A Matter of Time
BY NORM POWERSPHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID DIETRICH
Living with history isn’t always a cordial relationship, as modern needs bump elbows with tradition and practicality jostles with atmosphere. The dilemma is particularly acute when one’s home is intimately connected with a site listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But for Denise and Joe Boals, it’s been a love affair from the first time they saw Tryon’s famous Block House, long the gateway to the community’s equally fabled horse country.“I got chills the first time we walked into the house,” Denise said during a recent tour of the home she and Joe purchased two years ago. “It was like every piece of furniture we owned was made for the house.” The Boals have been enthusiastic collectors of English and French Country antiques throughout their 25 year marriage, their passion evident in the careful arrangement of pieces that do, indeed, appear to have found their true home, comfortably adjusted to the house’s colorful history.
The site’s checkered past dates all the way back to pre-Revolutionary War times and includes incarnations as a fort, a tavern, a brothel and an antique shop. Sitting on a hillock marking what became the border between North and South Carolina, the home rightfully earned its place as a historic site in 1970.
The Boals, who moved to Tryon from Memphis upon Joe’s retirement from a distinguished career as an orthopedic surgeon, are the latest in a long line of owners who have carefully tended the Block House since it was built for Midwest industrialist Alfred D. Plamondon Jr. in the early 1940s. Plamondon, a foxhunting man, visited Tryon during World War II, stayed at the Pine Crest Inn and struck up a friendship with the Inn’s owner, Carter P. Brown. A self-taught architect, Brown had for some time had his eye on an abandoned cabin in what was then the hunting country of Brown’s Tryon Hounds.
When Plamondon expressed an interest in having a permanent hunting box for his family in the area, Brown promptly bought what even he described as “a tumbledown ruin” that his client had never seen. The purchase, he later admitted, “was a rather bold thing for me to do, as the place was a shambles and [the Plamondons] were people of social position and sophisticated tastes.”
To meet those tastes, Brown disassembled the old cabin, placed a stone marker on the site (which still stands) and incorporated as much of the old place as he could in the new house he built on higher ground some 300 yards to the west. The Block House became the most famous of Brown’s many creations in the Tryon area, all following the same pattern of historic recycling coupled with a quiet country grace.
“From a structural aspect, we made no major changes,” Joe Boals noted, adding that he and Denise consider themselves less as owners than as caretakers of a beloved local landmark. “We did replace old wiring and so on, but previous owners had taken excellent care of the structure and only minor improvements were necessary.”
Most familiar to longtime Tryon residents is the house’s great room, the site of many a community meeting or fundraiser. With its original beamed ceiling and rustic fireplace, the room is combined nicely with parts of other antique homes discovered by Brown. The fireplace bricks, the mortar still tinged the rusty red of the local clay-heavy soil, are thought to have been made by slave labor; the plain pine mantelpiece is said to be from a Revolutionary War-era home in Union.
It’s in this room, with its leaded glass bay window and heart of pine floors, that the Boals have placed one of their most treasured pieces, a delicate writing desk crafted of sycamore and dated to about 1750. “We found it in New Orleans and it was so unique and warm we had to have it,” Joe said. “I’ve often compared it to the furniture that Geppetto, from Pinocchio, had in his workshop.”
Carter Brown added onto the great room a dining room and kitchen, separated by a full-height, double fireplace. The kitchen’s most recent renovation, undertaken by one of the Boals’ predecessors, has brought it up to near-professional standards. The dining room is graced by another of the Boals’ favorite discoveries, a mahogany 19th century Regency-style dining room table from Salisbury, England that the couple found at a shop in Germantown, Tennessee. “We were drawn to it because we’ve always remembered a trip to Salisbury Cathedral with our daughter Allison,” recalled Denise. “She was very young then, but she delighted in ringing the Cathedral’s bell. We still talk about it.”
A short flight of stairs leads from the great room into the oldest part of the house, along a passageway that was once the exposed connecting element of the original cabin’s dogtrot shape. Brown closed off the passage at either end by creating the great room on one side and the master bedroom on the other. One of the house’s two guest bedrooms is about halfway along the passage, an intimate room redolent of aged wood and featuring a four-poster bed, pine paneling, another original fireplace, and a loft sitting room reached by a spiral staircase.
“They say that the original log beams of the old Revolutionary War fort are behind these walls,” Joe said, tapping on the paneling. “I’ve always wanted to remove a small section and see if it’s true.” The master bedroom, which may have once been the cabin’s kitchen and living area, is a spacious, beamed and tranquil chamber graced by another of the house’s four fireplaces and, over the bed, a framed English stamped leather fire screen collected during the Boals’ travels.
One of the house’s bewildering array of doorways leads from the master bedroom to a flagstone terrace overlooking a 30-acre expanse of meadow. “That’s another reason everyone knows the Block House,” Denise said of the sweeping view from the terrace. “This was the original site of the Block House Steeplechase, starting in 1947. It was run here for 40 years before it moved to where it is now, at the Foothills Equestrian Nature Center (FENCE).”
Indeed, in the downtown offices of the Tryon Riding and Hunt Club, the organization Carter Brown created in 1925 to coordinate and sponsor local horse shows, a photograph from about 1950 captures the Block House as seen from the race course, a judge’s platform perched precariously atop its main chimney. Two of the stewards’ towers on the old course are still in place, now covered in vegetation. (The race course site was split off from the Block House itself in the 1960s, and later sold to a California development firm, leaving the house and its 11-plus acres in private hands.) Until its move to a purpose-built course at FENCE, the Block House Steeplechase was known for covering two states and three counties that converge near Carter Brown’s stone marker.
More recent history can be found outside the house’s east facade, where a swimming pool and pool house were added under the ownership of Converse College in the late 1950s when the college’s then-president, Dr. Oliver Carmichael, took up residence. The school used the house as a headquarters for its equestrian program, affording students a place to stay while competing in local shows. The Boals now use the pool house as a second living room during the summer months, the kitchenette being especially handy during warm weather entertaining. The pool is surrounded by the lush plantings and landscaping design created by previous owners, complemented by century-old oak trees framing the surrounding pastures.
But there’s a more subtle relationship between the house and its present occupants, less tangible than wood and stone and the glow of antique wood. Like the Plamondons, the Boals first came to Tryon because of equestrian pursuits, daughter Allison being an active hunter/jumper competitor before beginning her college years at Clemson. And like the Plamondons, the Boals stayed at the Pine Crest Inn during their visits and began thinking of finding a permanent home in the area. Denise’s degree in anthropology from the University of Tennessee drew her to the idea of living in the heart of what was once Cherokee hunting country.
“The house had only been on the market for a few days when we saw it,” Joe remembers. “We made an offer right away. Both of us love old homes, and Denise’s background heightened her interest. There was all the archeological importance of the Block House fort during the French and Indian wars, too.”
The Block House and its owners, in fact, seem made for each other, each bringing something to the relationship that honors the other. For the Boals, the Block House provides a deep connection to the community and a perfect haven for their many treasures collected over the years. In return, the Block House remains settled in its history, comfortable and safe as the years roll on.
