04/08/2026
A wonderful history of horses in Tryon! 🐴🩷
𝗛𝗼𝗿𝘀𝗲 & 𝗛𝗶𝗹𝗹𝘀 | 𝗖𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗕𝗿𝗼𝘄𝗻
Every trail ridden, every fence jumped, every horse that calls Polk County home — his fingerprints are on all of it.
In the summer of 1917, a Michigan businessman drove into the Appalachian foothills and saw something most people hadn't thought to look for: a place that was already, in spirit, a horse town. It just needed someone to say so out loud.
That man was Carter P. Brown.
He didn't just visit Tryon. He built it. As a hotelier and amateur architect with a deep appreciation for Appalachian vernacular design, he took a former tuberculosis sanitarium on a hill above town and turned it into the Pine Crest Inn — adding stabling for 30 horses, inviting his foxhunting friends, and watching what happened next. What happened next was that people came for a season and never left.
In 1925, he founded the Tryon Riding and Hunt Club. The following year, he started the Tryon Hounds fox hunt and rode as their huntsman for the first five years himself. In the 1930s, he worked alongside the Harmon Family and a small army of volunteers to build out the showgrounds at Harmon Field — 36 acres, three show rings, 140 permanent stalls. Life Magazine showed up to cover it. One year when the show ran a deficit, the community put on a Vaudeville show to close the gap. Schools let out on show day. Businesses locked their doors. The whole town came.
That is what Carter Brown made possible — not just events, but a culture. Not just a club, but a reason for a place to exist the way it does.
He served as president of the Tryon Riding and Hunt Club from its founding in 1925 through 1947, and returned to serve again from 1957 to 1959. He died on November 15, 1978.
As Col. Charles C. Ross — local historian and former club president — put it simply: "Carter Brown was not the only horseman of that time. But he was the man who put Tryon on the map as a horse center."
All month, THM's Horse & Hills series explores Tryon's equestrian heritage — the people who built it and the places that still carry it forward.
🏇
