Reynolda: The Estate That Became a University
Near Winston Salem, North Carolina
In nineteen twelve, Katharine Smith Reynolds began planning a house. This understates the situation considerably.
What Katharine Smith Reynolds actually designed, working in close partnership with Philadelphia architect Charles Barton Keen and with her husband Richard Joshua Reynolds providing the funds, was a complete self-sufficient world on a thousand acres just beyond the western edge of Winston. The main house had sixty rooms. The estate included a working farm with prize dairy cattle, model dairy barns, a smokehouse, a corn crib, a blacksmith shop, a post office, a school, a church, and a village of cottages for workers modeled on an English estate village.
Katharine was thirty-one when she started. She tracked every material, every construction cost, and every design decision. She was, by multiple accounts, the chief architect of the project in all but title.
The estate was finished in nineteen seventeen. The Reynolds family lived there for six years. Richard Joshua Reynolds died in nineteen eighteen. Katharine Smith Reynolds remarried in nineteen twenty-one and died in nineteen twenty-four, in her mid-forties, from childbirth complications. She had spent less than a decade in the house she spent nearly a decade building.
The estate passed through the family and was eventually offered to Wake Forest College in nineteen forty-six. The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, named for Katharine and Richard's son who had died from a gunshot wound at twenty, provided the financial incentive: an annual grant of three hundred fifty thousand dollars, in perpetuity, if the college relocated from its original campus one hundred ten miles east to Winston-Salem. Wake Forest accepted and moved to the Reynolda campus in nineteen fifty-six.
Today, the main house is a museum of American art. The estate village buildings are shops and restaurants. And Wake Forest University spreads across the grounds that Katharine Smith Reynolds planted, designed, and never quite finished imagining.
