TRYON TOYMAKERS, WEAVERS & WOOODCARVERS
The Tryon Toy-Makers and Weavers was founded by Charlotte Yale and Eleanor Vance after they departed Biltmore Estate Industries which they had established in 1907. They located their shop in their home in Tryon and they hired one of their best carvers from the Biltmore Estate Industries, Wayne Creasman to manage the wood-carving and toy-making industry. Under Creasman's direction many unique wooden toys were produced and with the assistance of other wood carvers many exceptional carvings were produced. It is the toy industry that is best remembered. Creaseman's raw wooden toys were  painted and new designs were created under the direction of  Eleanor Vance. In addition to the production of toys, Vance and Yale provided a museum of toys from throughout the world and a playground where the children of Tryon and visiting children might play and use the toys found in the shop.

Sometime after Fred Seely purchased the Biltmore Estate Industries from Edith Vanderbilt [April 11, 1917], he relinquished the wood-carving patterns back to Vance and Yale and placed the two women  under his employ for the wood-carving production. The old patterns from the Biltmore Estate Industries were used by the Tryon shop to create new wood crafts for the Biltmore Industries. The Asheville Citizen [May 12, 1923] notes that Miss M. A. Faulkner of Dandridge, Va., assisted the two owners of Tryon Toy-Makers in the salesroom and with the new responsibilities of developing the Tryon wood-carving studio. Miss Faulkner had been trained at Biltmore Estate Industries by Vance and Yale and also at Allanstand Cottage Industries.  As recorded in the Asheville Citizen, November 12, 1922 Seely sought the assistance of Yale and Vance for the wood carving production as his business was soon dominated by the weaving of homespun and he wanted to concentrate his energies on the burgeoning textile demands. His new location next to the Grove Park Inn had quickly grown into a major operation and at one time employed over 200 workers. 

While Seely's focus of the Biltmore Industries changed and the wood carving aspects of the industries was abandoned, he never abandoned his friends, Charlotte Yale and Eleanor Vance. Theirs was friendship that would last until Seely's death in 1942.


The 1923 Christmas issue of Vogue magazine describes the Tryon Toy- Makers in this way:

"Some one has said of Boston, that besides being a place on the map, it is also a state of mind. This may truly be said of Tryon, North Carolina, a happy little town snuggling among the Blue Ridge Mountains. For many yeas, it has been the Mecca for people blessed with appreciative discernment. 

 

Men and women of the literary and the art world have found there the soul-refreshing baths of mountain air that Rousseau urged as a remedy for tired nerves.  Names that standout in literary and art history are also the names of kindly neighbours in Tryon: Doctor Edward Emerson, Geroge Warner, brother of Charles Dudley Warner, Margaret Morley, Sidney Lanier, William Gillette, Mrs. Payne Erskine, and also Charlotte Yale and Eleanor Vance, the creators of the Biltmore Industries.
 In this remarkable village they have lived side by side in the closest kind of sympathetic brotherhood. North Carolina is rich in having such a spirit. Just a little to the north of Tryon is Biltmore, the famous place of the late George Vanderbilt. Here was conceived the fine idea of community up building, and here was later established the Biltmore Industries, today holding a remarkable reputation. For years, every visitor to Asheville called "the Athens of the South," has carried home with him from the looms of the industries materials for tailored clothes.

He carries the same kind of genuiness home with him in the fascinating toys that are being made by the Tryon Toy Makers. They are truly toys with souls. The Vanderbilt mind sensed a great truth in sending a woman with a soul to establish the Biltmore Industries many years ago, and now that same woman, with the help of an equally consecrated friend, has set up this absolutely unique enterprise upon a philanthropic foundation in an ardent wish to place opportunity at the doors of a most interesting people.

Descendants of a fine British ancestry, the people who live in the Carolina mountains have been strangely overlooked by the world for generations. Any race so shut-in for a hundred years would need some outside incentive to stimulate it to ambition. The Biltmore Industries have brought this inspiration to a great army of artisans, and the Tryon Toy Makers and Weavers are now opening up avenues of promise to many more.

The work is being done at present in the home of the two women who have this project in charge. The advantages to the girls who come into this home are many. They unconsciously absorb the atmosphere of right living, of proper ways to keep a house and make a home. While they care for the old Chelsea china and ancestral mahogany, they acquire courteous ways and a habit of gentle speaking, and, though no mention is made of it, character building is growing along with the toys and textiles.

The toys are charming, unique, and have already made their debut on Fifth Avenue. They do credit to their designers. They have an air that immediately sets them apart as something unusual. They show the spirit of earnest endeavor and a perfection in workmanship. Possibly some of this is due to the fact that their designers are constantly seeking for ideas, although it must be admitted that where so much soul is expended in creation, there must be something to distinguish it from merely mediocre work.

The Noah's Ark is enough to grip the imagination of any navigator, not to mention its powers over the heart of a child. The circus sets, complete with funny clown, pink lemonade stands, and a most joyously rotund "fat lady," demand small excited hands to fondle them. Little Red Riding-hood walks forth with her faithless wolf, and little Bo-Peep waves her crook over numberless fleecy sheep; Simple Simon pleads for pies off the pieman's try, and a long procession of nursery rhyme celebrities stand at attention, waiting for Santa Claus.

There are, besides balancing elephants and workable churns, many coloured tops, and some delightful book-ends that would grace the most fastidious nursery, snow white bunnies with lovely pink eyes that crouch low while holding the juvenile classics. Then there are prairie schooners with wide canvas tops and sturdy oxen which look staunch enough to stand any kind of transcontinental journey, and play cabins carefully dovetailed at the corners, like the huts of pioneers, which open and close with a precision that would delight a fresh-air fiend. The treasure trunks, copied after an ancient jewel-box out of another generation, are resplendent with all the airy forms of butterflies and flowers that the most imaginative child could desire. The prim little dolls in pinafores stand waiting for the protection of motherly little girls who may choose them according to their frocks of pink or blue or lavender.

Aside form the toy-making, there is much attention given to weaving and embroidery. The native Carolina cotton is used in many different forms,. There are looms running off countless yards of curtain material that looks somewhat like scrim with stripes woven in it, and there are many heavier weaves for over-draperies. The Tryon weavers dye these cottons themselves and combine colours with an artist's taste. The textiles are very unusual and attractive and suitable for summer homes or rooms where chintz might be used. Like those which make the home-spuns at Biltmore, these looms are operated by hand.

The embroideries are exquisite and should be displayed by themselves. The plan has been to take the peasant work of foreign lands as models, and it is amazing to see how cleverly the women in these mountain passes have been able to copy, and also to exceed the perfection of the originals. There are splendid examples of Italian cut-work, lovely cross-stitch designs in very fine thread, smooth precise embroidery like that done by the Russians, and many other wonderful evidences of the inborn love that women have for needle-work.

Such work, be it embroidery or carving, toy-making or weaving, is inspirational and creative. Amid the spray of flying saw-dust, the whirring of many wheels, and the atmosphere of right living and thinking, this industry is growing to such proportions that those who are at the helm are almost bewildered to know how to take care of it. Whether to try to stem the tide of demand that comes flooding into their little mountain retreat, or to heed the great invitation from the commercial world, they cannot decide. But the paramount thing before them is the constant wish to do the thing that is best for their mountain people."

Louise Seymour Jones

[Printed by the Inland Press Asheville, NC from the Christmas issue of Vogue magazine, 1923 [?]
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