Bryn Avon

Bryn Avon is an estate of about 127.86 acres along the French Broad River near Etowah in Henderson County, North Carolina, with views toward Mt. Pisgah. Its centerpiece is a stone and half-timbered manor house with multiple gables, jerkin-head roofs and red metal shingles. Morgan J. Evans, a Welsh-born settler in the English colony at Bowman's Bluff, began the house in the mid-1880s as a one-and-a-half-story stone and frame residence. The Mallett family, who later owned the estate, enlarged and reshaped the upper story from the 1910s, adding half-timbering and casement windows. The grounds also hold a tea house, a terraced garden, a family chapel and cemetery, a stable and four cottages, one with an artist's studio. Interiors retain Evans-era woodwork and early twentieth-century portraits by Wilford Conrow. Together the buildings and landscape document an agricultural estate that became a family retreat, which is why the district was listed.