Homes Alone: The stories of four historic mountain structures, as told in North Carolina Curiosities

“Home” means different things to different people, a fact aptly documented in the new edition of a Tar Heel literary chestnut, North Carolina Curiosities.

On its mountains-to-the-sea review of “quirky characters, roadside oddities and other offbeat stuff,” the book explores scores of unique spots and structures. These excerpts showcase three historic Western North Carolina homes (and one historic dome) that get the curious treatment.

The Goat Gland King

This stone cottage in the East Laport community in Jackson County gives little hint of the reckless and wildly influential life of its former owner, Dr. John R. Brinkley.

{module Share this!|none}Before men had drugs like Viagra and Cialis to put, as they say, “the lead back in their pencils,” legitimate cures for erectile dysfunction were hard to come by. In that age of quackery, no one quacked quite as loudly as Dr. Brinkley.

Born here in 1885, Brinkley grew up an underachieving student. Nevertheless, by 1918, with a string of medical degrees from unaccredited colleges under his belt, Brinkley set up a medical practice in Milford, Kansas. His specialty was “curing” impotence by stitching goat glands into his patients, a procedure he was later estimated to have performed on 16,000 men. With capital amassed from his popular cure, in 1923 Brinkley built that state’s first radio station, KFKB (“Kansas First, Kansas Best”). Ever the entrepreneur, he gave medical talks alongside the regular performances by local musicians, building his practice gland by valuable gland.

When officials caught wind of the good doctor’s dubious earnings, they yanked his license to practice medicine. Brinkley answered by moving his practice to a hotel in south Texas. Across the border at Villa Acuña, Mexico, he built powerful radio stations with signals that could be heard as far away as Russia. The “border blaster” stations helped to popularizer early country music stars like the Carter Family, as well as banjoist and singer Samantha Bumgarner, also a Jackson County native.   

Some of Brinkley’s programming choices were less inspired; in 1939 and 1940 he gave airtime to a string of Nazi sympathizers including North Carolina-based William Dudley Pelley. The U.S. government soon had enough and in 1941 worked with the Mexican government to put Brinkley out of business.

Dogged by claims of tax evasion and drowning in malpractice suits, Brinkley died of a heart attack in May 1941 and was buried in Memphis, Tenn.

The East Laport residence was built in 1929 when Brinkley was still a rising star. His surname is emblazoned in pale river rocks on the entrance gate. In 1937, Brinkley erected an elaborately carved stone monument to his beloved Aunt Sally, the woman who raised him. It stands about a mile north on N.C. 107 on a shady bend of the road.

Brinkley’s house is located on the northwest side of N.C. 107, 1.1 miles north of State Road 1172. It is not open to the public, but can easily be viewed from a comfortable distance.

Biltmore Built More

It’s no secret that George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore House, built in the late 1800s, is the largest family dwelling in U.S. history. To the public’s good fortune, the house and the scenic estate surrounding it have long been open to paying visitors.

And by now, you might think that you had heard all there is to hear about the 250-room mansion, which is perched on an enviable piece of property in Buncombe County. Millions of folks have visited the majestic gardens, grand terraces, the ornate banquet halls and boudoirs, and the library bursting with books.

But in a dwelling that big, you never know what might be discovered and uncovered. Asheville’s Biltmore House is a gift that keeps on giving, and it keeps revealing parts of itself.

Every few years Biltmore House curators open up still more rooms. After careful restoration, four new rooms opened in 2009. Renovated to its original splendor, one suite offers visitors the first opportunity to fully see the house as a family home and the Vanderbilts as parents. The Louis XV Room was the birthplace of George and Edith Vanderbilt’s only daughter, Cornelia, in 1900. Years later, it was where Cornelia delivered her own two sons, George Henry Vanderbilt Cecil and William Amherst Vanderbilt Cecil in 1925 and 1928, respectively.

Biltmore’s team of curators, conservators, and craftsmen spent years researching and sourcing materials from around the world to restore a part of Biltmore House that’s been closed to visitors for nearly one hundred years. So authentic was this search that on-site curators pieced remnants of original wallpaper found underneath door moldings and drapery brackets together to determine wallpaper patterns for the reproduction process. They even traveled to France to collaborate with fabric and wallpaper company designers to ensure the original fabrics were reproduced exactly. That’s pretty cool! Would that we all had those kinds of resources for our humble abodes.

Additionally, some 250 furniture pieces and decorative objects in the suite, part of George Vanderbilt’s collection, have been stored out of public view since the 1930s. Think we’d find anything like that in the storage units that dot the North Carolina countryside?

Afterglow in the Mountains

So you’ve been hiking and biking every day on the Blue Ridge Parkway. For something completely different, there’s an elegant inn just outside Blowing Rock that was once the summer manor of artist and writer Elliott Daingerfield. Today, Westglow Resort and Spa, offers genteel piano concertos at cocktail hour, sumptuous gourmet cooking surrounded by art at the in-house restaurant, and a luxury spa to sweat and soak your worries away. The view from the “relaxation room” and terrace, in fact, is one of the best of the mountains.

On the 20-acre estate is a 1917 Greek Revival manor house, rich with details of turn-of-the-20th-century elegance. Drawing rooms in quiet foam green and the living room and lounges in cream, white, gold, and sunshine yellow provide appealing bursts of color against a serene setting. Daingerfield’s original oils, watercolors, and sketches appear throughout the manor. His personal volumes of art books and literature fill the library. Perhaps most impressive is the mansion’s façade—spectacular Grecian columns form the west portico that overlooks an expanse of meadow and Grandfather Mountain beyond. These were shipped from Italy and pulled up the mountain by oxen.

Daingerfield was born in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, son of a Confederate officer and friend of Robert E. Lee. The family moved to Fayetteville, N.C., when Daingerfield was little, and his father was the commander in charge of the armory there during the Civil War. He and his family remained in Fayetteville through his childhood and adolescence, and Daingerfield studied art as best he could in postwar Fayetteville, working with an itinerant sign painter and with a china painter. He moved to New York in 1880 at 21 and studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League. Within a year or so he was teaching life study classes. In 1886 he married and bought a summer home at Blowing Rock, where he would maintain a residence for the rest of his life.

Westglow was named for the vistas that “glow” rather than glare “throughout the shadows, clouds, or mist.” It remained in the Daingerfield family until 1978, later taken over by various owners who turned the expansive property into the oh-so-elegant spa and resort it is today.

Home of the dome

Structure, science and style. The three came together in Black Mountain, where visionary thinker and doer R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) built the first of his geodesic domes. The futuristic structure was a milestone in what might be called humanistic design.

Lloyd Sieden described how “Bucky” did it in a 1989 article in the journal The Futurist. When he set out to craft the perfect dome, using the principles of spherical geometry, Fuller was trying to find “nature’s coordinate system” and build “a structure that would, because it was based on natural rather than humanly developed principles, be extremely efficient,” Sieden wrote. The construction he created was the geodesic dome, which, Sieden noted, “encloses much more space with less material than conventional buildings.”

The unconventional project required an unconventional space in which to build it. So in the summer of 1948, Fuller took his head full of dome dreams to Black Mountain College, an avant-garde institution that was a hotbed of artistic and cultural innovation.

Fuller had previously worked in architecture and construction, fields that deeply shaped his thinking. “He came to realize that the dome pattern had been employed, to some extent, ever since humans began building structures,” Sieden notes. “Early sailors landing upon foreign shores and requiring immediate shelter would simply upend their ships, creating an arched shelter similar to a dome.”

With help from the college’s students and some fellow instructors, Fuller spent much of the summer designing a new sort of dome. He acquired a sizable store of Venetian blind strips, his basic building materials. By September, the prototype design was complete, and Fuller and crew erected the first geodesic dome.

That first dome was an impressive but short-lived structure—within moments of going up, it sagged from its own weight and crumpled to the ground.

So Fuller spent another year back at the drawing board, trying to get the spines of the dome in perfect position. In the summer of 1949, he returned to Black Mountain College to give it another go. With help from students from the Chicago Institute of Design, this time the inventor pulled it off. Built with aluminum aircraft tubing, his second dome, which was 14 feet in diameter, stood strong this time. He covered it in vinyl, and—voilà—a lightweight and functional structure was born.

Fuller went on to craft domes of many sizes, from all sorts of building materials, and today the geodesic wonders can be found in dozens of countries and serving as everything from homes to concert arenas to “immersive environments”—where multimedia artists and educators use the dome’s ceiling and walls as a canvas for creating virtual realities. Perhaps the most recognizable one in the United States is “Spaceship Earth,” a main attraction at the EPCOT Center at Disney World in Orlando, which has a diameter of 165 feet and houses an educational amusement ride.

— By Jon Elliston, Kent Priestley and Constance E. Richards