The Swannanoa Valley Museum hosts the fourth annual Historic Haunted House Tour of one of Asheville area’s best kept secrets on Friday, October 23 and Saturday, October 24, 2015.
Museum volunteers will lead tours of In the Oaks, a Prohibition-era county manor house on Montreat College’s campus in Black Mountain, NC. The guided tour explores the history of the 24,000-foot National Historic Register property that once welcomed Roaring Twenties flappers, and later, Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
Historic re-enactors usher guests through the library, pool, Dutch tavern room, formal dining room, master bedroom, great hall, and music room, festooned with Halloween decorations. The tour concludes with museum exhibits, live music, and hors d’oeuvres in the gymnasium.
The event is a fundraiser for the Swannanoa Valley Museum, Buncombe County’s primary museum of local history located at 223 W. State Street in Black Mountain. A collaboration between the museum and Montreat College, the tour is coordinated by local business owners Carol Tyson and Micki Cowan and Joellen Maurer, the wife of Montreat College’s president, with the help of over 60 volunteers.
Tucked in the woods between downtown Black Mountain and Interstate 40, the Tudor style house was once the second largest private home in Western North Carolina after the Biltmore Estate. The mansion boasts 67 rooms and many of the amenities of Biltmore, including an indoor swimming pool and bowling alley and landscaped grounds influenced by Frederick Law Olmsted.
Constructed for General Electric vice president Franklin Silas Terry and his wife Lillian Slocumb Emerson, as Congress signed Prohibition into law in 1920, the manor house entertained high society and silent film stars with its secret wine cellar. As Terry’s niece Marion Perley Casstevens explained in a 1994 interview, “Biltmore was built to show-off. This house was built to have a good time.”
After the Terry’s deaths, In the Oaks served as a conference center for the Episcopal Diocese of Western North Carolina, which established Camp Henry on the grounds in 1958. In 1967, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the estate hosted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Montreat College purchased the property for its growing enrollment needs in 2001 and the camp relocated to Lake Logan in 2002. The tour of In the Oaks in part of the college’s centennial celebration.
Guided tours begin at 5:30 pm and leave every half-hour until 8 pm each evening. Tours are approximately 2 hours long. Guests are invited to dress in period attire. The cost is $25 for museum members and $35 for non-members. Advanced registration is required.
Swannanoa Valley Museum’s Historic Haunted House Tour of In the Oaks. Friday, October 23 & Saturday, October 24 at 5:30, 6, 6:30, 7, 7:30, 8 pm (each tour is approximately 2 hours long). $35; $25 for museum members. Purchase Tickets at www.history.swannanoavalleymuseum.org.
For more information visit www.swannanoavalleymuseum.org or call (828) 669-9566.