Graylyn, the imposing Norman Revival mansion on Reynolda Road, now presides over formal affairs, from weddings to medical conventions. But Graylyn, approaching its eightieth year, was not always such a stern fortress. Imagine young boys riding their bicycles around and around its attic, or roller-skating up and down the underground passage from the manor to the guesthouse. Envision men spitting tobacco juice into the neatly trimmed shrubbery.

Graylyn was built for two generations of a family who did a great deal to build Winston-Salem. Bowman Gray, a lion of American industry, never really cottoned to the idea of building the mansion, but he could not deny his wife a thing. Nathalie Gray, a sweetheart of local society, approved every painted ceiling, every wrought-iron filigree, and every mosaic installed. The result is an architectural wonder. Less well-known is its place in the history of what was once North Carolina’s richest city.

Aggressive salesman
R.J. Reynolds planted a tobacco company and picked Bowman Gray to make it grow. In 1899, Gray was four years into his job handling the northern sales accounts for Reynolds Tobacco out of Baltimore. Reynolds, one of thirty tobacco companies in Winston, was acquired by the real giant in the state, James Buchanan Duke’s American Tobacco.

In 1911, after courts broke up the American Tobacco trust, Reynolds issued new shares, encouraged his Winston friends to buy them, and took back control of his company. But that was just the preliminary bout. To win the main event, Reynolds needed a salesman to drive his Camels into a cigarette market dominated by Buck Duke’s Lucky Strikes. That salesman was Bowman Gray.

“As manager of the sales department,” wrote historian Jo White Linn, “Bowman Gray was given a large part of the credit for the company’s rise from the smallest of the Big Four tobacco companies in 1912 to the largest tobacco company.”

Bowman Gray was born into the lap of one of the area’s founding families. His grandfather was an original settler who developed some of Winston’s early residential lots and helped found Wachovia National Bank. Young Bowman went off to college at Chapel Hill, grew restless, and came home to work at the bank. He grew restless again and, in 1895 at age twenty-one, accepted an offer from “Mr. R.J.” to sell tobacco. His paycheck dropped from $25 a week to $5 a week.

Gray trained in Georgia, then transferred to Baltimore, where he spent fifteen years executing Reynolds’ aggressive sales strategy. In 1912, Gray was called back to Winston to become vice president for sales. Cigarettes were introduced as the top of company’s line.

“I seldom saw Dad in the early days of my life,” wrote Bowman Jr. in a loving remembrance, “because he had gone to work by the time I got up to go to school in the morning, and most nights I guess I was in bed by the time he got home.” When asked why he so often needed a haircut, Bowman Sr. explained that by the time the barbershop at the Robert E. Lee Hotel opened in the morning, he’d been at the factory for two hours.

In 1902 Gray had married Nathalie Fontaine Lyons. Born in Asheville, Nathalie was eighteen years old when she married, ten years her husband’s junior. When the Grays and their sons - Bowman Jr. and little brother Gordon - moved to Winston-Salem, they lived at the Zinzendorf Hotel before buying the Chatham house on West Fifth Street. The house was part of “Millionaires’ Row,” Victorian homes that sheltered Will Reynolds’ family next to the Grays and, next door, brother R.J. Reynolds’ family.

By 1916, those three men - R.J. and Will Reynolds and Bowman Gray - and their workers had led Reynolds past Liggett & Myers to become America’s second-biggest tobacco company. Despite World War I - indeed, partly because of wartime tensions - smoking’s growing popularity brought them even more millions. Reynolds Tobacco hired a succession of advertising firms to help Camels (“The cigarette in a million”) compete against the fast-growing Philip Morris and American’s Lucky Strike. In 1931, as the Depression took hold, Reynolds Tobacco earned $36.4 million and spent 44 percent of that on ads.

R.J. moved to Reynolda’s 1,000 acres, where he died in 1918 at age sixty-eight of pancreatic cancer. Will took over as president and built his Yadkin River estate, Tanglewood. He soon followed his heart back to his Florida estate, however, where he bred horses for the popular sport of sulky racing. In 1921, Bowman Gray took over the company.

On January 15, 1928, builders broke ground on eighty-seven acres bought from R.J. Reynolds’ widow.

A symbol of success
The notion that Graylyn was built as part of a rivalry between the Gray and the Reynolds families - a showy sort of one-upmanship - is the sort of story that breeds in cities accustomed to the gossip of politicians or the sniping of merchants. “The families were friends,” says Thomas A. Gray, great-grandson of Bowman’s and a resident of Old Salem. His master’s thesis at the University of Delaware was on the building of Graylyn.

Tom Gray, who combines patrician grace with the memory of a scholar, grew up hearing stories about Graylyn and his family. “R.J. Reynolds’ girls, Mary and Nancy, were friends with the Gray brothers,” he says. “The girls came over to visit all the time. They were close to the same age and were all good friends. After the R.J. Reynolds family moved to the country, I remember seeing photos of Bowman Jr. at Reynolda House acting in plays.

“You have to remember that until about 1930, Winston-Salem was the biggest city in the state,” Gray says. After that, commercial centers like Charlotte and Greensboro and the political capital, Raleigh, began to flex their muscle. “But up to then in Winston-Salem there were textiles, banking, tobacco.”

In that day, wealth was expressed in architecture. Great Victorian and Queen Anne mansions and brownstone townhouses graced the seaside of Rhode Island and the West Side of Manhattan, though European and American architects were rapidly changing their esthetic. Bauhaus ideas advocated a break with the past, and the simpler styles of the Arts and Crafts movement and Prairie Style - form follows function - were being advanced by young architects like Frank Lloyd Wright. Graylyn’s Norman Revival design suggests the waning popularity of Victorian ornamentation.

Graylyn’s design also suggests a creative urge toward the unique. It had visual competition all around. There was the P.H. Hanes mansion in Winston-Salem and Robert Lasater’s house on the Yadkin River. Nathalie and Bowman Gray already had a mountain home in Roaring Gap, “built before Graylyn,” says Tom Gray, “and almost as large. It’s almost as if everyone was building these great white elephants.”

Nathalie’s tastes, choices
The mansion expressed Nathalie Gray’s refined and eclectic tastes. Graylyn was all Nathalie’s creation, although Bowman did bring his own own bedroom suite to the new house. “He did not want a decorator from Baltimore decorating his bedroom,” says his great-grandson.

Of Nathalie, people said her personality could light up a room. Son Gordon described her as “gay, dainty, and beautiful.” She was known as a quick study who returned from her frequent travels with abundant ideas. Often accompanying her on trips was her spinster sister-in-law, Alice Shelton Gray, known to the boys as “Aunt Polly.” Before Nathalie left on each trip, she placed handwritten notes throughout the house for her husband to find. Because her business-only husband had never learned to dance, noted a biographer, Nathalie “never danced a step after they married.” Furthermore, the biographer continued, photographs revealed that “in later years she seemed to have an almost wistful look.”

Nathalie and Alice Gray were inseparable in their charitable pursuits. Each year, according to the Winston-Salem Sentinel, they presided over “a gaily decorated and festively adorned tobacco warehouse” on the city’s north side. There they “staged a glorious Christmas party for the colored children of the Memorial Industrial School.” Nathalie also sponsored a more inclusive Christmas party. In December 1927 the Sentinel enthused: “Her invitation includes every boy and girl, regardless of color, in Winston-Salem..” A month later, ground was broken for Graylyn.

Luxury during Depression
Not everyone was enamored of Graylyn. The house took four years to build, 1928 to 1932, as Winston-Salem, the state of North Carolina, and the nation descended into the Great Depression. A full year was lost due to death threats to family members. “They had guards twenty-four hours a day,” says Tom Gray.

Graylyn was a study in contrasts. On one hand, Reynolds’ cigarettes represented inexpensive relief for the common man. The movie industry prospered during the Depression for the same reason - when you were down and out, there was nothing quite like a Charlie Chaplin movie or a good smoke.

On the other hand, some saw Graylyn as being built on the back of the working man. Between 1912 and 1933, Reynolds nearly doubled its workers’ wages, according to Nannie Tilley’s history of the company, but wages were still only $13.20 a week. At the same time, gasped historian Frank Tursi, Graylyn’s “Venetian glass chandeliers cost more than most people made in a year.”

Yet one hundred and thirty-six people - stonemasons and carpenters, truckers and laborers - found work on Graylyn during its construction. Designed by the twenty-eight-year-old architect Luther Lashmit, Graylyn rose with a thick, bold aspect. Turrets, used as stair towers, were modeled after Norman silos, and stone chimneys loomed over slate roofs. For all its exterior mass, the interior was kept free and open; rooms flow into one another. J. Barton Benson fashioned extensive wrought-iron designs that contribute to the interior lightness.

The grounds were as carefully planned for beauty and utility as the house. “In informal and naturalistic compositions,” Linn continued, “specimen trees may stand free . or they may arise singly or in groups.” Nearby meadows had twenty-one varieties of cherry and twenty-two types of crabapple trees; they are surrounded by deciduous and white pine trees.

The manor house measures 46,000 square feet; its windows and doors hold 8,000 square feet of glass. Slate for the roof came from Vermont. The house is threaded with enough copper wire to reach Greensboro. The estimated cost of land, buildings, and furnishings - in 1932 - was roughly $1.5 million.

Tragically, Bowman Gray Sr. lived in his mansion just three years. On July 7, 1935, aboard an ocean liner with his family en route to Europe, the patriarch died of a heart attack. Son Gordon later wrote that the family derived special pleasure from cruises, sitting side by side in deck chairs “taking strength and comfort ... from each other.” Bowman Sr. was buried at sea.

Three years later, Nathalie remarried. Her new husband, Benjamin Franklin Bernard Jr., also a native of Asheville, had served as a first lieutenant in World War I. He was fifty-two; she was fifty-four. When he died in 1949, she continued to live at Graylyn.

Throughout those last years, Tom Gray says, the family brought Graylyn to life. When Bowman Jr. married, he and his wife, Elizabeth, lived in the manor house, and his mother moved into the gardener’s cottage. Younger brother Gordon also married and moved with his bride, Jane, into the guest quarters. Children brightened the place. Tom’s father, Bahnson Gray, rode his bike with cousins in the mansion attic and skated in the underground tunnel. “Thirty-six people worked on the property,” Tom Gray says, “so there were plenty of servants and there were plenty of yard people. The [first Bowman Grays] had entertained there, but the entertainment was principally for the family. “After he died . that’s when most of the partying went on. It was later when Graylyn became a lively place.”

Fire, then renovation
Today, anyone can enjoy Graylyn - at weddings, meetings, or reunions. Nathalie Gray, who died in 1961 while still living at Graylyn, and her sons donated the estate to Wake Forest University’s Bowman Gray School of Medicine in 1946. It was used as a psychiatric hospital and later for academic programs.

In June 1980, fire broke out on the third floor of the manor during a performance by the Winston-Salem Symphony. Seven thousand people watched in dismay as the unoccupied third floor was destroyed and water damaged the first and second floors. The next day, the university announced that the building - at a cost of $6 million - would be restored. Tom Gray served as preservation consultant for the renovation. Graylyn reopened as a multipurpose conference and event center in 1984.

Freelance writer Jerry Adams of Winston-Salem attended his daughter’s wedding at Graylyn in 2004.