Reynolda House Pool

This article is about the old outdoor pool at Reynolda House. I have hiked past the ruin of the pool for decades and wondered what it was, so I finally did some research on it. Before I get to the pool itself, a little history about Reynolda House and the estate.

Reynolda House and Estate

Reynolda House sits on Reynolda Road in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on what was once a sprawling country estate built by tobacco magnate Richard Joshua “R. J.” Reynolds and his wife, Katharine Smith Reynolds. R. J. arrived in North Carolina in 1874, opened a plug tobacco factory, and incorporated his business in 1888. He and Katharine married in February 1905, when he was 55 and she was 25 years old. Not long afterward, Katharine began buying land outside Winston-Salem, starting around 1906, and over the following years those purchases grew into the estate that would become Reynolda.

In 1912, the couple began building an English-style village and manor house on the 1,067 acres Reynolds had assembled on the outskirts of town. They envisioned the village as self-sustaining, built to support the family and the workers who lived on the grounds—complete with a church, post office, greenhouse, blacksmith shop, dairy, school, administrative offices, and a formal garden. Every building, from the manor house to the smallest cottage, was finished in white stucco with green tile roofs.

Construction ran from 1912 to the end of 1917, and Katharine was deeply involved in the design process. She specifically asked for something homier than extravagant, instructing her architects to build a “squatty house.” The final result blended Arts and Crafts with Colonial Revival and was luxurious without being showy: a 64-room, more than 34,000-square-foot bungalow still considered the largest bungalow in the world. It had the now-iconic green Ludovici terra-cotta tile roof that would go on to influence architecture across Winston-Salem.

The family moved in during December 1917. Tragically, R. J. Reynolds was already ill with pancreatic cancer and never got to fully enjoy the home he had built. He died on July 29, 1918, just months after moving in.

Reynolda went on to house two generations of the Reynolds family. In 1935, eldest daughter Mary Reynolds Babcock acquired the estate. She and her husband, Charles Babcock, used it as a vacation home until 1948, when they moved in permanently. In 1951, the family donated 300-acres of the original estate to Wake Forest College, which opened its Winston-Salem campus there in 1956—meaning much of what is now Wake Forest University sits on land that was once part of the estate.

The manor house and its surrounding 20 acres were not part of that gift. In 1964, Charles Babcock Sr. donated the house itself for use as a nonprofit arts and education museum. It opened to the public in that capacity in 1965 and became a full art museum in 1967.

Reynolda formally affiliated with Wake Forest University in 2002, and 28 of the original 30 estate buildings still stand today, many now home to Reynolda Village shops and restaurants.

Swimming at the Estate

Swimming was a constant in the family’s life at the estate. In summer there was swimming in the lake and pools; in winter, on the rare snow day, there was sledding. It was a part of the rhythm Katharine built for her four children at Reynolda and it continued even after the death of  R. J. in 1918.

Lake Katharine

Before the manor house even broke ground, Katharine Reynolds was already shaping the land that would become Reynolda—and one of her first moves was building a lake.

The estate’s vision called for a family home with gardens, a self-contained village housing twenty worker families, a 350-acre dairy and grain farm, a 19-acre golf course grazed by sheep, and woodlands planted with thousands of daffodils. Silas Creek ran through the property, and one of Katharine’s earliest projects was damming a 16-acre stretch of the creek bed to form what became Lake Katharine. The dam itself was stone-faced, built by landscape designers Miller and Buckenham, and originally engineered as a two-arch dam to hold back Silas Creek—a structure that, almost as an afterthought, created what is now known as the Reynolda waterfall, today a fixture of the Wake Forest campus.

The lake was not purely ornamental. It also served as a source of irrigation water for the estate’s lawns, flower beds, and formal gardens, while providing a place for fishing, boating, and recreation. Thousands of fieldstones dug up during the lake’s excavation were repurposed to line the foundations of the bungalow and village buildings and to build the dam and chimneys. The whole project cost the equivalent of $400,000 in today’s money.

The lake quickly became woven into Winston-Salem life. R. J. Reynolds held a Fourth of July picnic there for his sales associates and their wives in 1916. In 1921, a pageant of “Hiawatha” was performed on its shore, drawing an estimated 5,000 spectators seated on the slope before the main house, with children from the Gray, Hanes, and Reynolds families taking part. Its boathouse, which still stands today, was the social hub of the lake’s “Roaring Twenties” heyday.

Almost as soon as the lake was finished, silt and sediment from Silas Creek and other feeder streams began building up—a natural process for man-made lakes that continued for the next fifty years. That siltation accelerated sharply in the late 1960s and early 1970s, worsened by a lack of erosion control at construction sites upstream. The timing lines up with Wake Forest University’s arrival on adjacent land in the 1950s, when campus construction runoff made matters worse. By the 1960s, the lake had filled with mud, and what was once Lake Katharine is now an artificial wetland, still held back by the original dam and known today as the Lake Katharine Wetland. 

Indoor Pool

There were two swimming pools on the estate: the indoor pool, which is still in operation, and the outdoor pool, now a forgotten ruin. Although the indoor pool came years after the outdoor one, I’ll discuss it first since it is not the main subject of this article.

In 1937, Mary Reynolds Babcock, Katharine’s daughter added a glass-roofed conservatory pool to the estate house as an extension of the guesthouse, which later became the Reynolda House museum lobby. Mary spared no expense, commissioning then-state-of-the-art equipment surrounded by artful tile, custom furnishings, and a pair of dramatic 12-foot birdcages. In 2014, the pool underwent its first restoration since 1937 as part of the broader “Reynolda at 100” preservation campaign. The Reynolda House Museum of American Art occasionally hosts a “Members’ Swim Club,” allowing museum members to swim in the restored historic indoor pool.

Outdoor Pool

Currently, visitors to the estate see the large indoor swimming pool that is part of the main house. The pool has always been maintained as part of the estate house. But there was also an outdoor swimming pool on the estate that has never been restored, and people walk past its ruins every day without knowing what they are.

The outdoor pool was built in 1915 at the same time as Lake Katharine was constructed. It sat beside the lake, just a short walk down the hill from the estate house and it had a sliding board and an awning-covered patio.

The pool was part of a spillway system designed by Katharine Reynolds. The system served as both a functional water-management mechanism for the newly created Lake Katharine and an interactive recreation area for the family. To create the lake, a concrete two-arch dam was built across Silas Creek, holding back the creek’s water. The top of the dam doubled as a walking trail, and the overflow created a scenic waterfall that dropped into the creek bed below.

Rather than building a separate, isolated pool, the estate’s landscape engineers integrated a concrete-bottomed outdoor swimming pool into the water system. Water overflowing from Lake Katharine was channeled through a designated spillway and into the pool. The continuous flow from Silas Creek supplied fresh water, functioning like a natural, gravity-fed filtration loop. During heavy rains, the wide concrete spillway basin allowed excess water to bypass the dam safely without eroding the surrounding banks.

Beside the pool and spillway, a dedicated pump house drew water from the lake and forced it up to a large concrete cistern at the edge of the property. From there, the managed water was distributed to irrigate the estate’s lawns, flower beds, and formal Reynolda Gardens. Over the decades, silt and sediment naturally filled Lake Katharine, turning it into the protected wetlands seen today. But the concrete foundations of the 1915 spillway and pool system remain intact beneath the forest canopy.

After being overlooked by various restoration efforts over the decades, the spillway and pool are now filled with dirt, but the basic stone structure remains.

See it Yourself

To see what remains of the old pool, drive to Reynolda Village, 2201 Reynolda Rd, Winston-Salem, NC 27106, park in the lower lot below the Barn, walk past the Boathouse, enter the Woodland Trail, and follow it a short distance to the site.