Resort hotel · Balsam, North Carolina · Built 1908 (begun c. 1905)
Balsam Mountain Inn
A three-story frame railroad resort hotel of 1908 on a ridge above the hamlet of Balsam, with a 100-foot double-tier porch, built when the Southern Railway reached what it called the highest depot east of the Rockies.
History
In 1908 the Southern Railway pushed its line through the Balsam Mountains between Waynesville and Sylva and built a depot at Balsam, at 3,470 feet billed as the highest east of the Rockies. Joseph Key Kenney, a Jackson County native who had bought the hilltop ten years earlier, built the hotel that year with backing from the Atlanta financier Walter H. Wiggs, calling it the Balsam Springs Mountain Hotel after the springs on the property; it was said to be modeled on a Saratoga hotel. With about 105 rooms it was among the largest summer hotels in western North Carolina, and its wide halls were meant for travelers' trunks. In 1909 Kenney sold it for $75,000 to the Balsam Hotel Company, and in 1921 William Hutchinson and his wife Myrta took it over.
Hutchinson lost the hotel in the Depression, and in 1937 Ephraim P. Stillwell, a Sylva attorney, bought it at auction on the courthouse steps. His family held it for half a century, leasing it to a series of operators; Florida lessees modernized the plumbing and painted it white in 1952. Passenger trains stopped running through Balsam in 1948, and guests came by car instead. The building declined until the health department closed it in 1988. Merrily Teasley bought it in 1990, halved the rooms to add private baths and heating, and reopened it in stages from 1991, winning a state preservation award for her dining-porch addition in 1995.
“The inn's primary exterior amenity is its broad double-tier front porch which overlooks the crossroads below and the mountains to the southeast.”
Architecture
The inn is a horseshoe-shaped frame building with a south wing, two weatherboarded stories and a third behind a gambrel roof of black-painted pressed-tin shingles, raised on brick piers. Its eleven-bay Colonial Revival front faces downhill, with a broad pedimented center dormer holding four windows and a semicircular vent, and tower-like end bays rising a full three stories under hipped caps. A double-tier porch on Tuscan columns with turned balusters runs from corner to corner. Inside, the lobby fills the base of the horseshoe, divided by two rows of columns and two freestanding fireplaces, with the original registration desk and mailboxes. Walls throughout are narrow beaded board, and eight-foot corridors serve small bedrooms with transomed doors.
What to look for
- Corner-to-corner double-tier front porch
- Pedimented center dormer with a semicircular vent
- Three-story end towers with hipped caps
- Original registration desk and mailboxes in the lobby
- Railroad line below the ridge
Setting
The inn sits on a wooded ridge above the railroad line and the crossroads hamlet of Balsam, off Seven Springs Drive near U.S. 23/74 between Waynesville and Sylva. Grass slopes down from the porches toward the hamlet, with mature forest behind, and the porches look southeast across the Plott Balsam and Great Balsam ranges. The Blue Ridge Parkway passes a few miles away at Balsam Gap.
Timeline
- 1908Railroad reaches Balsam; hotel opens
- 1909Sold to the Balsam Hotel Company
- 1937Bought at auction by Ephraim P. Stillwell
- 1948Last passenger train through Balsam
- 1988Closed by the health department
- 1990–1991Bought, restored and reopened by Merrily Teasley
Where sources differ
- Wikipedia names the builders as brothers-in-law Walter Christy and Joseph Kenney of Athens, Georgia, with construction from 1905 to 1908; the nomination names Joseph Key Kenney of Jackson County, backed by Walter H. Wiggs, and gives 1908.
- Room counts differ: 125 (Wikipedia), 105 at opening and 107 in 1981 (nomination). The elevation is given as 3,750 and 3,500 feet.
- Ghost stories tied to a 1928 shooting are legend.
