A growing archive of conversations with historians, residents, and scholars — recorded in Tryon, drawn from memory and research, and preserved here for anyone who wants to listen.
Strat and Ellen Douglas
Strat and Ellen Douglas share their memories of Dr. M.C. Palmer — a country doctor whose practice, vision, and presence shaped Tryon across a long career of service.
A Country Doctor's Practice and Vision
Strat and Ellen Douglas
Strat and Ellen Douglas share their memories of Dr. M.C. Palmer — a country doctor whose practice, vision, and presence shaped Tryon across a long career of service.
Andy Haynes
Andy Haynes presents the life of Emma Payne Erskine — writer, painter, civic leader, and cultural force who helped shape Tryon's identity as a center of art, literature, and community life.
Joanne Gibbs and Gerald Pack
A look back at one hundred years of the Tryon Riding & Hunt Club — from Carter Brown's founding vision in 1925 through Morris the Horse, Harmon Field, the Block House Steeplechase, and the community life that has gathered around horses in this town for a century.
Tales of Tryon
The stories behind Ligon Flynn and Holland Brady, Jr. — the architects whose Mid-Century Modern work left an indelible mark on Tryon and on North Carolina's architectural record.
Jenny Purtill
Jenny Purtill traces the story of the Lanier Library — one of the South's oldest private subscription libraries, founded in Tryon by a circle of readers and named for the Georgia poet who loved these mountains.
Entrepreneurs, Educators, and Everyday People
Dr. Warren J. Carson
Dr. Warren J. Carson — Professor Emeritus of English and African American Studies at USC Upstate, lifelong Tryon resident, and President of the Roseland Community Center — turns his attention to the personalities who built and sustained life on Tryon's Eastside. Delivered at Roseland, the community center at the heart of the neighborhood he has spent his life serving.
Founders of the World's Smallest Daily Newspaper
Panel: John Vining, Jim Vining, Hub Arledge, Garland Goodwin · Moderated by Michael McCue
A conversation among grandsons, friends, and students of the Vining family on the founding of the Tryon Daily Bulletin — the tabloid-sized paper that has published every afternoon since 1928 and claims the title of the world's smallest daily.
Bruce Johnson
Bruce Johnson, author of Biltmore Industries and the Tryon Toy-Makers and Wood-Carvers, traces the lives and craft of Eleanor Vance and Charlotte Yale — the women whose Tryon workshop became a node in the broader Appalachian handicraft movement.
Dean Trakas
The third installment of Dean Trakas's ongoing survey of the architects and buildings that gave Tryon its distinctive look and feel.
Dean Trakas
A second recording of Dean Trakas's third-act lecture on Tryon architecture, captured in longer form with additional material and audience discussion.
Dr. Warren J. Carson
A tour — in memory and in place — through the Eastside neighborhood that shaped Dr. Carson and generations of Tryon's African American community. Delivered at the Roseland Community Center.
Steven Nash · with Michael McCue
Historian Steven Nash examines the contested, uneven Reconstruction era in western North Carolina, followed by Michael McCue's commentary on its local legacy in Polk County.
Dean Trakas
Dean Trakas continues his survey of Tryon's defining buildings and the architects who drew them — the second in a three-part series that is itself an education in how a small town accumulated an outsized architectural record.
Dr. Milton Ready
Dr. Milton Ready, author and Emeritus Professor of History at UNC Asheville, traces the colonial governor's influence on the frontier settlement that would become Tryon — and the first settlers who arrived here.
Hub Arledge and Bill McCall
Two longtime Tryon residents recall the town as they knew it as boys — the shops, the streets, the characters, and the rhythms of a small town in mid-century.
Gerald Pack and Libbie Johnson
From the Tryon Riding and Hunt Club to the Block House Steeplechase, Gerald Pack and Libbie Johnson trace a century of horse culture in the Carolina foothills.
Garland Goodwin
Garland Goodwin, a Tryon native, shares personal memories of three towering local figures: Seth Vining Sr., founder of the Tryon Daily Bulletin and the Polk County Historical Association; Clement Stevens, Mayor of Tryon in the 1940s; and Muriel Mazzanovich, Nina Simone's piano teacher.
Susan Story Speight
Local author and historian Susan Story Speight discusses her book White Oak Mountain and the landscape, people, and stories it gathers.
Dean Trakas
The opening lecture of Dean Trakas's three-part survey of Tryon architecture — a study of the builders, designers, and patrons who gave the town its form.
Trinah Falgout
Trinah Falgout leads an evening of Tryon's lingering stories — the unsolved, the unexplained, and the remembered. Part local history, part oral tradition.
Alan Leonard
Alan Leonard takes an audience through one of Tryon's strangest episodes — a murder mystery centered on the Tryon Theater.
Pre-History to the Civil War
History of Tryon Panel
The first of a two-part panel discussion covering Tryon's earliest history — from Cherokee habitation of the Xuala region through colonial settlement, the Revolutionary era, and the Civil War.
Civil War to Nina Simone
History of Tryon Panel
The second part of the panel — covering Reconstruction, the railroad era, Tryon's emergence as an artists' colony, and the early life of Nina Simone, who was born here in 1933.
Amber Keeran
Amber Keeran presents the history of the Lanier Library — the subscription library that has served Tryon readers since the late nineteenth century.
Bruce Johnson and Ambrose Mills
Bruce Johnson and Ambrose Mills on F. Scott Fitzgerald's time in Tryon — the years when the Great Gatsby author came to the Carolina foothills seeking quiet, recovery, and the air of a small town.
Jamie Carpenter
Jamie Carpenter at the Tryon History Museum — an evening of Tryon stories from a voice deeply familiar with the town's people and places.
Robert Lange
Robert Lange on the earliest years of Tryon — from the Cherokee presence and the arrival of settlers through the founding of the town in 1885 and the railroad's transformative arrival.
A Special Event
Harthorne Wingo
A special event honoring Harthorne Wingo — Tryon native, Polk County High School standout, and former New York Knicks forward who won an NBA championship in 1973. Included in the Tales of Tryon archive as a community tribute.
"Tank" Waters, Assistant Fire Chief
Assistant Fire Chief "Tank" Waters shares decades of service, story, and first-hand observation of the Tryon community from one of its most essential institutions.
Cliff Marr
Cliff Marr of the Polk County Board of Elections shares the view from one of the town's most essential civic offices.
Gerald Pack
Gerald Pack, whose name recurs across this archive, shares his own stories and reflections on Tryon — recorded in 2018 at the Tryon History Museum.
The Polk County Community Foundation