John H. Johnson's 1887 Home in Holbert Cove
Built in 1887 in the old “Tryon District,” John H. Johnson’s simple home has never been painted, wired for electricity, or fitted with indoor plumbing. Remarkably, it is preserved in near original condition and is on the National Register of Historic Places.
The old "Tryon District" predates Polk County’s formation and even the Civil War. Sitting above 2000 feet in elevation, its rugged mountain neighborhood has beautiful eastern views of prominent Tryon Peak. In 1834 Forman’s Chapel, a non-denominational meeting house, was erected nearby, named for entrepreneur Joshua Forman who founded Syracuse, New York and mined gold near Rutherfordton. The first Tryon post office was established in 1839 along the Howard Gap Road which ascended the mountain escarpment from South Carolina, then plunges into picturesque Green River gorge, crossing Guice’s covered bridge where Interstate 26 crosses today.
One of the area’s early influential figures, Isaac Henderson, a wealthy slaveholder and Democratic Party activist, fathered children by several women. His last known son, John Johnson, was born in 1859 to Sallie Johnson, daughter of an impoverished illiterate shoemaker, George Washington Johnson, who migrated to Tryon from South Carolina. Raised in his grandfather’s household, John Johnson and his siblings did not attend school, unlike many neighboring children.
The first post-War census showed Sallie’s parents gone, leaving her with no apparent means of support, and revealed she had a daughter born during the Civil War, now known to have also been fathered by Henderson. By 1880, when Rev. L.R. McAboy came through the district as census enumerator, John was gone – married in 1877 when he was 18, to a woman some twenty years his senior. He worked as a farm hand. Kindly old McAboy reported John illiterate. But his wife’s brother Hampton Bradley was a school teacher who probably tutored John to read and write. During the difficult Reconstruction period, when disadvantaged youths like John Johnson had poor prospects, it was his good fortune to fall in with the Bradleys.
Illustration by Charles O. Hearon Jr.
for Dart's 1997 monograph
Indeed, Hampton Bradley was a neighbor of McAboy, minister and physician from Pennsylvania, and of John Garrison a millwright and entrepreneur whose wife Melissa is well-remembered for her endowment of a new Baptist church for Black people during those years. Whether John worked at McAboy’s resort near new Tryon City, for Garrison or in one of the workshops in the new railroad town down the mountain we don’t know. But we know that by the mid-1880s he had acquired considerable land – some 200 acres by the Holbert Cove Road – and set about to build a new house on it.
Friendship Church is circled in this fragment of Polk County's 1905 first topographical map.
Eli T. Bradley, Hampton’s older brother, was a surveyor — and, like his sister married to John H. Johnson — lived in the up-mountain Tryon district, at Fishtop hamlet on Green River. Besides his professional work, and farming, Eli served as educator and preacher for the Brethren denomination. After the catastrophe of the American Civil War, this Christian movement gained many adherents around the nation. Originally Germanic in character, especially strong in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Virginia, by the 1870s its schools and worship services were conducted in English although the term “German Baptist Brethren” was still often used (though not in the South). Always pacifist, always anti-slavery, it was New Testament focused and non-hierarchical. Pastors were expected to serve their flocks for free, supporting themselves by other means, and some congregations never erected houses of worship. In-home family worship was the norm and many groups simply met in the pastor’s home, or offered their own homes on a rotating basis. Baptisms were triune and usually in a stream. As the church had few money-consuming practices, it sought little in the way of financial support from adherents. Thus, people of all kinds were attracted to the fellowship of the Brethren.
In southeast Polk County during the late 19th century two Brethren congregations were founded and flourished, at Mill Creek and nearby Melvin Hill. In western Polk County –beyond the new Tryon City founded in 1877 – Brethren activity accelerated around Fishtop and the Cove area, which was oriented toward the new village called Saluda. The railroad reached Saluda (formerly Pace’s Gap) in 1878, which enabled it to get a new post office. The old Tryon post office nearby closed and Forman Chapel became Friendship Church, a building where Methodists and Baptists conducted services. At Saluda tourist activity sprang up with boarding houses and the Mountain House hotel. Thus John H. Johnson’s farm was near a rail depot, not remote for the times, economic activity centered there was growing. Already in 1879, the post office revenues at Saluda were more than those of Tryon City, Columbus the county seat, and the hamlet between them called Lynn — where McAboy’s resort was welcoming guests from near and far.
In 1994 this property was entered into
the National Register of Historic Places.
John’s wife died unexpectedly in 1886 leaving him and their baby daughter. Grizzled old Isaac Henderson died that year too. It’s said construction of John’s new house in Holbert Cove began in 1887, plain but up-to-date for its time – with weatherboard siding and not log. There are good six-over-six double-hung sash windows. Roof has generous pitch, enough for a decent attic; machine-riven red-oak shingles for it likely were made at Edwin Anderson’s little factory in Tryon City. Reverend Anderson (1844 – 1900), from upstate New York, in 1874 first patented his machine riving shingles neatly and cleanly to uniform dimensions. Edwin was also a building contractor, served a term as Polk County Surveyor and was resident minister at Tryon City’s first community house of worship, non-denominational, also called Friendship Church.
Wood roofs and exterior wall weatherboards of vernacular houses weren’t painted.(Arriving Northern settlers in Polk County found this custom perfectly sensible, and began to ask for walls shingled and unpainted, or only stained in some muted woodsy hue. Locals thought their delight for shingled walls was bizarre, not picturesque.)
Single story houses were the norm, even for the comfortably well off. Only the wealthy asserted their success by constructing full double-story. We don’t know what Isaac Henderson’s house was like. Asbury Thompson’s, near Friendship Church, was full double-story, with double-hung sash and riven roof shingles as photographed in 1938. John Garrison at Tryon City built his similarly around 1885, devoid of Victorian ornament. John H. Johnson must have been right proud of his new home, a big step up from his humble boyhood in the cabin of his grandfather Johnson the impoverished shoemaker. Chairs and a “clothes press” armoire said to be John’s work were acquired a century later to display at his Home Place.
Thompson house abandoned, now destroyed,
photographed 1938 by Frances Benjamin Johnston.
It was expected John would quickly find a new wife. On February 26, 1888 he wed Sarah Bradley, age 20. Her mother being dead, the simple ceremony was held at the groom’s residence. Brethren minister Eli T. Bradley united them with three Johnsons present, but not his mother, as witnesses for their marriage certificate filed at Register of Deeds in Columbus.
During the 1880s George Morton from Ohio settled west of Tryon City and began his serious commercial cultivation of market fruits at “Valhalla” below the mountain escarpment. Reverend McAboy is known to have experimented with fruits, including grapes; he was Polk County’s correspondent with the Department of Agriculture in Washington. Navy retired Commander Eugene Thomas from Troy, Ohio carried the grape culture forward during that decade, on the Lynn end of Howard Gap Road. By 1890 or so it was learned grapes did especially well on steep, stony slopes that earlier had been considered nearly worthless for agriculture; Lindsey from Kentucky grew grapes successfully on Warrior Mountain. Apple and cherry orchards were planted at higher elevations near Saluda.
John was not a well-off man. He had no children with Sarah. During the 1890s when the nation experienced a sharp economic recession, he followed the lead of other progressive Polk farmers by planting fruit trees. Johnson found paying work off the farm and eventually moved to Henderson County where he died in 1917. Via his network of Brethren adherents he rented out, then sold, his Holbert Cove property to Rev. Joel Sherfy, a Brethren minister from Jonesborough, Tennessee. Sherfy had extensive experience in fruit raising in Washington County (near the North Carolina border) where Brethren congregations flourished and George Branscom, founder of Polk’s two thriving churches, originated. Farmers in Washington County were canning and drying fruits for outbound rail shipments by 1880.
Sherfy’s mission was to build up the Cove congregation of Brethren. He worked diligently hosting Sunday services in his own home and traveling to preach at Fishtop and elsewhere around western Polk County into the 1930s. The Sherfys and a daughter’s family, the Garretts, resided at Holbert Cove until the second world war. During that period rural population in the Cove vicinity declined. Train travel through Polk County did, too, as Highway 176 was paved and became the automobile artery from South Carolina up the escarpment to Hendersonville and on to Asheville. Howard Gap Road became a byway, leaving the Cove off the beaten path. In Saluda most of its early inns and boarding houses burned down, were razed or converted to single family residences, many for out-of-state summer sojourners. The Great Depression left many farmers destitute; a number of Cove residents moved elsewhere to find jobs. The 19th century Thompson “big house” near Friendship church was abandoned.
John H. Johnson’s more modest house still without running water or electricity, on unpaved Holbert Cove Road, went unoccupied until 1979 when an enlightened couple seeking to flee Chicago, for eventual retirement in an appealing climate, stumbled into Saluda. They liked it for its quiet charm and authenticity. John T. McCutcheon, junior, had been editor for the Tribune and a trustee of Chicago Historical Society.
His wife Susan Dart, a New Orleans native, was an author active in their suburb’s historical society and sister of noted American architect Edward Dart. On their wanderings they spotted the modest Johnson house, for sale at a price that realistically valued the land only, not the obsolete structure. As luck would have it, the McCutcheons were imaginative historic preservationists, at a time when late 19th century vernacular dwellings weren’t yet appreciated. The potential of the surrounding acreage appealed to them, too. So they bought it as their seasonal get-away place, and began spending time seriously studying its story and interviewing neighbors, meanwhile resisting the urge to “update” with modern conveniences or ripping out original features. Ultimately the McCutcheons’ restraint earned their house a 1994 designation to the National Register of Historic Places.
In 1992 they sold their Modernist 1950s residence designed by Edward Dart, in order to retire full-time to Polk County. Ironically, their unique architect-designed house in suburban Chicago was promptly destroyed by its buyer to construct a mansion. They liked rural living in Holbert’s Cove. With caution and deliberation they chose ways to live in their historic home without destroying its essential character. For example, a separate structure was designed for the “shower house” with running water, built of concrete block with exterior log veneer to simulate vernacular outbuildings of Johnson’s time. His house had never been painted so they decided not to. It had never had shutters so they decided not to make it cute with some. Nor was it a “pioneer” log cabin, of an earlier era, so they didn’t strive to make it seem so. Each decision was formulated with a genuinely conservative philosophy: respect for its authentic heritage.
Susan in 1997 authored a slim illustrated volume about their project, honoring the home’s past and the lives of its previous inhabitants. It’s probably the best monograph about a rural “ordinary” late 19th century property ever to have been published in the Carolinas.
John and Susan died in 2007 and ’08. During their last years they built a final retirement cottage with modern conveniences nearby but away from the Johnson house and its sympathetic accessory outbuildings. Their daughter Anne McCutcheon Lewis, who participated in their multi-year Polk County project, lives in Washington DC where she has served on its historic preservation board. She is a graduate of Harvard School of Design and a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.
