Life

Stillwell designs span the South

Carolyn Justus, the former state legislator and a history enthusiast, points out a local theater pictured in the Erle Stillwell exhibit.

By Bill Moss, Published: May 2, 2012

Henderson County library director Bill Snyder remembers the day back in the mid-1990s when someone from an Asheville architectural firm known as Six Associates Inc. offered him Erle Stillwell's design drawings.

 "They were getting ready to move and they wanted to clean out their storage room," Snyder said. The firm had boxes and boxes of dusty old drawings from Erle Stillwell, a founding principal of the firm and a Hendersonville resident from 1903 until 1978. "Either you take it," the person on the telephone said, "or it's going to the landfill."

Library over landfill is always the right call when it comes to historic documents, as Snyder knew. The library preserved the collection of more than 4,000 drawings. And because it did William Mitchell was able to research and write about Stillwell's prodigious design output in his impressive book, Buildings as History: The Architecture of Erle Stillwell.

Mitchell presented a short description of his research into Stillwell's career and his life Tuesday evening during the opening of the Stillwell exhibit at the Kaplan Auditorium at the Hendersonville library.

Stillwell had come from Hannibal, Mo., but if that other, far more famous native of Hannibal, Mark Twain, was voluble, comedic and self-referential, Stillwell was quiet and dry. He never talked about where he came from and how it came to pass that he wound up in Hendersonville at age 18.

"He certainly was not some young guy coming to a new town to make his fortune," Mitchell said. "He already had a fortune."

The reason for his fortune might also be connected to the reason for his reluctance to talk about his personal life. His father, a wealthy meat packer in Hannibal, had married a woman 22 years younger, with whom he had three children, Erle the youngest. But after his mother started carrying on with a rich doctor, Erle's father was murdered by an two-edged ax to the head.

Erle Stillwell inherited $40,000, close to $1 million in today's dollars, which set him up to start anew in Hendersonville. He first tried enrolling in the Naval Academy but got sick and had to come home. He went to UNC, and came back home again. It wasn't until he enrolled in and completed training at Cornell that he had found his niche. He could draw plans for houses and buildings.

Stillwell married Eva, the daughter of Laurel Park developer William Smith, and the mutual friendship of the two benefited both men, Mitchell said. When the Florida land bust of 1926 caused the echo bust in Laurel Park, "Stillwell lost a lot," Mitchell said. "In the stock market crash he lost the rest."

The rise of movies, and the buildings where people watched them, saved Erle Stillwell's career. Across the South, in small towns and larger cities, Stillwell theaters are still standing, many reused as something else. In Hendersonville, Jake Wells and Capt. Ellison A. Smyth, local businessmen who had built and opened the Rex theater, later the Carolina Theatre, hired Stillwell as their architect.

After Wells died, Smyth decided to hire a regional firm, the North Carolina Theatres Corporation, to run the business. When fire damaged the Carolina theater in 1932, the corporation's owners, Robert Wilby and Herbert Kincey, hired Stillwell to remodel it. They must have liked his work because Wilby and Kincey, who were connected to the Paramount Public Corporation, engaged Stillwell to design or remodel theaters across the South.

Stillwell designed more than 70 theaters in his long career. Among the cities and towns that boasted Stillwell's theaters along their main streets were Raleigh, Wilmington, High Point, Fayetteville, Chapel Hill, Lexington, Wilson, Charlotte, Durham, Greensboro, Monroe, Rocky Mount, Salisbury, Valdese, Shelby and Tryon.

Because he designed so many well-known buildings in Hendersonville and Henderson County — among them an addition to Rosa Edwards School (1912), the Queen Theater (1915), St. James Episcopal Church (ca. 1917-1919), State Trust and Citizen's Bank (1923), First Baptist Church (1923), Hendersonville High School (1926), Blue Ridge School for Boys (1926) and Hendersonville City Hall (1927) — local people know only of Stillwell's local output.

"This will be a real education for a lot of people who might have a little knowledge of Erle Stillwell but not a whole lot," said Mayor Barbara Volk. "To have him working out of Hendersonville is a real honor for us."

The Stillwell exhibit is part of the celebration of Preservation Week by the Hendersonville Historic Preservation Commission. Events also include a guided tour of Stillwell buildings downtown on May 15, guided tour of Oakdale Cemetery on May 18, and a tour of historic Stillwell homes on Sunday, May 20.

http://www.hendersonvillehpc.org/news-events/preservation-week-2012-erle-stillwell

The book can be purchased at the Henderson County library. Hardcover is $60 and softcover $20.