The Many Thoughts of Wanda Kidd

Some would say we did not think through all the ramifications of purchasing the Rest-A-Bit lodge (my parents) because I had just completed a two-year internship, and ministry jobs for a woman in the mountains of North Carolina in 1986 were slim pickings.  Did I mention that Dan had just started his practice, and as he often told me, there are very few rich, young CPAs?  Funds were tight, and the home improvement needs were mushrooming.

The drought had been a two-edged sword that first summer.  Water scarcity taught us how to take showers using two 64 oz Moose cups from Hardee’s. One cup to wet down and another to rinse off, but at least the roof didn’t leak.  That changed when the mountain monsoon season arrived in the fall—the days of rain made it obvious that we needed to move up the roof repair as soon as possible. Over the summer, we found someone (he was not a local and had not been steeped in the stories of the house) to work on the very steep and angled roof. While he planned to start in late summer, it got pushed back to the fall. Unfortunately for him, that is when we discovered that we lived in a grove of black walnut trees that dropped all of their leaves in two days, and then they began to let go of mammoth green walnuts that dented our cars and made walking outside as treacherous as walking on marbles.  So, the dry days that the roofers could work coincided with the days that the walnut trees dropped the tree nuts like bombs on the workers.  You know, there is a rather soothing rhythm to the sound of a professional roofer; it’s a rapid tack, tack, tack as they nail down the shingles. To this day, however, I can hear those men hanging onto their footing three stories from the ground, tacking, dodging, and cussing as they tried to finish the roof before the first frost. Maybe the haunting stories were started by people who just didn’t want to work on that house.

We were trying to get by as we slowly adjusted to the fact that we had moved into a house with a long and storied past.  Our son arrived three weeks early while we were five hours from home celebrating Thanksgiving. We came home to find that the motor on the furnace had stopped working, and that is how we found out it was straight-wired into the electrical panel. Dan became an accountant because he hated working in his father’s mechanic shop. Still, that experience made him the hero when he found enough parts left by the previous owner to Jury-rig a new motor for the furnace. In addition, it turned out to be the coldest winter in decades, making heating a 3,000-square-foot house with 52 single-pained windows, inadequate insulations, and an oil-guzzling furnace challenging. Fortunately, Ray Fabrics sold quilted bedspread fabric by the pound, and I bought enough to cover all the windows.  I have little memory of that winter, except it was dark; I had a new baby, started a small after-school business that helped cover the basic expenses, and figured out what to do next.

The unsolicited stories people began to share with us did not diminish my rose-colored glasses about what we could do with the house.  I envisioned it as a retreat center for ministers or women’s groups.  Maybe even a wedding venue.  My creative juices were flowing as I tried to legitimize its purchase.  I felt it would be a perfect place to combine my home economics degree and calling to ministry until I realized the house would take many more renovations to make it commercially ready. Truthfully, I had to admit I did not want to clean and cook for strangers, either. Therefore, we settled into the house with our family and opened the doors to students who needed a place to call home for a while. 

All was going pretty well. We were adjusting to people stopping us to tell us various stories about things they had heard or knew about the house. Gudger Crawford was close to eighty when he told me he had helped build the rock walls all over the property when he was a teenager.  A lovely lady named Dottie told me she was fifteen and living with her aunt Katie when the flood of 1940 took out every bridge in Jackson County. She said she stood on the balcony of her room and watched the Tuckasegee River wash out the whole valley.  Her eyes were still emotional when she marveled that it did not reach the lodge in the cove. That story comforted me during times when the river waters threatened to leave its banks and the edges of the roads in front of our house crumbled.

However, when we thought we had heard it all, Dan went to his first deacon’s meeting at church. I had been a member during my college years and had worked next door at the Baptist Student Union for two years, but Dan was relatively new to town and did not know all of the old guard.

As he sat down, an older gentleman looked over and said robustly, “Who are you?” He said, “I am Dan Kidd.”  The older man replied, “WHO?”  To which one of the most respected and low-key men of the church leaned over and said in a voice that all could hear, “Wanda’s husband.”  “Oh.” He said.  Then, trying another tact, he asked, “WHERE do you LIVE?”  Dan responded, “In the old Rest-A-Bit Lodge,”  thinking it would give him some local credibility.  The fellow deacon furrowed his brow and said, “Where?” In an effort to move this conversation along, the same dignified and careful-speaking gentleman leaned over and spoke into the other man’s ear, “You know, the ole whorehouse,” bringing the whole meeting to a stop.  Dan was startled, flummoxed, and a bit embarrassed as if he had something to do with the newly discovered history of the house. He responded, “I know nothing about that.  No one has ever mentioned it.”  “Oh, It was back in the 50s”, was the reply, as if that was all we needed to know. The meeting proceeded as if Mr. Mitchell’s off-handed comment had not been a real jolt to the new owner.

To be honest, we did not seek further information about this tidbit of history. This truth could have possibly moved my woman in ministry status down on the list of reasons people did not want to work on the house. But we decided to keep that story pretty close to the vest.  Then, one Christmas Day, several years later, we hosted a dinner party in the dining room that looked out at the backyard. After the meal, when we were all swapping stories, the lawyer in the group looked out the window and said, “You know, the first time I came here, there were chickens all over the side of the mountain.”  Many questions swirled in my mind, but the one that came out was, “Why were you here?”  “Oh, I was the lawyer for the man who ran the whorehouse (Did no one think they should use a euphemism for their description?)  

So, was the story that Mr. Mitchell told Dan at the deacon’s meeting true? “Indeed it was.” He replied. “Why did the owner need a lawyer, and why were there so many chickens? “someone asked. “Well, chickens were taken as payment,” he continued. “Oh my gosh, like the Chicken Ranch in Texas?” “ I have no idea about Texas,” he said, “but times were hard, and money was tight. Chickens were as good as money.”  As to why he needed a lawyer, the story goes that the proprietor(as the lawyer called him) took “the girls” on a vacation to ride the famous Cedar Point roller coaster in Ohio.  It seems that as long as they stayed close to home, the law did not bother them, but when they crossed the state line, he was arrested for breaking the Mann Act, that is, transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes. The most obvious next question was, “Did you win?”  The attorney said with great pride that he did. He did so by having the man disclose to the court some possibly embarrassing medical condition that made the charges null and void, so to speak. Wow, just another day at the Rest-A-Bit Lodge.

Since people rarely spoke about this part of the Rest-A-Bit’s history to us, I simply added it to the other stories we kept. Then, about a decade later, I was called to jury duty. The first morning, while waiting for the process to begin, I looked up as another woman in the jury pool slid into the chair beside me.  She said, “You’re Wanda Kidd, aren’t you?”  “Yes”, I replied.  “Do you still live in the Ole Whorehouse in East LaPorte?” (People, House of Ill-repute is much less jolting). “Yes,” I  said. “Well, My mom wants to know if the “Kissing Stone is still in the rock fireplace,” she casually said. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” I answered. Undeterred, she continued, “You know that round rock in the center of the fireplace that is smooth and shiny?” I nodded. “ Well, it was known as the Kissing Stone, and the men had to kiss it before they went upstairs.” She was not sure why.  I asked her how she knew all of this.  She was not very forthcoming with the source of her knowledge. She did say that the house was raided once, and the men marched out of the lodge with their pants over their heads so they would not be recognized. That made me laugh. She thought there was a picture of it somewhere, but I could never track it down.  That was some pretty specific information to be shared with a virtual stranger about the place where she was raising her children. I went home and took a picture of the “kissing stone” that night and shared it with her the next day so she could show her mama.

There were two other eras of the house.  One was when Mrs. Kribb owned it in the late ’60s and ’70s.  We were told she was a fine Presbyterian lady who rented rooms to Western Carolina students. I do not know much about that period; she was gone by the time we arrived, and the guys were transient to the area. I am sure they could add even more eventful happenings if they knew we were collecting stories. In the years that preceded us, the house was inhabited by a family who saw the cove as a place to embrace nature and live as rustically as possible.  It took us decades to correct some of their attempts at survivalism. 

Each generation put its mark on the Old Rest-A-Bit Lodge. For us, every person who visited or came to stay for days or months added to our story, and we hold them all dear. Blessings and TBTG.

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