a little canvas canoe. He used to paddle up from the cottage to the sight of the Wright brothers. They had abandoned the place. He gathered up this thing that was a wing tip of the 1902 glider. He had parts of the 1905 plane, the first one to fly two people.”

Next to the Wright brothers table is a wooden chest. On top of the chest is a woven basket of African design, made in the 1850s. The small trunk underneath is the camp chest of Tristrim Lowther Skinner — one of Inglis’ crowd. Inside are his sash, insignia, epaulets and a belt drawn in because he was losing weight. He was killed in 1862 and when she’s asked where, Inglis replies, “Mechanicsville,” in a voice so soft it’s as if the news just arrived. “Trim, they called him,” she says. The Skinner family papers, including letters home from the battlefield, are in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Outside Homestead, we race past a large monument. “This is the Joseph Hewes Memorial. He was great friends with John Paul Jones. That’s about him,” Dixon says with a sweep of his hand.  At the other end of the green we hop up the steps and enter the front door of the Chowan County Courthouse, a National Historic Landmark built in 1767, and the oldest active courthouse in North Carolina. The state Supreme Court still convenes there for ceremonial occasions. “They sit up there on those hard, terrible benches, but they love coming here,” Dixon says. Inside, there’s a welcoming committee of two, Judy Chilcoat and Carolyn Owens. One of the ladies taught Sambo Dixon math. He apologizes for that less than stellar bit of history. We go upstairs to the central window facing the green below. “When they ratified the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Secession, they read them out of this window to the people down below. We had a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a signer of the Constitution and a person on the first Supreme Court from here,” says Dixon.

Behind the courthouse we pass the empty jail building, oldest in the state. Dixon wonders out loud what it might be repurposed for. Perhaps something servicing the nearby 60-room boutique hotel planned for the old Hotel Hinton, a 20th century testimonial to utilitarian architecture already upgraded once into county government offices and then downgraded into deserted. We skip onto Broad Street, a small commercial district so 1950s if you didn’t see Michael J. Fox with his pig, you might see him screeching by in his DeLorean. Dixon points out the bank. “The story I’ve always heard,” he says, “is that during the Depression, there was going to be a run on the bank, so a bunch of local folks went to the mint and got a bunch of one dollar bills and put hundred dollar bills on top and said the bank was safe and it wasn’t.”

Next is St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, organized in the Vestry Act of 1701. “That’s all my crowd,” Dixon says with a gesture so expansive it’s as if the gravestones were acres of corn with too many ears to pick just one. “I’ve got the pew rent books at home from the 1840s. I’ve got 10 or 11 generations buried in this church.” We walk inside and he looks around at the altar and the balconies. “Every part of my life would begin and end here,” he says.

Someone is trimming hedges as we leave. There are vines intertwined with the shrubs, and Dixon offers advice. “Pull them out like this,” he says. “Don’t break them. Put newspaper around them and spray them with Roundup. It goes back to the root and kills them.” Perhaps the only endangered roots in Chowan County.

“These are 1900s houses. That’s the Conger House. It’s got a ballroom,” Dixon says as we march down Church Street. We walk up to the back door of a small house. It belongs to Daryl Adachi, who moved to Edenton after getting chased out of his renovated Vermont schoolhouse by cold winters a decade or so ago. He head-hunts for financial services companies from his computer.

“This is my where-in-the-world-have-you-been room,” says Adachi. “I’ve got France and Italy and England and Mexico and China.” There is a dead icons room with black and white photography of the Kennedys, Elvis, Dr. King and Marilyn. In another room there’s a wall for his alma mater, Notre Dame. And an Asian room. “I lived in Hong Kong and Japan for a while,” he says. “I subscribe to the Sambo Dixon theory of interior decoration — fill every piece of wall, fill every single table. Make sure there is no space that’s left untouched.”

Robert Beasley is back in town, too. He bought the Granville Queen Inn in June of last year and if it’s possible to give the impression of profound gentleness in a single meeting, Beasley is your guy. Born in Edenton, he grew up in nearby Tyner, attended North Carolina A&T and had a career in business services in the D.C. area. “My grandmother, Vashti Twine, worked for one of the wealthiest ladies in Chowan County, Eliza Elliott. I would go with her some days in the summer when she went to the house to pick the vegetables or dust the house because the lady was always traveling. She had this mansion and all these beautiful things. It did something to me, going with her and having an appreciation for the finer things.” The appreciation found expression in the Granville.

On our way back to Beverly Hall, we cut through the engineering marvel of Wessington, the 1850s Georgian mansion next door. Purchased by Richard Douglas, from Charlottesville, Virginia, it has a geothermal power plant that looks like the guts of a nuclear submarine, or what one imagines the guts of a nuclear submarine might look like.

We come full circle in Dixon’s living room. “The house was built as State Bank of North Carolina in 1810,” he says. “They have all this early interior security. There are iron bars that go across the windows at night. Here’s the vault. The two burn marks? The way it stopped being a bank was the teller embezzled all the money, put the books on the floor, set them on fire. There was a run on the bank. He ran out in the back yard and shot himself, but people were so angry they took him down to the courthouse and tried him after he was dead and hung him on the green.”

Dixon points out the Civil War camp chest belonging to William Badham — his crowd. There’s a set of dueling pistols and a silver service. A book by James Iredell, Edenton’s member of the first Supremes, is in a library full of books with old notes and pressed flowers inside. “You never know what you’re gong to find in them,” he says.

Dixon looks at his watch. “I got to go see a guy in jail about a murder.”  PS

Photos of Edenton by Kip Shaw accompanying this article can be found in Hospitality, Edenton Style to be published in November by Pembroke Bay Press, 2333 Locust Grove Road, Edenton, NC 27932.

How David and Ann Marie Thornton transformed an empty ice cream stand into a business with a fringe benefit

By Jim Moriarty   •   Photographs by Laura Gingerich

If you’re going to grow a business from the ground up, you might as well get a good buzz out of it. When Dr. David Thornton and his wife, Ann Marie, turned some of the same varieties of Southern heirloom apples George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had at Mount Vernon and Monticello into hard ciders of their own creation, the experiment blossomed into a cottage industry that could make your head whirl like Auntie Em’s house.

Crates of ripe Grimes Goldens, a fruit with roots dating back to 1790 and Johnny Appleseed, sit under the open-air shelter beside the cider house that, in a previous life, had been the Ferguson farm produce and ice cream stand on Old U.S. 1. The Thorntons’ F350 Super Duty truck is parked nearby, the door wide open so they can hear Nickel Creek on the sound system. Assisted by Erin Knight, who studied agriculture at the University of Vermont, they slice the apples by hand, carving out the bad spots. They dip them in a tub filled with water and a soupçon of bleach to discourage any natural yeasts, then rinse them off with a hose and feed them rapid fire down the metal throat of a crusher as if they were tossing rocks into a wishing well. Cut. Dip. Rinse. Grind. Repeat. The bluegrass mandolin is drowned out by the heavy metal symphony of grinding. Tiny shards of apple fly about like sweet, sticky shrapnel as a 5-gallon bucket fills with mashed pulp. They pour bucket after bucket into a cylindrical silver hydraulic press that, like a vertical colander, squeezes out the juice.

“This will be at least a two shirt-crushing,” says Dave. The old ice cream stand, now a constant 60 degrees, is the lab where they test pH, measure sulfites and add the yeast of their choice, maybe English cider or white wine. “Dave is in charge of microbial control,” says Ann Marie of their “picobrewery,” as she laughingly calls it. The pasteurizing is done in a tank behind the building. The old produce stand fronting the orchards the Thorntons now own is where they put the labels on the bottles with a hand crank machine, 10 in a minute, 1,200 on a weekend on the way to bottling a couple thousand gallons for the season. “I really am the chief cook and bottle washer,” says Ann Marie.

It’s the first season the Thorntons have been able to sell their cider commercially. Previously, they stayed under the legal limit and confined themselves to lighting up local happenings like Stoneybrook or the foxhunt and hanging out a shingle or two at the odd farmers market. Now, they’ll be producing two brands of hard cider, James Creek Cider House, made strictly from their own apples, and Stargazer, which will be a more adventurous version of the hard ciders familiar to most consumers’ taste buds.

“Our James Creek will be a very wine-like cider, refined, dry and relatively higher in alcohol content, about 8 or 8 1/2 percent,” says Ann Marie. “Stargazer is a little bit more on the craft beer, inventive side.” It’s where the Thorntons can get their freak on, blending in a hint of peach, blackberry, ginger, pretty much whatever they feel like. “For Stargazer we press our apples, we press apples from other growers, and we also bought juice. The Stargazer is themed with constellations. Prowling Peach is Leo. He’s a summer constellation. A lot of great apples ripen in October when Orion is high in the sky, so it will be Orion the Mighty Hunter. We might do a blend with persimmon for winter. Stinger for Scorpio. Something like that. I think we’ll have blueberry in the spring.”

Two of their ciders have won prizes in the Great Lakes International Cider and Perry Competition. (Yes, there are cider conventions.) Last year they attended CiderCON in Portland, Oregon. “Physician conferences look pretty bleak compared to cider conferences,” says Dave. “I used to think doctors partied. These guys are having fun.”

The Thorntons aren’t trying to become the Angry Orchard of the East. “If we come out with a good quality product that gets people engaged and just keep it local, then we will have met our goals,” says Dave. “We love this land. We love the countryside. Having something we can use the land for and creating something new is part of the challenge.”

So, how did an intensive care unit doctor and his wife with a master’s degree in English wind up as the Moëts of Sandhills cider?

Dave Thornton grew up in Cincinnati in the Ohio River Valley, where his family was in the produce business, the Castellini Co., still headquartered in Wilder, Kentucky. “The produce warehouses were all down on the waterfront,” he says. “So, I grew up down on the river carrying boxes around and driving forklifts full of fruits and receiving them on the docks. I was surrounded by fruits and vegetables when I was a kid, but I really wanted the farm side.”

Ann Marie grew up in Pelham, New York, a New York City suburb, and the pair met at the University of Notre Dame. They spent a semester in London in the fall of their junior year, simultaneously cultivating one another and a taste for hard cider. After Notre Dame, the Air Force put Dave through medical school. He was on active duty during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “I used to teach medicine at the Air Force’s residency hospital in San Antonio, but I also worked with Air Force Special Operations Command and ran a team that did light combat search and rescue, took care of the operators if they had problems,” he says. He was in the first task force to Afghanistan. “I wasn’t kicking down doors. The minute somebody found out I was a physician, my street cred went way down.”

San Antonio eventually led the Thorntons and their two daughters, Katheryn and Maura, to Southern Pines, where they found a house and some land bordering James Creek on the outer environs of Horse Country. There was a small, hidden glade, invisible from the house. “We called it a secret field. We thought, well, this would be a lovely place to put some apple trees,” says Dave, who wanted to plant something he could ferment, a boyhood enthusiasm. When he was growing up, he actually had a still in the basement. “I took a still to the university science fair when I was in grade school,” he says, and took a blue ribbon back to the basement. “It was pure science, with a fringe benefit.”

They began reading up on Southern heirloom apples. “Everyone was teasing us. This is peach country. You’re planting apples?” says Ann Marie. “We said, well, it seems like they grew on people’s farms a hundred years ago.”

They did soil preparation in ’08 and began planting trees the next year. “Apple trees are all traditionally done by grafting, so you take a branch cutting from an existing tree and you place it onto a rootstock,” says Ann Marie. The rootstock determines the size of the tree and how soon it produces. The grafting is the genetic material that determines the type of fruit. Sounds simple enough, except for a few things. They weren’t farmers. They weren’t growers. They weren’t pruners or pickers. They weren’t cider makers. They weren’t bottlers. They weren’t marketers. It’s a good thing they each possess a finely tuned sense of humor because the learning curve they were staring at was hysterical.

“They’re highly intelligent people, they really are,” says Taylor Williams, the Agricultural Extension Agent at Moore County’s N.C. Cooperative Extension. “They didn’t grow up in this area. The soils and climate here are quite unique. Ann Marie went through our Farm School Program, where you can sit down and look at the numbers for a business plan related to a farm. Here’s your production costs. Here are your marketing costs. Here’s your likely market. This is what you’re going to have to do to access that. Let me put it this way, for me to take a tobacco farmer who knows all about handling soil and handling the crop and get him geared up toward growing complicated produce crops, that’s a big transition. The Thorntons have had to learn all of that plus some of the soil and fertility managements, then carrying it through to adding value — processing the apples into cider. At every stage there’s a learning curve, plus a regulatory curve, figuring out how to negotiate with the alcohol and beverage control people. Just everything to get a saleable crop and do it legally.” Which is why Ann Marie now has a 60-hour-a-week job.

The Thorntons’ research began with Old Southern Apples, a book by Creighton Lee Calhoun Jr., a Pittsboro native described as the man who built the Noah’s ark of Southern heirloom apples. He criss-crossed the South taking cuttings of apple tree varieties to, in many cases, keep them in existence. Calhoun’s banner, to a considerable degree, has been passed to David C. Vernon, an advance placement chemistry and physics teacher at Western Alamance High School, who grows roughly 500 different varieties of mostly Southern heirloom apple trees on his farm, Century Farm Orchards, where the Thorntons bought their first trees.

Along with advice from Williams, the Thorntons got input from Dr. David Ritchie and Dr. Mike Parker from N.C. State University, the former a plant pathologist and the latter a horticulturalist who advised them on plant spacing and pruning. “It’s amazing what a resource we have in those folks,” says Dave. “One of them will come out and I’ll say, ‘Hey, what’s going on with my tree?’ He’ll pick some grass and say, ‘Oh, yeah, you don’t have enough of this.’ I’m looking at the tree. He’s looking at the grass. He knows what’s going on before he even looks at the tree. It’s been a fairly humbling experience.”

The secret field morphed into the Thorntons’ genesis orchard that now has more than 60 heirloom varieties among its 600 or so trees. “Those down there are American Golden Russets,” says Dave as he walks between the rows of their “test” orchard. “This tree is from the 1600s. It’s a Roxbury Russet. It was in Monticello and Mount Vernon.”

“This is a Hewes Crab,” says Ann Marie. “Jefferson said it was his favorite apple. That yellow apple is a Grimes Golden.”

“This is an old Southern apple called a King David,” says Dave. “It was such a heavy crop this year we had to hold the branches up or they’d break right off the tree.” Arkansas Blacks. Johnson Keeper. Summer Bananas. Terry Winter. Limbertwig. “The two of us can get our geek on over this, in no uncertain terms,” says Dave.

In addition to their cider business, Ann Marie takes fruit to the Carrboro Farmers Market, where she’s been doing an “heirloom of the week.” It’s a Peter and Paul dynamic. To ferment or not to ferment, that is the question. “I usually say those apples are for cider,” says Dave. “But the truth is, where cash flow is concerned, Ann Marie wins.”

On her latest trip to Carrboro, a French couple sampled one of the Thorntons’ ciders. “A woman from Normandy told her husband, in French, it tasted like her grandmother’s cider,” says Ann Marie with a smile.

“Right now we’re having a blast,” says Dave. “Fermenting these in groups either by harvest date or by variety and then making hard cider out of them and tasting what each different variety is like. Then what we can do is blend them together to make something that’s very interesting and palatable. The blending at the cider house is pretty cool.”

So are the days in the field. “We keep some German shepherds and they’ll come out on the hillside with us and hang out while we prune away on the trees. You can get a real Zen going about it. The time can just fly by,” he says.

“We recognize the apples from this place may taste differently than they do somewhere else,” says Ann Marie. “That’s OK. We just want to know what they taste like here. What kind of cider can you make here?” It’s a traditional Southern cider to complement traditional Southern foods, fried chicken, barbecue, oysters. Just a couple of Golden Domers at home with their Grimes Goldens.  PS

Jim Moriarty is Senior Editor of PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.

How the Carolina Theatres of Pinehurst and Southern Pines navigated the leap from silent films to talkies in 1928

By Bill Case

he man in charge of virtually everything in Pinehurst perused the June 1928 edition of Motion Picture News, bypassing the provocative feature on the recent European vacation of Hollywood’s most glamorous couple, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Instead, 32-year-old Richard Tufts concentrated his attention on the trade paper’s lengthy editorial dealing with the rapid emergence of the talking movie — a technological advancement in the film industry likely to alter the business model for movie studio and theater owners alike. One of the many hats Tufts wore in his ubiquitous management of Pinehurst was that of president of Pinehurst Theatre Company, operator of the town’s 5-year-old movie house, The Carolina Theatre, at 90 Cherokee Road.

So, on June 21, 1928, Tufts posted a letter to PTC’s general manager, Charles Picquet, expressing the view that, “Pinehurst should be one of the first to have talking movies.” Ever close with a buck, Richard focused on how the costs of retrofitting the theater to exhibit “talkies” could be minimized. With Picquet’s connections as president of the Carolina Theatre Owners Association and vice-president of the National Theatre Owners Association, Tufts thought he might avoid the estimated $11,000 cost of synchronizing for sound. To him it was product placement Roaring 20s style. “With your influence and with the recognized standing of the
Pinehurst Theatre, it might be possible for us to persuade some of the companies to locate a machine here, pretty much at their expense, in order to obtain publicity for the talking movies,” Richard suggested. Presumably his clientele, the upper crust of the East, once having experienced talking pictures in Pinehurst, would induce theater owners back home to convert to the new technology.

Picquet was the man Richard Tufts tasked with the job of keeping his resort guests and the well-heeled members of the town’s “cottage colony” entertained. Along with his wife, Juanita, Picquet had once been a member of a light opera troupe touring the U.S. and Canada. Whether it was managing the Sandhill Fair, organizing local choral groups, luring performers like humorist Will Rogers for theatrical engagements, or exhibiting feature films, Charlie was in the middle of things. He was a hands-on manager, typically greeting movie patrons wearing a tuxedo with a carnation in his lapel, then scurrying to the projection booth, changing into a blue denim jumper and running the projector. When the last frame flickered out, Picquet would be back at the theater entrance in his tux as the audience filed out.

Picquet wasted no time replying to Tuft’s suggestion, advising him events were moving at a dizzying pace. He said Paramount Pictures had already announced that “75 percent of their new product will be synchronized (talking pictures) and Metro will do the same.” Theaters in Greensboro and Raleigh were showing talkies, as were two movie houses in Charlotte. Picquet believed movie houses everywhere would inevitably have to buy in or close. Manufacturers couldn’t keep up with the demand for sound synchronization equipment, making Richard’s hope of obtaining it gratis seem as fanciful as the movies themselves. Picquet warned that addressing the issue could not be sidestepped: “We cannot escape it no matter how much we would like to.”

Since PTC was its own company, Richard Tufts and Charlie Picquet could not act unilaterally. The support of a majority of the 21 shareholders was required for such an extraordinary expenditure. Those shareholders included some glittering names in the Pinehurst galaxy: Henry C. Fownes (steel magnate and founder of Pittsburgh’s Oakmont Country Club); George T. Dunlap (founding partner of Grossett & Dunlap publishers); Leonard Tufts (Richard’s father and owner of the controlling interest in Pinehurst, Inc.); and Donald Ross (Pinehurst’s unparalleled golf course architect).

In light of Picquet’s sense of urgency, Tufts authored a message on July 16, 1928, to PTC’s shareholders asking for an immediate vote on whether to obtain sound equipment. “It is apparent to the officers of your company that the moving picture industry is about to undergo one of those revolutionary changes which new inventions frequently bring to an industry,” he wrote. Richard made the case that if the requisite synchronization equipment wasn’t put in, “. . . we shall probably lose business during the coming winter as many of our patrons will be accustomed to attending the ‘talking movies’ already installed in practically all the larger cities. We cannot afford to have this happen because we depend wholly on our winter patronage to make money.”

Since smaller theaters around Pinehurst seemed unlikely to make the move for the upcoming season, Richard was confident he’d quickly recoup the investment in box office receipts and wanted PTC to immediately initiate acquisition of the equipment. He framed the proposition this way: “If the ‘talking movies’ are with us to stay, it seems almost axiomatic that the sooner we are on the bandwagon the better off we shall be.”

Like any innovation, talking movies had its detractors. There were respected voices in the motion picture business that believed they were little more than a passing fad. Some trade journals expressed concern that the exorbitant costs of producing a sound movie made them impractical. There were fears the rehearsals necessary for actors to master dialogue would compound production costs. Not all silent stars possessed the voice and thespian skill to make a seamless transition to talkies. Other industry flacks believed the public wouldn’t accept the disappearance of silent movies’ orchestral accompaniment. And, the musicians’ union promised a battle royale to protect its members whose jobs would disappear if the talkies actually caught on. There was enough negativity bandied about to give pause to theater owners concerned about laying down serious cash for an extravagant new sound system.

With Richard Tufts on board, however, shareholder approval seemed a mere formality. He controlled enough stock by himself that he needed very little support from the non-family shareholders to get approval for his plan. The formality proved to be anything but. With an eye toward his own bottom line, J. T. Newton, holder of nine shares, was out. He was “opposed to any such expenditure that would reduce dividends.” George Dunlap ambivalently stated that while it might be necessary to “hook up” with the talking movies, his personal preference “would be the other way.” But it was H.C. Fownes’ opposition that caused Richard to waver on the proposal himself. Fownes argued the concept was only in its formative stages and questioned whether PTC was “in the proper financial condition at present to make the investment.”

Fownes’ reply to Richard had somehow caused a flip in the PTC president’s viewpoint. On July 31, Tufts wrote to Picquet, “The more I think about it, the more I think Mr. Fownes is right.” The purchase of synchronization equipment was suddenly in doubt. What caused Richard to make such a quick about-face? The answer may lie in a parallel theater-related brouhaha.

That dispute involved another movie theater operating at 143 N.E. Broad St. in Southern Pines also named the “Carolina Theatre.” PTC did not own the Carolina Theatre of Southern Pines, but Picquet and Tufts, personally, did. Though the two Carolina Theatres were not under common ownership (one owned by the PTC shareholders, the other by the Picquet/Tufts partnership), Richard considered it beneficial for them to be managed as one, giving Picquet leverage in obtaining films from distributors on terms that a single screen operator could not achieve. The two theaters could coordinate their movie showings and share the costs of a single film rental.

Earlier in 1928, Tufts and Picquet asked PTC shareholders to consider financially participating in the construction of a new theater in Southern Pines to replace the existing one, which Richard described as “a dump.” Fownes, however, rejected PTC’s participation in the construction venture outright. Richard fumed at this unanticipated roadblock and fired off an indignant missive to Fownes declaring that “it would be impossible for Mr. Picquet and me to adjust . . . if the stockholders have lost confidence in the way we have conducted the theater. It would be so much better for us to get out.”

The dust-up was resolved only after the landlord of the Southern Pines Carolina Theatre agreed to make overdue improvements. Richard usually avoided run-ins with the elite members of Pinehurst’s “cottage colony.” His atypical outburst probably caused some uneasiness in his relationship with H.C. who was arguably the most prominent cottager of all, serving on the country club’s board of governors and Pinehurst Inc.’s citizen advisory board. Fownes had personally supported a local bond issue and, after the crash of 1929, would help bail out Pinehurst, Inc. by contributing $30,000 to retire its delinquent bank note.

When the issue of PTC’s transition to talking movies arose, Tufts would naturally have been reluctant to engage in another fractious dispute with Fownes. So, when H.C. reported on Aug. 6 that a friend in the film industry had confirmed “it would be a mistake to make an investment to the degree you (Richard) estimated an outfit would cost,” Tufts did not push back. Pinehurst’s Carolina Theatre would remain a silent movie house for the duration of the resort’s 1928-29 season.

Picquet, however, was not inclined to take no for an answer. When he got wind of Fownes’ letter, he composed a diplomatic rebuttal. He informed Richard that he was “glad to see the note from Fownes also as I am anxious to hear all sides of the sound question.”  However, the manager pointed out, “talkies are packing them in even during the most torrid weather while ‘silents’ are suffering and closing . . . Fox has stopped silents. Within a month Paramount and Metro will do the same . . .Within two months all newsreels will be talkies.”

Facing what he was sure would be dismal winter admissions in Pinehurst, Charlie urged reconsideration of the decision in an Aug. 10 message: “I am going on record . . . to predict that we would more than pay for the installation within the next two years in increased attendance and higher admissions . . .The theaters that will clean up . . . are the theaters who get in on it now while there are comparatively few installations.” Picquet also mentioned that, “Contrary to Mr. Fownes’ report, Pittsburgh’s sound theater is doing a turn-away business and the silent ones are doing almost nothing.”

Perturbed at his general manager’s drumbeating, Tufts suggested Picquet was not fully in tune with public taste. On Aug. 27 he wrote he was “very much impressed at the lack of interest shown (in talkies). Most . . . do not like them and prefer the organ music.” He intimated people in the trade were getting ahead of their own customers.

The correspondence between Tufts and Picquet took on a frostier tone. On Sept. 5, Charlie rubbed it in that the Greensboro sound theater was perpetually “SRO” and that in three months, the resulting profits would pay for the equipment. Three days later, Richard noted the impresario’s ongoing “propaganda on talking movies.” No still meant no.

Picquet took a September vacation to New York, where he enjoyed racing days at Belmont Park but also found time to hobnob with fellow movie people. Not above negotiating in the press, when he returned Charlie informed The Pilot that he had concluded, “after tramping Broadway from end to end . . . the ‘talkies’ are here to stay.” With Tufts still opposed, Picquet tried another tack on Oct. 23. He offered “to ‘hock’ my stock with the bank in order to provide funds for the installation.” So sure was he that Richard and H.C. would find his offer acceptable that Charlie began arranging for purchase of the equipment.

Even that gambit misfired. Fownes still objected. He feared PTC would wind up on the hook morally, if not contractually, if the investment didn’t pan out. On Dec. 17, Picquet informed them he had already personally bought the necessary equipment, but that if “Mr. Fownes is unwilling to allow me to put it in, I would suggest that it be installed in Southern Pines.” Charlie also sounded the alarm that the competing theater in Aberdeen was “rarin’ to install one and will get it, if I do not.”

The frustrated Picquet could not resist taking a potshot at H.C. “Of course, Mr. Fownes does not know it, but the silent pictures from now on are going to be ‘sorry’ affairs . . . No less than 15 silent pictures which were booked for November and December, have been withdrawn to make ‘talkies’ . . . This means that the silent pictures will be junk.”

Finally, Tufts relented, allowing Picquet to install sound synchronization equipment in Southern Pines’ Carolina Theatre. Nelson Hyde’s editorial in The Pilot hailed the coming of the talkies: “This week Charlie Picquet expects to present the first talking picture show ever brought to middle North Carolina.” Hyde cited the “courage of the Carolina Theatre’s management” in bringing about the talkies’ arrival.

On March 7, 1929, Southern Pines’ Carolina Theatre debuted its first talkie, The Iron Mask, starring Douglas Fairbanks in his inaugural speaking role. The Pilot remarked that “Mr. Picquet worked feverishly for two days to assemble his new de Forest Phonofilm projector for the Fairbanks production, and the presentation was voted a great success by those present.”

The Pinehurst Carolina Theatre continued to show silent movies as an alternative to the talking variety exhibited by the sister theater in Southern Pines. In April, a Lupe Velez movie was exhibited in silent form at Pinehurst while the sound adaptation was on view in Southern Pines. The Pilot encouraged moviegoers to check out both versions and reach their own conclusions. The verdict, in the Sandhills and everywhere else, came swiftly: the market for silent pictures had vanished altogether. The Pilot observed in November that, “the Pinehurst house has been playing to handfuls while Southern Pines has been turning people away. No longer will the public go to see silent films while they can witness musical comedies and cry with the tragedians . . . (T)his season was only four weeks along when it became evident to Mr. Picquet and others interested in the Pinehurst theater that times have changed and the old dog is dead.”

Once they observed in the fall of 1929 that silent movies in Pinehurst were playing to a nearly empty theater, Tufts and Fownes swallowed their pride and changed course rapidly. In November, they authorized Picquet to acquire a de Forest projector for Pinehurst and get it installed promptly. As astute businessmen, they may have missed the launch, but they weren’t going to miss the boat. Normal delivery would have taken months. But Picquet managed to expedite matters. The Carolina Theatre Owners Association scheduled its annual meeting in Pinehurst for Dec. 9-10, 1929. Lee de Forest, the inventor of the radio tube and the de Forest projector, was slated to speak at the convention. Charlie reasoned that if talking pictures’ grand opening at PTC could be scheduled to coincide with the gathering, he could prevail upon his fellow theater owners to attend. He pitched to the manufacturer that the conventioneers would make for a target-rich audience for de Forest to showcase their projector in action. His pitch worked; delivery was expedited and the equipment installed at the theater in record time. PTC’s first sound movie was presented on Dec. 9 to a packed house. The Love Parade, a musical comedy starring Maurice Chevalier, was well-received by a crowd seeking respite from the jolt of the stock market collapse. Lee de Forest himself came by to offer remarks to the enthralled audience about the revolutionary synchronization system.

Thereafter, neither theater looked back, enjoying good runs for the next 25 years. As consumer tastes changed mid-century, it became increasingly difficult to economically operate a seasonal movie theater. Pinehurst’s Carolina Theatre showed its last film on April 25, 1954. A local theatrical company performed plays for a time, but in 1962, the Pinehurst theater went permanently dark. Subsequent renovation led by new owners Marty and Susan McKenzie transformed the building  into market space by 1981.

Despite advancing health problems and fierce competition from the Sunrise Theatre, Charlie Picquet doggedly kept the Southern Pines Carolina Theatre going. Longtime Southern Pines resident Norris Hodgkins ushered for Charlie at the Carolina Theatre in the late 1930s. Hodgkins remembers that his boss observed formalities not often practiced in other theaters. “Mr. Picquet had us ushers wearing spiffy bellboy uniforms with pillbox hats. If a customer misbehaved, Mr. Picquet tossed him out,” says Norris. “There was no concession stand at The Carolina. No popcorn, no soda. Mr. Picquet believed that food inside the theater detracted from the tone.”

Always nattily attired, Picquet faithfully followed his nightly ritual of personally greeting his theatergoers, then bidding them goodbye after the final credits rolled, a practice he continued until the day he died of a heart attack at age 81 in May 1957. The last movie Charlie showed was a classic: Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Strangers on a Train. All of Southern Pines’ merchants closed their businesses for an hour to mourn the man who opened the town’s first theater in 1913 — originally named the Princess Theatre — and ran it for 44 years. After Charlie Picquet left its stage, the theater never reopened.

Katharine Boyd paid homage to Picquet in The Pilot, writing that he was “. . . the George M. Cohan type, the trouper through and through: the good friend, the good American.” She noted that Picquet started a competition for musically gifted high school students, the Picquet Cup, and that it “will endure and grow in significance, keeping the name of its donor always before us, up there in the lights where the star’s name goes.”

Today, the Kiwanis Club of the Sandhills continues to hold the Picquet Music Festival each April. Vocal and instrumental students from local high schools compete at the festival for college scholarships. A pioneer and innovator, Charlie’s name remains on the marquee.  PS

Pinehurst resident Bill Case is PineStraw’s history man. He can be reached at Bill.Case@thompsonhine.com.

Euro-minimalism meets Southern practicality

By Deborah Salomon   •   Photographs by John Gessner & Laura Gingerich

Desired by many, attained by few: a peaceful living space.

Trish and Gates Harris succeeded. Their contemporary lakeside home in Whispering Pines integrates Euro-minimalism with function and practicality.

“Ahhh . . . ” the house breathes, from living room with window wall and narrow deck to open kitchen with soapstone countertops, skylight, Italian gas range and espresso machine.

Nothing huge, nothing obtrusive. No clutter, zero tchotchkes.  Bookshelves, a few paintings and family photos against white and neutrals.

“I’ve always wanted to live beside peaceful water . . . and soothe my soul,” Trish says, echoing the psalmist.

This totality represents a startling reversal. For more than 20 years, Gates, an attorney, and Trish, a psychology professor at Sandhills Community College, occupied a rambling home in Weymouth — a 30-minute commute to Gates’ law office in Red Springs. Here, they raised two sons, Max and Will, while collecting mountains of stuff.

When the boys left for college, Trish and Gates made that noise familiar to empty-nesters: downsize. An understatement, in their case.

“We purged!” Trish exclaims. “Moving is a good time to let go.” Furniture that wouldn’t conform was left in the house. Other items they donated or parked by the “free tree,” which Gates characterizes as giving back to the Earth more than throwing away.

“We used to have 30 (cereal) bowls; now we have four,” says son Will, 21, pulling an unusual white one from the cupboard.

Here, the process mirrors the people.

Gates grew up “poor as church mice” in a tenant farmhouse in Robeson County with one bathroom accommodating six occupants. As a young attorney he worked for A.B. Hardee, developer of Whispering Pines. “I would drive there on business — Whispering Pines looked like the shining city on the hill.”

Raising a family in traditional Weymouth sharpened his appetite not only for cleaner lines, but for less maintenance. In the past, “Gates dug the hole for every plant in the yard — it was never a ballgame on the weekends,” Trish recalls. “Now that’s switched off.”

Gates even purged his power tools since, after the renovation, little needed fixing. “This is freedom for us.”

Trish describes her childhood home in Michigan as a “little post-war cracker box.” Five children, one bathroom. “Growing up, I always wanted to live in a house with a lovely fireplace.” Now she has two, one with raised hearth, both into long walls of painted brick. Nature frames her lifestyle; Trish recently completed hiking the 2,190-mile Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine, over four summers. “I like the peacefulness of water, I like the birds. I’m looking for a kingfish.” Early mornings, she has coffee on the deck, walks, sometimes kayaks across Spring Valley Lake.

This purge/relocation didn’t happen overnight.  The Harrises looked for two years in several lakeside communities. Gates, a Frank Lloyd Wright admirer, wanted something mid-century modern suitable for an interior renovation without enlarging the footprint.

“I knew Gates loved the linear nature of a modern home, one that we could afford to fix up,” Trish says. He identifies Whispering Pines as a hotbed of architects who promoted this style. The elongated brick house they settled on, built as a vacation retreat for Kodak executives in 1973, channeled FLW outside with what Gates calls an Austin Powers interior.

“You know, shag carpet and foil wallpaper,” he cringes.

But it had a sunken living room, aboveground finished basement, screened porch and potential galore. Trish, Gates, their sons and contractor Steve Sims designed the renovation by gut. “(My mother) picked the house,” says Max. After that, “Nothing was decided without agreement,” adds Will, who helped with demolition and carpentry.

Up came the carpet, but unlike homes built in the ’50s, this one revealed no hardwood underneath — a plus for Gates, who designed wood strip flooring resembling a boat deck. Down came the wall (with typical ’70s pass-through) separating kitchen from dining area; in went the black-and-white Ikea kitchen with soapstone island, significant because the material reminds Gates of college chemistry lab.  Here, illuminated by a skylight, they cook in tandem, “. . . sometimes bumping into each other as we sashay around,” Gates says.

The screened corner porch, where Trish curls up with a blanket and a book on winter afternoons, is a study in forest browns and greens, with iron chairs once belonging to Gates’ mother peeling white paint. Bedrooms follow the shades-of-grey palette. The enlarged master bathroom has an unusual shower with no curtains or glass enclosure. Neither are windows covered, allowing maximum natural light.

Gates paid particular attention to plumbing and lighting fixtures, all with clean, modern sculpturesque lines.

Downstairs, the walkout basement has become a private apartment for the boys, with separate entrance, bedrooms, bathroom, easy-clean slate floor, living area with fireplace looking out toward the dock. Their kitchenette sports a hunk of nostalgia: the well-worn butcher block from Gates’ grandfather’s store in Robeson County.

“I remember chopping neck bones,” Gates grins, miming the action.

The Harrises have traveled the world, living in rather than visiting Europe, India and Asia. At chez Harris, furnishings defy period or style, simply fading into the international aura. Some, like a pair of swivel armchairs, survived the purge, reupholstered. But over them looms a new floor lamp that cuts a parabola through the air. The Swedish sectional sofa stands alone. Pillows from India provide a spot of color along with Oriental runners and a landscape by Pinehurst artist Jessie Mackay. Gates’ reading chair is positioned by the window for view and best light. They both value books, therefore built a wall of bookshelves in the dining area, which also contains chairs that were left in the house, now painted black, and an unusual slat table meant for patio use.  Over the door between dining area and screened porch hangs another family trophy:

“My mother fished once in her life, in Florida,” Gates explains. “She caught a snapper.”

Fine with Trish: “I’m a go-along girl.” She selected furnishings but “Gates drives choices like color and space.” He is an expert on whites, matching nuance to the room.

Then why is the oversized front door with deep panels red?

“Vermilion, actually,” Gates says. Gates and Max spent several weeks in Japan, living on tatami mats, visiting gardens and studying Buddhism and Shintoism. They noticed this color, vermilion, an ancient pigment made from inorganic chemicals applied to lacquerware. The heavy door begged its brilliance. “People say it makes the house look like a Chinese restaurant,” Gates says.

The total effect seems more an architect’s showplace than a pre-retirement home expressing evolved tastes. However, The Lake House, as the Harris family calls it, expresses multiple personalities rooted in common precepts, a near-nirvana few families achieve. They acknowledge the transition:

“It was weird, coming from a house we’d lived in for 22 years,” Max says.  “Everything here seems fresh and new. It turned out better than I thought.”

“I see my sons’ hands all over it,” Trish adds. “The house balances us out.”

Or, according to Max: “Nothing but good news here.”  PS