Körner's Folly: The House That Jule Built
Near Winston Salem, North Carolina
Jule Gilmer Körner made his money the strangest way: he painted tobacco bulls on barns and buildings from the Carolinas to the Mississippi in one of the first national advertising campaigns in American history, promoting Bull Durham Smoking Tobacco. With those earnings, in eighteen seventy-eight, he started building a showcase for his design work on Main Street in Kernersville.
The result was a house that baffled everyone who saw it. Twenty-two rooms spread across three and a half stories. Fifteen fireplaces. Trap doors. Pivoting windows built as an early air-circulation system. As the story goes, a passing cousin saw the unfinished structure and called it Jule Körner's folly. Körner loved the name so much he kept it.
In eighteen ninety-six his wife Polly started a children's performing troupe here. A year later Körner converted the third-floor billiard room into what historians believe was the first private little theater in America, with cupid murals painted by a professional artist. He was still drawing renovation plans when he died in nineteen twenty-four.
