Reynolda House Museum of American Art

R.J. Reynolds built his fortune selling cigarettes to a country that couldn't get enough of them. What he and his wife Katharine built for themselves, starting in 1912, was something else entirely — a working estate on over a thousand acres outside Winston-Salem, centered on a house completed in 1917 that operated more like a self-contained world than a private residence.

Architect Charles Barton Keen designed not just the main house but the village around it: church, stables, school. The whole compound was conceived as a piece — an example of the American Country House movement, the belief that a properly built estate could be both beautiful and functional, a model of how land and life should work together. Keen had made his name designing homes in Pennsylvania and New York before Reynolds brought him south.

R.J. Reynolds moved in that December and was dead by the following July, taken by pancreatic cancer before he could properly inhabit what he'd built. Katharine had driven much of the design; her correspondence with Keen survives. The estate stayed in the family for nearly fifty years. The elder daughter, Mary Reynolds Babcock, acquired it in 1935, used it as a vacation home, then moved in permanently with her husband Charles in 1948. The house opened to the public as an arts and education institution in 1965, and as an art museum in 1967. It affiliated with Wake Forest University in 2002 — a university that itself was built on land the Babcocks donated from the Reynolda grounds.

The permanent collection runs from the colonial period through the modern era, with works by Mary Cassatt, Frederic Church, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Gilbert Stuart. Twenty-eight of the original estate buildings still stand. The Babcock Gallery is currently open; the historic house wing is closed through August 2026 for preservation work. The grounds — free, open daily — are reason enough to make the drive.