TryonToyMakers.org
Welcome to our site, a public service for all people interested in the fascinating history of Tryon Toy Makers.
In 1915 Miss Eleanor Vance and Miss Charlotte Yale, co-founders of Biltmore Estate Industries, left Asheville, North Carolina and resettled in Tryon, a mountain community 40 miles southeast on the Southern Railway, the last stop before the South Carolina border. It was already a thriving center for arts and crafts. In Tryon they purchased a cottage and soon were training young boys and girls to handcraft finely-designed and beautifully-crafted toys inspired by European precedents, equal in charm and quality to the best made for centuries in the Toy Valley of the South Tyrol. Those toys were suddenly unavailable in America because of the outbreak of the First World War.
Vance and Yale's little non-profit business, motivated by a desire to do good and to train young people in rewarding artist-work, eventually became the famous Tryon Toy Makers and Wood Carvers. Its story will be told and seen on this site, which will expand with additional information and illustrations as time and resources allow in the future.
If you want to acquire a publication that shows color pictures of some of their toys and wood crafts, and recounts an accurate history of the enterprise, please click here to visit the Condar Press site where you can learn about and order it.