Nina Simone was born on February 21, 1933, in this 660-foot square home in Tryon, North Carolina. Named Eunice Waymon, she lived here with her parents and eight siblings until 1937. This home is mere feet away from St. Luke’s CME Church, where her mother was a pastor, and she began to play the piano for the church by the age of four.
In 2017, artists Adam Pendleton, Rashid John, Ellen Gallagher, and Julie Mehretu bought the home for $95,000. This prevented the potential demolition of this historic home. The artists worked with the National Trust for Historic Preservation and other groups to help restore the home. Plans include adding a living space with modern amenities for a potential artist-in-residence program.
The congregation of the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church began in 1886 in a log church near Tryon as a place for Black residents to worship. It didn’t officially become the Good Shepherd Mission until 1908.
Before the mission’s founding, the church existed in a Sunday school begun by Mabel True Plaisted, the second wife of Maine’s governor and member of the local white Episcopal Church, Holy Cross, to educate local Black schoolchildren. The school became a local gathering place for the Black community, much to the chagrin of the white community members. The town forced Plaisted to close the school because they did not want the school so close to Holy Cross.
In the following year, the Tyron Industrial Colored School was opened on Markham Road, an area that was approximately a mile from town along winding roads. The church used the school for services. By 1908, the building became an official missionary chapel of the Episcopal Missionary District of Asheville.
The building was used until the 1950s, when it was decided that the old building needed to be replaced. The church found an abandoned church, St. Andrews Chapel, on a nearby plantation was built in the early 1900s for the servants and tenant farmers of the plantation to use. The church was dismantled and moved to its current location. The building is still in use today.
While the church was started for the Black community members of Tryon, it became integrated in the sixties and is now fully integrated.
Nina Simone grew up in Tryon. Her parents and a few of her siblings are buried in the Good Shepherd Cemetery.
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