THE STORY OF A HOUSE

The Masters of Maple Lawn

By Matt Moriarty

It had to be Russ Tate Jr.’s destiny to live in the Vass farmhouse known as Maple Lawn. Tate and his daughter, Mary Catherine Tate, represent the sixth and seventh generations of his family to inhabit the Victorian-style home originally constructed in 1878.

The créme three story, 14-room, 4,500-square-foot farmhouse sits majestically on 1,000 acres just southwest of downtown Vass. The land, bisected by Little River, has been in Tate family hands for 13 generations and was a grant from the King of England. Dr. James Addison Leslie, a sergeant in the 3rd N.C. Cavalry during the Civil War, built the home — listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Leslie-Taylor House — after he and his wife Annie Maria McNeill relocated to Vass from Wake County in the 1869.

With its steeply pitched gable roofs, decorated bargeboards, bay windows and sawnwork balustrades, the National Register notes that Maple Lawn is the only example of “Late Victorian Gothic” architecture in Moore County.

Dr. Leslie got plenty of medical work in Vass, but he still sought to supplement his income — “He got paid in eggs or something like that,” Tate says — so he bolstered his income by going into the lumber and turpentine businesses and grew everything on the farm from wheat, oats, corn, rye, fruits and vegetables to cotton and tobacco. Later, his daughter’s husband, Frederick W. Taylor, took over the businesses and started a dairy in 1926. From the 1961 to the 1981, Tate’s father, Dr. Russell Tate, ran a veterinary practice for small and large animals out of the massive 13,000-square-foot barn built in 1929 for the dairy. In 1965, he founded the county’s first humane society in the barn, but Tate said he’s most proud that his father insisted on providing only one restroom for customers, regardless of their color.

The home got its name “Maple Lawn” from the large maples that once dominated the front lawn. Today, a buggy that his father used and a boy sits in the front yard where Vass’ best and brightest used to pull their buggies up along Carthage Road for one of the Leslies’ popular parties. A stone walkway leads up to the full-length front porch where a couple of white rocking chairs await visitors.

The front door opens to a carpeted hallway with a winding staircase against the right wall and an antique grandfather clock against the left. Like all Victorian homes, Maple Lawn has a pair of formal sitting rooms at the front of the house. The first, on the southeast corner of the house, with its softly curved original furniture arranged around a painting of Alliene Fresh, Tate’s grandmother, hanging above the hearth, and its early morning eastern light pouring in through bay windows, has a distinctly feminine feel.

Its counter-point, a masculine sitting room on the southwest corner centered around a painting of Frederick L. Taylor, Tate’s grandfather, is the social heart of the house. It still includes the original pump organ and piano that provided the entertainment. Alliene Taylor wrote, “the love seat and square piano in the parlor hold many secrets of courtship.” It’s not hard to picture generations gathered around the piano in a room lit by a roaring fire and oil lamps, most of which remain in the house and have been wired for electricity. To this day, the family likes to adjourn to the sitting room following a holiday dinner. “Christmas and Thanksgiving we’d have in the dining room and then move toward the front,” Tate says. “I have an uncle, Frederick H. Taylor, that likes to come play tunes on the piano, just like they did 100 years ago.”

One hundred thirty years’ worth of those holiday dinners have been served in the dining room, with its east-facing windows pouring light on a serving table against the far wall and a dining table, both of which were wedding gifts to the Leslies. The dining room is adjacent to the modern kitchen, which used to be the butler’s pantry, the smallest room on the first floor. The original kitchen is now a library where Tate relaxes in front of a flat screen television. Above the mantel is Leslie’s flintlock rifle. He was said to be a dead-eye hunter. In the dining room, shelves are built into the wall to house a number of silver serving pots, platters and china. In the center of it all is a white turkey platter with pink trim. During the Civil War, the family buried it in the yard of their home in Holly Springs to hide it from Union soldiers. When the soldiers arrived, they took all of the family’s chickens and unearthed the platter. “Legend has it that the lady of the house so charmed the soldiers,” Tate says, “that they dug up and returned the buried platter,” but they did get the chickens.

The stairway, decorated with carved wooden designs, leads up to the second floor and back to a simpler time. The steps feel a good inch too short, and an average-sized man practically has to bend down to grab the handrail. “People were a lot shorter back then,” Tate says. Upstairs are four equal-size bedrooms, each sharing a bathroom. On the walls hang charcoal drawings by Emma Florence Leslie, one of Dr. Leslie’s daughters. There are verandahs on the east, west and south (or front) sides of the house. Dr. Leslie’s original roll-top desk sits in the hallway between the bedrooms. You can look out a north facing window and see the rose garden in the backyard. The bedroom windows still have the original glass in them, imperfections and all. The glass plays with the light like a child letting sand slip through his fingers.

It was likely in one of these rooms that most of the children who grew up in the house were born. “I’m sure Dr. Leslie delivered all of his kids,” Tate said thoughtfully.

The third floor is mostly an attic and the rooms are used for storage. You’re equally likely to find an original bound book from the Civil War era as you are to find a bean bag chair. Tate says the third floor came in handy during the Great Depression. Early in the Depression, tobacco was as good as gold, and Frederick W. expanded the farm’s tobacco production. The next year, the bottom fell out and he couldn’t pay the bills. “The family remembers on more than one occasion the tax man knocking on the front door,” Tate says. “They hid on the third floor until he left.”

In 1962, Frederick L. Taylor moved from a home in Pinehurst, known as The Castle, to retirement at Maple Lawn and undertook a massive remodeling in order to modernize the house. He added a sun room to the northeast corner with custom-made sliding glass doors, so big that Tate says he has no idea where he’d ever get another pane if one cracked or shattered. He likes to draw the drapes — all handmade by his grandmother like many other keepsakes in the house — during the day to keep it from getting too hot. On most days, the central air, put in by Frederick L., doesn’t come on until late in the afternoon. The remodeling included removing the fireplaces in the five bedrooms and replacing them with bathrooms. Taylor made as few changes as possible, even using some of the original brick from the fireplaces to frame the door to the sun room. “Ninety percent of the furniture and architecture is original,” Tate said. “Pretty much nothing ever left except for the people.”

Tate, who runs three animal hospitals with his father and partner, was compelled to buy the house from his family in 2007 shortly after his grandmother died. No other place ever felt like home. “It’s always truly been a part of my life,” he says. “I always felt like I should be here.”

 

 

 

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THE GARDEN PATH

Guerilla Gardener

By Jim Dodson

On a recent late summer afternoon, with tomato buckets in hand, Dr. Max Morrison marched through a shady tunnel of arching camellia bushes and stopped before a fenced veggie garden that looked a little like a concentration camp for cucumbers.

Tall wooden posts supported three different kinds of wire fencing — chicken wire down low to deter rabbits, hog fencing in the middle for larger critters, and individual strands of thick-gauge strands of wire up high for anything foolish enough to attempt a leap over the fence.

“Well, there it is,” Max said with a flourish, “What do you think?”

“That’s the mother of all veggie fences,” I said admiringly. “How long did it take you to do this?” I knew from his wife, Myrtis, that he’d erected this impressive protective barrier in less than a week, using mostly scrap wiring and fencing he had in his storage shed. Max Morrison is nothing if not thrifty.

“Oh, maybe two or three days, working solidly. For the moment at least,” he allowed, “I think we’re holding our own.”

Deep in the heart of peaceful Weymouth Heights, as any gardener this September knows, a life-and-death struggle for dominance in nature is under way, an insurgent guerilla war is being waged over tender shoots and tiny buds.

On one side of the conflict stand dedicated gardeners like my neighbor, Max — people who live simply to coax beautiful flowers and delicious vegetables from the poor soil of the Sandhills.

On the other side of the conflict, forever watching and waiting for the right moment to advance upon another’s bounty of the land, breeding like there’s no tomorrow to boot, stands Odocoileus virginianus, a ruminant mammal famed for its cute white tail and herbaceous eating habits.

“See those?” Max snorts, pointing to a row of smaller tomato plants that appear to have simply ceased growing in the late summer heat. “Those were 50 or so Italian tomato plants, doing beautifully until the deer got them several weeks ago just as they were flowering. They just jumped over the fence and helped themselves, ruining the entire planting. That’s when I decided I had to do something more to keep them out other than play music for them.”

Heretofore, Max creatively relied on a portable radio turned to a really bad rock station — wired up beneath an old plastic pot and hung near the pole beans — to deter any uninvited critters from his garden. He also used a lot of liquid fencing but discovered that hard summer downpours reduced the effectiveness of that approach.

“Nobody knows for sure how many whitetail deer there are around these parts or even in North Carolina,” he explained as we set about picking “Improved Whopper” tomatoes from his robust eight-foot plants. Around town, Max Morrison’s veggies — his sweet corn, peppers, butter beans, and various exotic forms of lettuce — are considered backyard treasures. But the tomatoes he gives away by the bushel to friends and neighbors are considered the showstopper of his garden. This year has been nothing shy of a bumper crop.

“But here’s a disturbing thing to think about,” he continued, examining a tomato that had split on the vine, giving it a quick chuck over the fence to where several discarded vegetables lay decomposing in the sun, later to be turned to sweeten the soil. “Eighty years ago there were maybe 300,000 deer in this country. And now, it’s estimated, there’s more than thirty million of them.”

He gave me a sidelong glance. “They were never much of a problem around here until just a few years ago. But that all seems to have changed just lately.”

Indeed, as another growing season nears its end, agricultural authorities across North Carolina are reporting a significant increase in deer-related incidents, including damage to crops, autos and private property. A network morning show that week, in fact, was highlighting the havoc flourishing deer populations are creating in mid-Atlantic states, and a gardener I’d recently chatted with from Chatham County explained to me that the deer are so commonplace — and entirely unafraid of humans — in his county, they’re regularly seen strolling the neighborhood streets of Chapel Hill, “dining on everybody’s flowerbeds in the middle of the day.”

“It’s becoming a real war between the deer and the gardeners,” Max confirmed as we filled up a pair of tomato buckets and started toward the house where Myrtis Morrison’s kitchen was still in full canning and freezing mode. By this day in mid-August, the gardener’s wife had already put up 60 quarts of blueberries, 60 quarts of canned tomatoes, 60 jars of peach preserves, and 60 jars of strawberry jam. Ditto 30 quarts of string beans and 60 pints of fillet beans. “If the deer or the heat don’t get the raspberries,” she said, “they ought to be good, too.”

Both Max and Myrtis grew up in rural North Carolina, growing veggies and “putting them up” for the winter larder. Max’s first garden was his father’s vegetable patch in Wallace, which he began tending around age eight. By 12 he was also taking care of the lawn duties, mowing grass and pruning shrubs. “My mother had a particular fascination for camellia bushes,” he explains. “So I guess that got passed down to me.”

His first serious garden didn’t come until the couple moved to Southern Pines in 1963 so Max, an eye surgeon trained at UNC-Chapel Hill, could take over the eye, ear, nose and throat practice of the town’s retiring physician. After a decade in a house on Ridgeview Road, they bought seven acres nearby and built their own home, an expansive property that permitted Max to indulge his ambitious horticultural plans.

“By then I was pretty well into this thing, and I brought more than 1,100 plants in pots down here from the other house. That took longer than moving our furniture,” he said with a grin.

Local landscape architect Tom Howe did much of the original landscaping on the Morrison property, but Max did most of the planting and expanded his gardens every year. Today, among other notable features, the Morrison property is home to more than 100 different varieties of Camellia — more than 400 specimens in all — plus spectacular Japanese maples, azaleas, and perennial beds. When Sandhills Horticultural Garden was getting started, Max donated scores of his Camellias to the college along with several hundred cuttings from several unusual varieties.

One other impressive specimen is a massive fig tree that stands near the site he chose for his ambitious vegetable garden. During an early phase of the garden’s creation, a worker helping to pull a stump accidentally drove over the young fig tree Max had planted. “I trimmed it down hoping it would just grow back,” he explains. Thirty-five years later, the tree stands more than 25 feet in height with spreading circumference of more than 100 feet. It’s become a prodigious fruit producer and simply part of Morrison garden lore.

The garden’s fertility relates to its splendidly amended soil. The terraced vegetable patch rests on a clay base that has been improved over the decades with loads of bark, mulch and other organic material. Even during a period of extended drought, Max’s garden stays green and doesn’t need much more watering than nature provides.

Max Morrison, 77, retired from his eye practice in 2002 and took up playing golf. But he never retired from his garden.

“On the contrary,” laughs Myrtis, “that garden is Max’s life saver. He lives to fuss over it, forever trying new things and battling whatever threatens anything out there. Once it was the raccoons. Now it’s the deer — which is why we have that fence. Between you and me,” she says with a husky laugh, “I think Max loves the battle. He had the best time working on that fence.”