Smithfield, North Carolina: Ava Gardner's Country

Smithfield is the Johnston County seat, a tobacco and cotton market town on the Neuse River established in seventeen seventy-seven. For most of its history it was unremarkable in the way that working Southern county seats tend to be: a courthouse square, a main street, tobacco warehouses, the rhythms of an agricultural economy. Then one of its daughters became one of the most photographed women in the world.

Ava Lavinia Gardner was born on December twenty-fourth, nineteen twenty-two, not in Smithfield itself but in a small farm community called Grabtown, eight miles away in the Johnston County countryside. She was the youngest of seven children in a family that tenant-farmed and ran a boardinghouse. The family moved around Johnston County during her childhood, following work, and Ava grew up in the red clay and tobacco fields that shaped this corner of North Carolina.

She was discovered almost by accident. A photograph of her taken in a North Carolina studio was placed in the window of a New York City photography shop run by her brother-in-law. A talent scout from MGM saw it and arranged a screen test. She was eighteen years old. Within a decade she was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, appearing in The Killers in nineteen forty-six, Show Boat in nineteen fifty-one, and Mogambo in nineteen fifty-three. Frank Sinatra, whom she married in nineteen fifty-one and divorced in nineteen fifty-seven, once called her the greatest woman in the world, though their relationship was spectacularly volatile.

Gardner spent most of her adult life abroad, in London and Madrid, finding America too confining and fame too intrusive. She died in London in January of nineteen ninety and was brought home to Johnston County, buried at Sunset Memorial Park in Smithfield, as she had requested. The Ava Gardner Museum on Market Street holds the largest collection of her personal memorabilia in the world, donated by a local collector who spent decades acquiring it.