The effort to preserve Simone’s Tryon home has a long, winding history, but perhaps it’s best to begin by noting how remarkable it is that the house is still standing at all. Built circa 1930, the three-room, 660-square-foot house is the kind of threadbare construction battered by Southern storms that often blends into backroads, or otherwise disappears entirely.
If you go searching for the childhood homes of many other African-American artists and activists of the twentieth century—W.E.B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X—you’ll find only a placard on a street corner. That Simone’s home has survived time and gentrification, a curtain of kudzu separating it from a panorama of the foothills and distant Hogback Mountain—well, that feels close to a miracle.
Over the years, the house has passed through many hands and rehabilitation attempts; in 2016, it went on the market, putting it in immediate danger of being destroyed. In 2017, four African-American visual artists from New York—the conceptual artist Adam Pendleton, the collagist and filmmaker Ellen Gallagher, the abstract painter Julie Mehretu, and the sculptor and painter Rashid Johnson—quietly purchased the property for $95,000.
Their timing couldn’t have been better: That same year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation launched a campaign to preserve African-American historical sites. With the help of the trust, Pendleton, Gallagher, Mehretu, and Johnson were able to secure the house’s National Treasure status, protecting it from demolition.
“It was really perfect timing. I truly believe that everything happens for a reason,” says Carly Jones, the music director at the N.C. Arts Council, noting that last fall, Governor Roy Cooper declared 2019 the Year of Music, rolling out Come Hear NC, a year-long series celebrating North Carolina’s musical heritage.
Numerous arms of the state’s Department of Natural and Cultural Resources have been involved in preservation efforts since then, including the N.C. African-American Heritage Commission, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the North Carolina Museum of Art; the Tryon-based Nina Simone Project has also had a heavy hand. This collaboration, according to Jones, is a model for state and federal cultural programming.
“I think it’s really important for North Carolina to be an example of how to be a good partner for this national campaign to preserve spaces that belong to African Americans,” she says.