Emma Payne Erskine
1854 - 1924
courtesy Haynes Family Collection
As much as any other person, this remarkable woman was responsible for making little Tryon a cultural center with a national reputation. An artist and writer, she attracted many other accomplished people during the three decades after her family came to Tryon.
Emma Payne was daughter of Alfred Payne (1823-1893), one of Chicago’s earliest professional artists. After arriving New York at nine on an immigrant vessel from England, Payne became an itinerant portrait painter in Ohio before marrying a farmer’s daughter in Wisconsin. Many residents of the vicinity hailed from New England. It was a hot-bed of Abolitionist sentiment famed for illegal Underground Railroad activity. Payne served as a rural schools superintendent before the Civil War; as a teenager Emma taught school as well. Her mother was a descendent of Increase Mather, president of Harvard 1685-1701, and Emma grew up surrounded by people who valued ideas and the arts. From an early age she liked working with her hands, showed a talent for story-telling, and had abundant energy for all kinds of creative pursuits.
At 19 she married Charles E. Erskine of Racine, Wisconsin, son of a partner in the Case Machinery Co., an important manufacturer of farm equipment. Charles had money, a comfortable position in his father’s firm, and serious interests in music and intellectual pursuits. They were quite unalike, but complementary. He took care of business matters and made the decisions about decorating their home. Emma was practical and did not hesitate to wield a hammer; she taught her daughters as well as her sons the rudiments of carpentry. They had a large house built outside Racine in a country setting, where they raised six children and Emma proved adept at managing a staff of seven. Emma painted and wrote fiction and poetry. To escape harsh winters the Erskines would go to Pasadena, the California resort.
Emma never really enjoyed fashionable Pasadena. She was extroverted but not a socialite. Her taste in art was excellent, but she cared little for pretty clothes. She did not like snobbery, and she was an avid supporter of the emerging American movement for women’s suffrage. In 1885 she persuaded Charles, instead of going to Pasadena, to take the family to see the mountains of western North Carolina — then just becoming a magnet for winter sojourners. On the advice of a stranger in Asheville they stayed at McAboy’s Inn (later called The Mimosa) outside the village of Tryon. The Erskines were enchanted by the vicinity’s picturesque scenery and by the local people. Emma found the Black people living there friendly and much fun to be around. She painted watercolors of the Mills children (three are seen in the exhibition), the earliest known art of western North Carolina that depicts Black people without condescension.
Miss Mills in Pink 1885
watercolor 14 ½ x 13 ½ in.
Erskine Family Collection
By 1891 the Erskines had decided to build their permanent winter home at Tryon. Richard Sharp Smith, who had assisted Richard Morris Hunt on Vanderbilt’s huge Biltmore Estate project, was engaged as architect. Smith designed a large stone house on a high hill between The Mimosa and Tryon village. Named “Lynncote,” it overlooked the Pacolet River, with views of mountains in three directions. After the house was completed, the family spent more and more time there in each succeeding year, until Tryon became their primary domicile, and the Racine house was occupied only during the short summer in Wisconsin.
Black people enjoyed working for Emma, and she liked them. While Chicago and Boston publishers had already published her sophisticated poetry, in 1901 her first full-length novel, When the Gates Lift Up Their Heads, appeared which treats Black-White relations during the Reconstruction period of the 1870s. At that time segregation was hardening in the South, in 1898 North Carolina essentially had disenfranchised Blacks, and most Northerners — in an effort to reconcile with the South — were turning away from issues of Black civil rights.
Tryon was an intellectual little community, and Emma was in the thick of its cultural milieu. Virtually every year she presented at least one lyceum lecture at The Lanier Club. In 1899 she gave a talk on “The Imaginative Faculty.” In 1900 she explicated The Suicide Club by Robert Louis Stevenson, an author she had known personally. Her 1902 lecture was “Moral Responsibility of the Novel.” In 1907 she talked on painting, and she analyzed famous works of art. Her 1917 presentation was “On Building a Novel” when she read selections from one of her own in progress. Other topics ranged from the campaign against tuberculosis to the Irish poems of Thomas Hood. Emma persuaded her husband to donate land for the new building of the Lanier Library, and she sold her landscape paintings to benefit its construction fund.
painting on china, circa 1905
Haynes Family Collection
Throughout her creative life Emma’s nom de plume as well as her nom de brosse was “Payne Erskine,” though she never hid her female identity from her audiences. After Charles’ death in 1908 she turned to writing novels seriously again. Her great success was The Mountain Girl, first serialized in the Ladies’ Home Journal and later published as a book that went through at least 13 printings. It is a love story of the North Carolina mountains, where an English aristocrat comes in search of health. He finds it and more — happiness and usefulness among the local people, and young Cassandra who embodies his ideal of womanhood. He is called back to England, then she goes to join him there, yet fearing to make herself known lest she shame him before his people, she returns. He follows her back to the mountains, she bears his baby, and they live happily ever after in a simple cabin.
A tale of medieval times in verse, by Erskine, 1905.
Designs by Thomas Wood Stevens (1880 - 1942),
founder of Blue Sky Press, a “little press” in the Arts & Crafts mode.
One of 500 copies on VanGelder hand-made paper, handcolored.
courtesy of Carolie Bartol
That novel was followed by others. She engaged in other creative pursuits too. Emma wrote popular songs (“I’ll Teach Ye to Dance My Way” was published in 1907), painted china, and designed artists’ studios and houses for people she attracted to Tryon. In 1916 she remarried to Cecil Corwin, a dapper architect who wore a pointed moustache. (Corwin had worked with the young Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago, and was his best friend between 1886 and 1895. Corwin’s brother, a doctor, treated Wright’s stab wounds after an office fight.)
Erskine encouraged young people in the arts, including her son Harold who ultimately became an accomplished professional sculptor in New York. Daughter Violet married a noted Manhattan dealer in Persian and Oriental art, and endowed the nascent Tryon Fine Arts Center. Son Ralph started the Dan-Ersk Company that designed and made high-style furniture in Tryon sold through a New York showroom. The husband of her daughter Susan, Carroll Rogers, when he served in the North Carolina legislature, was instrumental in accomplishing the authentic replication of Governor Tryon’s colonial palace in New Bern.
In 1918 Emma suffered a stroke. Her left arm was paralyzed, yet she went on painting with even greater fervor. Her grandson can recall the humor of seeing her slap her left hand with her good hand, when it failed her in holding the palette. Her landscapes in watercolor and pastel, very colorful and free of sophistry, are quite remarkably modern.
It would be an interesting book, of some length, to document Emma Payne Erskine’s many accomplishments, her travels in America and abroad, and the significant people in the women’s movement and the arts who were her friends. She was broad-minded and encouraged people of many backgrounds to join in the cultural life of the community. Historically she is best remembered for her literary work. She deserves recognition for her important role in nurturing Tryon’s visual arts as well.
inscription to Tryon author Elia Peattie
in a presentation copy of Emma’s saga in verse
Iona, A Lay of Ancient Greece
Boston: Cupples & Hurd, 1888
