Reynolds Mansion

The Reynolds Mansion was built in 1847 by Colonel Daniel Reynolds and his wife Susan Adelia Baird, who together had ten children. The 1,500-acre property was given to Susan by her father, Israel Baird, and is the namesake of present-day Reynolds Mountain north of Asheville.

Architecturally, the house is a 'double-pile' brick structure — two rooms deep on each side of a central hall — and uses American-bond brickwork, heavy timber framing, and load-bearing interior partitions. It is conservative for its date but unusually substantial for the rugged mountain region, where most antebellum houses were timber-framed. It is one of fewer than ten surviving pre-Civil War brick houses in Western North Carolina.

Daniel Reynolds died in 1878; his son William Taswell Reynolds inherited the house and the 140 remaining acres. The mansion stayed in Reynolds-family hands for 125 years until 1972, when it opened as a bed-and-breakfast then known as the Old Reynolds Mansion. The Reynolds family is also connected to several prominent Asheville figures, including U.S. Senator Robert Rice Reynolds.

Editorial note (sensitivity:slavery): a 1,500-acre 1840s North Carolina estate operated by a slave-state militia colonel was, like comparable Buncombe County properties of the period, almost certainly built and worked in part by enslaved people. The mansion's published history does not enumerate enslaved residents by name, and we do not invent any; we note the context here so the antebellum framing is not romanticized. The mansion was listed on the National Register on September 13, 1984.