The R.J. Reynolds Estate

Richard Joshua Reynolds Jr. — known all his life as Dick — was the eldest son of the founder of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. He was a record-setting aviator, a Naval officer decorated in the Pacific during the Second World War, a Democratic Party treasurer and friend of Franklin Roosevelt, and mayor of Winston-Salem.

Devotion was his own project rather than an inheritance in stone: assembled acre by acre in the 1930s and built with local craftsmen out of American chestnut and river rock, at a time when the chestnut blight was killing the very forest that supplied the timber.

Long Creek Lodge sits on the dam of a second lake, built of chestnut and river rock and served by its own waterwheel. Around it he built an entire economy: a hydroelectric dam and powerhouse, a mill house, a dairy barn with a stone silo, a poultry barn, a slaughter house and cheese factory, a trout hatchery, machine shops, a movie theatre, a general store with a post office and fuel pumps, and an Olympic-grade stone skeet and trap field.

Butter, cheese, eggs, and poultry left the place under the estate's own Long Creek Lodge label. Nothing existed in isolation — water, feed, power, and labor all circled back through the same design.

If you arrived looking for the R.J. Reynolds estate at Devotion, this site is the family's own record of it: an illustrated history, archival newspaper coverage, and photographs taken on the place across four generations. The estate remains privately owned and is not open to the public.