A Greystone Family Account—Part 4

If you missed Part 3 of our feature story on Mary Lynne Arthur’s family story, you can read it here.

The two larger family stories (refer to the family tree here) officially connected in November 1957, when Mary Lynne Arthur and Walter Johnson Jr. married on Saint Simons Island, GA. Mary Lynne reminisced about her first impressions of The Greystone Inn and Mrs. Lucy Armstrong Moltz while on a 2022 visit to the area with her grown daughters.

“The first time I visited this lovely place and actually stayed here was in 1957. And [Walter] had just graduated from Duke, and we came up here to spend a week with Grandma—that was how I knew Mrs. Moltz then…I just fell in love with this place. First time I saw it.”

“It’s very genteel, very refined, very cultured. And she was such a grand lady. She’d studied cooking in Paris, so she was a gourmet cook. This place had this charm and this grace that it carried from the woman who was responsible for the construction of this lovely building.”

“The bedroom that I stayed in [before marriage] was something magnificent. It’s at the top of the stairs. It’s the first room that you go up the stairs to the left, and it had a beam. A four-poster bed with the skirt, whatever you call it, around the top. And it was beautifully decorated with this lovely Chinese red.

The McKinneys were the caretakers. I used to get breakfast, served tea in my room upstairs. It was all very elegant and refined.”

Daughters Andrea Johnson and Christina Johnson Marchetti with Mary Lynne Arthur at The Greystone Inn.

Andrea Johnson looks over her mother’s shoulder as she identifies the room she once stayed in.

“Yes, we came up here to this mountain house…Hillmont. Yes. It was very isolated when I came in ‘57, there wasn’t much here, no tourism. And there was no [lake] when I first came here, it was just all, old tree stumps and dirt.”

“Oh, we walked all around [the dry lakebed] then. I mean, we were kids. I was going on 19, and he was going on 22, so we were just kids.”

“I remember one time when [Walter] and I were going to go for a walk. We were going out the front door. Well, I was born in Puerto Rico. My grandfather, plantations there and citrus plantations. And then this grandmother from England. And so, my manner of speech was somewhat different. Anyway, we [Walter Jr and I] were getting ready to go out for this walk and he announced, we’ll be back in an hour or whatever. And Grandma said now make sure you get back in time for dinner. And I just said okay. Afterwards I was taken aside and told, you never, ever say ‘okay’ to Grandma. It’s yes, ma’am, which is the Old South. But I grew up with the combination of Midwest and England and just this mixture.

Anyway, that was one of my first impressions.”

She also recollects:

“I remember I was told that first visit that I might be a little too small to bear children because I was very narrow. That’s what you said then.” [turnng to her daughers] “Your great-grandmother said that to your dad. You know, ‘she may be too small to bear children.’ Well, I did four of them.”

____________

Unhappily, and again in a poignant echo of her own mother’s experience, the couple lost their first child, a son (Joshua Andrew Johnson), in 1958.

Mary Lynne notes in her memoir:
“Long ago I did lose a four-day-old baby and was not allowed to name him, bury him or even mourn him.  My husband and I were very young parents ourselves at that time, and my in-laws felt they were ‘doing the right thing’ for everyone when they took over. I was only twenty and my husband was twenty-three. That sense of loss never really left me, even after the [later] births of three beautiful children.”

In Oct ’59, Christina May was born in Asheville; soon after, Walter Jr., now a a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, was transferred to duty in Norfolk, VA, where the young family lived for the next two and a half years. A son, Walter III,  joined the family.

According to Mary Lynne, her husband had been “heavily influenced” by her father’s international business dealings. At the end of his term with the Navy, he went to work for Citibank, and in 1962, the Johnsons moved to Brazil, where Walter took on a new role as Senior Credit Officer. Their youngest child, Andrea Brooke, was born there in 1964.

Meanwhile in the early ’60s of Historic Toxaway, the new dam was installed, rebirthing Lake Toxaway again in front of Lucy Moltz’ home. When her husband, Carl, passed away, Lucy decided to sell her beloved Hillmont and move across the lake the lake to a smaller home, Robin Hill.

When Walter and Mary Lynne heard this news, they were still overseas. She remembers: “There were so many memories of Hillmont…it was so quiet and peaceful, and it was such a wonderful place to visit. Walter grew up there; [the sale] almost broke his heart.”

Of course, this isn’t the end of the this family’s history; but it’s where we’ll take our leave, bringing these new elements of Lake Toxaway history satisfyingly full circle. Many thanks to Mary Lynne Arthur and her family for allowing us to share her memories.