Qualla: Airlie Gardens

Airlie Gardens: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matt Trostle, CC BY 2.0. Minnie Evans worked the front gate of Airlie Gardens for years, taking admission tickets from white visitors who had no idea that the woman in the booth was painting some of the most original work in 20th-century American art on the back of those tickets, on scraps of paper, on anything she could find. She had visions. She drew them in colored pencil and crayon, then ink and oil, faces inside faces, plants made of eyes, gardens that bloomed inward. Her painting Airlie Oak now hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The oak it was named for is still here, 500 years old, its crown spread wider than most houses.

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Image: Matt Trostle | CC BY 2.0

Airlie Gardens: Minnie Evans, Gatekeeper and Visionary

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matt Trostle, CC BY 2.0. Minnie Evans worked the Airlie admission booth from 1948 until 1974, the gatekeeper who became one of the most important self-taught artists of the 20th century. She had begun drawing in 1935, at age 43, after a voice she described as inner instruction told her to. Born in 1892 t...

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Image: Matt Trostle | CC BY 2.0

Airlie Gardens: How a Family Built a Garden

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DiscoA340, CC0. Airlie was created in 1886 as a private garden for the Pembroke Jones family, designed initially by Sarah Green Jones and later transformed by German landscape architect Rudolf Topel. The name came from the Jones family's ancestral home in Scotland. The Joneses were New York-Wilm...

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Image: DiscoA340 | CC0

Airlie Gardens: The Oak

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DiscoA340, CC BY-SA 4.0. Airlie Oak is a southern live oak, Quercus virginiana, somewhere around 500 years old. In 1967 it was registered as member 238 of the Live Oak Society. When North Carolina Forest Service workers measured it in 2007, the tree stood 128 feet tall, its trunk circumference exceeded 2...

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Image: DiscoA340 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Airlie Gardens: Mount Lebanon and the Storm

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Edward Orde, CC BY-SA 4.0. Tucked into the grounds is Mount Lebanon Chapel, built around 1835 by Thomas H. Wright. It is the oldest surviving church structure in New Hanover County, part of the parish of St. James Church in Wilmington. The little Gothic Revival chapel was used by summering Wilmington famil...

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Image: Edward Orde | CC BY-SA 4.0