First Photo-Illustrated Brochure about Tryon: 1916

Not long after the new Spartanburg & Asheville railroad reached the new site for Tryon City in 1877, periodicals began to publish accounts of the village. These were soon supplemented by various small publications about its scenery and its cosmopolitan residents. Postcards with Tryon views appeared in the 1890s, and by 1900 professional photographers William B. Kruse (from Pennsylvania) and R. Henry Scadin (from Michigan) had arrived, generating numerous images that give us a good picture of what the public found interesting.

Several early brochures survive showing amenities of Tryon. The first to depict the village in general, and to be illustrated with photographs, was published by the Board of Trade and printed in 1916 locally by the press of Polk County News and The Tryon Bee. This was a consolidation of two earlier weekly newspapers. Their known extant issues are digitized by North Carolina State Archives and available for search at www.digitalnc.org/newspapers/polk-county-news-and-the-tryon-bee/

For a small village Tryon, North Carolina: The Famous All-the-Year Home-Town in the Thermal BELT District of the Western North Carolina Mountains. “The Land of the Sky” is an impressive twelve-page brochure. It’s written in a lively, concise way to appeal to tourists and sojourners, with implicit emphasis on how Tryon might be attractive to vacation or to settle permanently. The unnamed copywriter knows what attracts “quality” people of that era. It deploys photographs that depict Tryon as wooded and scenic, with a healthful temperate climate.

Addressing a concern of many educated people, who by then understood malaria and “fevers” were transmitted by mosquitos: Tryon having no stagnant water or swamp lands to create fogs, or breed mosquitos, has no malaria; in fact suffers from that malady have frequently been cured, by living HERE a short while.

To an audience that dreaded hot, sultry summer weather, before the invention of air-conditioning: Tryon summers are MILD, NOT HOT. Mornings up to about 10 o’clock, and evenings after 5 o’clock, are COOL . . . our atmosphere is very dry, void of that humidity that renders life intolerable in localities of lower altitude. Summer afternoons are made comfortable the gentle breeze that usually floats in from the forests on the Mountains, materially cooling the atmosphere. Summer nights at Tryon are invariably cool, a sleeper needs a blanket covering, and is sure of a comfortable refreshing night’s rest. [Objectively, this is ad copy. In fact annual precipitation averages are greater than almost anywhere elsewhere in the Southern Appalachians, and only visitors from the Deep South would find Tryon cooler and less humid. Hotels and boarding houses would often shut for the summer, and even full-time Tryon residents often went to higher elevations or to the North or the seaside during summers.]

To an audience of Northern and Midwestern visitors, seeking to escape long and frigid winters, the brochure offers enticing copy: Tryon Winters are very mild; and very short . . . By sun-up, it warms up rapidly and from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. normal temperatures can be relied upon. . . Only a very few mornings any Winter do we have freezing weather, ice seldom forms even as thick as window glass, and these cold mornings rarely occur two mornings in succession. Tryon seldom has snow . . .coldest weather usually occurs from middle of January to middle of February, rarely more than a month of it. Then Spring begins to manifest its presence, and buds and blossoms follow in rapid succession. [As early as the 1880s, many permanent residents were relocating to Tryon from Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, New York and New England. These “snowbirds” were the majority of the early white population of Tryon, for whom this message resonated and was more-or-less true. Some were retired, but many were working-age people with children. More than any other locale in the Carolina mountains during this era, “Northern transplants” established the tone of its business and social community. They brought with them prevailing attitudes about education, the arts, politics, gender and race, and even religion. Tryon was remarkable in having a Roman Catholic church, for example, very unusual for a small town in its region. Its most popular denominations were the Congregational and Episcopal, not the Baptist and the Methodist that might be expected. Even a Christian Science society came about, around the time this brochure was published. Agnostics, atheists, and non-practicing Christians found that “mainstream” Tryon would accept them; people divorced and the more-or-less gender non-conforming also were flocking into the village during Tryon’s early years – although these topics aren’t addressed in the 1916 brochure.]

To the brochure’s targeted audience, the character of its schools was important, as it is today. The brochure promises an excellent 8 grade public School, in a modern two story brick building. [Village voters passed a special bond issue in 1904 to supplement ordinary county appropriations, which made this possible.] There are also several private primary and preparatory schools. [This is a subtle, but important signal that Tryon had an unusual number of college-educated at that time. None of these private schools were denominational.] The brochure says this about its inhabitants: They have come from almost every State in the Union and a few from Foreign lands. They are a cultivated, refined, intelligent class, of industrious frugal habits, who respect one another, and co-operate with each other in all community enterprises. [The copywriter subtly conveys an image that Tryon had no ethnic districts nor recent immigrants from poorer European countries – a great concern to many WASP Americans at that time. No mention is made whatsoever of any Black population, which not only existed but was omnipresent. There of course were segregated black public schools, as well as the Episcopal diocese’s institute for black education. Many of Tryon’s black population migrated from outside Polk County, finding employment in the hospitality, railroad, and emerging equestrian economic sectors, as well as traditional roles as domestics or in personal services. As with other Southern communities, indeed in the United States generally, few blacks were welcomed into employment in manufacturing or retailing except in the most menial positions.]