Tree Tops and Sleepy Hollow Cottage are two of the homes that will be featured on the Historic Saluda Committee’s Tour of Homes on Saturday, June 4 from 1 – 5 p.m. The tour is part of Saluda’s 130th Anniversary Celebration and is a fundraiser for preservation projects in Saluda. Historic Smith Hill has been chosen as the site of the tour. There will be six homes, a teahouse and two additional smaller buildings on the tour, all within walking distance of each other.

In 1914, Dr. D. Lesesne Smith of Spartanburg started the Infants’ and Children’s Sanitarium in Saluda as a place where “anxious parents could get skilled attention, careful diet and treatment for their suffering children during the hot summer months.” Dr. Smith’s wife owned two houses in Saluda so he had a base from which to operate.

Dr. Smith also had under his care the Spartanburg Baby Hospital, established in the same year. From an original eight-room cottage, the sanitarium grew to 12 cottages, a central dining room, a diet kitchen, an assembly hall and examination and treatment rooms. Dr. Smith, along with Dr. Frank Howard Richardson of New York and Black Mountain, returning from a meeting of the Southern Medical Association, decided that general practitioners needed to be trained in childcare.

From the hospital in Spartanburg and the sanitarium in Saluda grew the idea of a Southern Pediatric Seminar, where from 1921 – 1959, it is estimated that between 3,000 – 4,000 doctors from all over the country and several foreign countries came to Smith Hill in Saluda to study the latest in pediatrics during two weeks every summer.

When the seminar closed in 1959, the property was divided among Dr. Smith’s four children. Some of the buildings were torn down, but the ones that remain are now permanent homes and all but one on the tour are still owned and now lived in by granddaughters and other relatives. The houses have all been restored in the last five years.

Tree Tops, the home of Nettie and George Sweet, was built in 1908 by Mr. Staton for Nettie Hane’s sister, Ammie Hane Smith. It has been used as a home for the Smiths, Owingses and Sweets, a place for house-paying guests at the sanitarium and as a physician’s office, with some additions over the years. After the house passed to the Sweets, renovations began in 1994 to make the house suitable for year-round habitation. Don Mintz’s crews did the major work and George Sweet worked behind the scenes. In 2004, when the Sweets became permanent residents, Ralph Morgan rebuilt the guesthouse and added the carport. “Stagger Inn” began as a chicken house in the Smith’s backyard in Spartanburg and was moved to Smith Hill and renovated for Dr. Smith’s summer interns. It is now the grandchildren’s bunkhouse.

Sleepy Hollow Cottage was built by Mr. and Mrs. Paul Kennedy of Spartanburg around 1917 with post and beam construction. Acquired by Dr. Smith, it was used to house nurses for the Infants’ and Children’s Sanitarium in the 1920s and became known as the “Nurses Home.” In the mid-1960s, Tennent Hane of Fort Motte, SC, purchased the summer cottage from his first cousin, Porcher Smith. Tennent always told everyone that he measured all of his first cousin’s porches to insure that, though Sleepy Hollow was the smallest house on the hill, it would have the largest porch. It is now owned by Tennent’s daughter, Jenny Hane, and her husband, Julian Wiles. In 2005, they began an extensive renovation with the help of Saluda contractor Adam Henry. The porch remains the same.

The Historic Saluda Committee was formed in May 2010. Its primary focus is “to preserve Saluda’s past to protect its future.”

Tickets are available at city hall, Historic Thompson’s Store and Heartwood Gallery in Saluda. Parking is available at the First Baptist Church at the corner of Carolina and Henderson Streets, and shuttle vans will be available to take you to Smith Hill for the tour. Tickets will also be available at the Saluda Arts Festival on May 21.

For more information, contact Lynn Cass at 828-749-1975.

– article submitted by Lynn Cass, chair of the Historic Saluda Committee

Sleepy Hollow Cottage