The most pivotal location in The Purple Menace and the Tobacco Prince is Peace Haven, the Williams family estate, located a few miles away from the hustle and bustle of 1931 downtown Winston-Salem and its cigarette factories and trolleys and ahoogas of Model A horns. Peace Haven in the novel is named after the road I grew up on; the manor and grounds are based on Reynolda House, home of the R.J. Reynolds clan.
The brainchild of Smith Reynolds’ mother, Katharine, Pennsylvania architect Charles Barton Keen, and New York landscape engineers Buckenham & Miller, the design and construction of the house and the surrounding 170-acre estate began in 1912 when Smith was an infant. Katharine was intimately involved with the planning of the home and its gardens.
Just before Christmas 1917, R.J. Reynolds, Katharine, their four children, and a platoon of butlers, cooks, housemaids, laundresses, nannies, tutors, handymen, gardeners, groundskeepers, stable hands, and nightwatchmen left their Queen Anne-style Victorian mansion on 666 West Fifth Street—downtown Winston-Salem’s “Millionaire’s Row”—and moved to Reynolda.
The 64-room country mansion—humbly called a bungalow by the family—combined the Arts and Crafts design movement with the Colonial Revival style and featured a distinctive green clay-tiled roof, stout Tuscan columns, and wide, sweeping porches. The grounds included a 16-acre manmade lake, formal gardens, golf course, and a spring-fed outdoor pool which figures prominently in The Purple Menace and the Tobacco Prince’s final chapter.
Another iconic Winston-Salem landmark featured in the novel is the Williams Building, a 21-floor limestone and copper Art Deco skyscraper based on the real-world Reynolds Building. Completed in 1929 at a cost of $2.7 million ($46.2 million in 2024 dollars) as the headquarters of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, the tallest building between Baltimore and Miami. It was often said that “nothing was done in Winston-Salem unless it’s first approved in the 19th floor of the Reynolds Building,” where the executive offices of RJR were located.
Perhaps most famously, the Reynolds Building was the design inspiration for the Empire State Building, both having been designed by architecture firm Shreve & Lamb. Local legend has it that for years the staff of the Empire State Building would send a Father’s Day card to the staff at the Reynolds Building, a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the latter’s role as the former’s predecessor.
In 2014, the Reynolds Building was named to the National Register of Historic Places and is home today to the Kimpton Cardinal Hotel with a restaurant on the ground floor named The Katharine Brasserie & Bar in honor of Smith’s mother.
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