Tryon Cemetery Chapel 1899

A proposed chapel by English-born Asheville architect Richard Sharp Smith (1852 – 1924) offers a glimpse of high-fashion style and materials in 1899. Rusticated stonework and steep, hipped roof dominate Smith’s sketches for a project that wasn’t implemented. Similar motifs are present in his 1894 sketches for a cottage proposed for Nellie Stearns from Ohio, to be constructed high on White Oak Mountain, also never built. Smith’s completed 1892 designs for First Lynncote, on the other hand, for the Erskines from Wisconsin are less consciously “picturesque” and more in keeping with the informal Arts & Crafts idiom that came into favor for buildings around Tryon on into the 1920s.

Smith’s West Elevation is dominantly symmetric, unlike many other cemetery chapels built around the United States during that era. His hip-roofed loggia (porch) has a pediment above, half-timbered presumably with stucco infill, and ribbon windows. These motifs are unusual for an ecclesiastical structure, a residential feeling. In fact that’s suitable for this chapel’s intended purposes. Tryonites who belonged to sectarian churches were usually honored with funerals at those; the concept here was to offer for services a pretty chapel with no particular denominational references. A number of Tryon’s early settlers chose not to join any denomination, and some even were agnostic or did not participate in religious ritual at all, by principle. Divorced people were welcomed in Tryon from its earliest days, relationships that might not have been conducive to church membership during that era.

Richard Sharp Smith immigrated in 1882 and four years later entered Richard Morris Hunt’s practice in New York. He was assigned to the Biltmore Estate project in 1889; as early as 1892 young G.W. Vanderbilt commissioned design work from him outside that role, and Smith lived at Biltmore where he met and married Isabella Cameron from Scotland, who was working on Vanderbilt’s household staff.

1896 All Souls, Biltmore designed by Hunt firm for G.W. Vanderbilt

There’s no vestibule. Through elaborate Arts & Crafts doors (shown in the West Elevation) people enter directly from the loggia to a nave 25 feet wide by 30 feet long. Smith’s sketch suggests windows won’t be stained glass, though they may have decorative muntins. Seating would have been chairs, probably portable folding, not pews.

The architect’s sketch for the East Elevation shows clearly this window isn’t ecclesiastical in character. The style appears to be more like the Collegiate Gothic then coming into fashion for all sorts of American buildings that weren’t churches. Standing outside this structure if built somewhere else, one could suppose it might be a library or a club-house. No sign of Christian iconographies are found in Smith’s sketches for this public building envisioned for the Tryon community in 1899. The chimney is prominent, projecting strongly out from its wall plane.

A strongly individualistic personality in his profession, Smith’s work has been characterized both as “Tudor Revival” and as “Arts & Crafts.” In America these design approaches were then usually perceived as essentially antithetical, while in British practice they were more closely related or even synthesized. In Britain, this design for Tryon would have been perceived as rural in nature, an effect he no doubt intended. In the United States however, such a design signaled urban sophistication and costliness. It’s no wonder the rich detailing of this building was rejected for actual construction at Tryon, where even for the wealthy buildings of much simpler detailing and more casual forms were what were desired.

Richard Sharp Smith

During the first years of his Asheville practice Smith got more than sixty commissions. One of these was a second job for Miss Nellie Stearns, for whom Smith had sketched her elaborate 1894 maiden-cottage up on her family’s White Oak mountain development near Tryon. In the meantime she’d met and married Herbert Lionel Grant. Their shingled 1900 home, in the Victoria neighborhood near his employment in Vanderbilt’s nursery at Biltmore, was far less elaborate. (After the Grants separated, that Smith-designed house was sold to Miss Frances Wright and Dr. Annie A. Angell from Tryon; Nellie resumed maiden identity becoming Miss Helen Stearns and ended up living in Tryon.)

Smith’s 1894 concept sketch
for Miss Nellie Stearns cottage on White Oak Mountain

R.S. Smith, architect
Nellie Stearns Grant cottage 1900
Victoria neighborhood, Asheville