The Holiday Inns Tour's Two New Stops Stretch What "Historic" Means

The 2026 Holiday Historic Inns Tour & Cookie Caper adds two first-time stops on Sunday, Dec. 6. One is the oldest house on the route by about forty years. The other is a bed and breakfast its owners call "purpose-built," and it doesn't appear on any historic register. Taken together, they show that Hendersonville's preservation fundraiser now celebrates a tradition, the local habit of taking in guests, more than it celebrates old buildings.

The Hendersonville Historic Preservation Commission puts it in nearly those words. Its 2026 event listing says proceeds go to protecting the city's historic resources "while helping tell the full story of our community and the people, places, and traditions that have shaped its history." It also calls the five stops "historic inns and vacation rentals," a wider category than the tour's name suggests.

Five stops, five versions of an inn

The tour is self-guided by car and runs from 1 to 5 p.m. A ticket costs $25 and includes a brochure with a map and a short history of each property, so you choose your own order. Here's what each stop actually is.

The list hasn't always looked like this. The 2025 tour featured the Elizabeth Leigh Inn, Osceola Lake Inn, Echo Mountain Inn, Brightwaters Guest House, the Waverly Inn and the Charleston Inn. Three of those rotated off this year, and no reason was given. Rotation is built into the format. Cheryl Jones, who chairs the commission, said in the City of Hendersonville's 2025 announcement that the commission was "excited to welcome some new inns to the tour this year."

The oldest end: a stone house that predates its neighborhood

Killarney is older than Hyman Heights, the neighborhood around it. The commission's inventory dates the original house to about 1858 and says William Bryson, who came from South Carolina, probably built it. The two steep front gables of that Gothic Revival house still form the main facade, with cut stone walls, a slate roof and a scrollwork balustrade on the second-floor balcony.

The inventory traces the deed history in detail. Mitchell King bought the property soon after it was built. Ellen Patton Hyman bought it in 1870, and the Patton family held it, with one break after a sheriff's sale, until Annie Patton's land was sold off to create the Hyman Heights subdivision in 1908. That same year William H. Rhett bought the house and hired architect Richard Sharp Smith, who added the wraparound porch and the rear additions between 1908 and 1910. The commission calls Killarney the oldest house in Hyman Heights, which is both a local historic overlay district and a National Register district.

None of that history involves innkeeping. The house's current role is recent. Its official site markets it for weddings and wedding weekends, with six bedrooms, overnight space for up to 12 guests, and house-only rentals by inquiry. It joins the tour as a historic house that now hosts guests, and that's a different thing from a historic inn.

The newest end: an inn built to be an inn

Tiffany Hill turns that around. It was always meant to host guests, but it brings no historic record with it. Its owners' site calls it a "purpose-built" bed and breakfast with seven guestrooms. It says it was the first B&B in the South to join the Southern Living Hotel Collection, and it puts the drive to Hendersonville at about 15 minutes.

What it offers is hospitality as a practice. Our State's February 2026 profile reports that Karen and Craig Verm, both professional musicians, finished buying the five-acre property in April 2024. They serve a three-course breakfast and then a short performance at the dining room piano. A returning guest nicknamed that performance the "Fourth Course" in the guest book, and the name stuck. According to the same profile, each of the seven suites is named for a Southern town.

The tour can include a stop like this because of how the commission now frames the event. A ticket buys you a cross-section of how this area has hosted visitors, from boarding houses on North Main to a Mills River inn whose owners are only in their third holiday season.

The middle that holds it together

The returning stops are the reason the newer framing still holds. Two of them sit on North Main Street, at 755 and 783, and started out as the same kind of business.

The Waverly Inn began as a Queen Anne boarding house built by Maggie Anderson. The commission's inventory notes a damaging fire, a rebuilt third floor and an Eastlake staircase that survived. The inn's own history says it opened as the Anderson Boarding House, took the Waverly name before 1915, and is Hendersonville's oldest surviving inn.

The Charleston Inn, just down North Main, went through more names. According to the commission's account of its National Register nomination, it was the Smith-Green House, then the Charleston Boarding House, then Chewning House. It grew to three stories and 20 guest rooms sometime between 1912 and 1922. It's on the National Register under a later name, the Claddagh Inn.

Brightwaters comes from a later wave of visitors. Hendersonville Lightning reported in 2018 that Samuel Childs built the eight-bedroom guesthouse at 119 Tioga Trail in 1938. It was part of his Brightwaters resort, which also had a lodge, a dining room, 25 cottages and a one-room schoolhouse converted into a dining hall. The guesthouse was restored that year and reopened with its historic interior features intact.

All three of these stops, from the 1898 boarding house to the 1938 resort guesthouse, were built to take in paying guests. Killarney was built as a private house and only hosts guests now. Tiffany Hill was built to host guests and has no historic designation.

The tour has grown in demand, too

The event has changed shape since it started. A 2014 Times-News report said the holiday inns tour began in 2003 as an every-other-year event. It drew nearly 300 ticket buyers in 2012, and organizers hoped for 400 in 2014, when the route covered seven inns. The 2025 edition had six stops, and the city marked it sold out.

According to the city, proceeds fund the commission's work across Hendersonville's three local historic districts, six local landmarks and eight National Register districts. The commission's own landmarks page currently names four local landmarks, so the counts don't match across sources.

Getting a ticket before they're gone

Last year sold out, so the ticket date matters more than the tour date.

1. Tickets go on sale Monday, Nov. 2, at the Henderson County Welcome Center, 201 S. Main St. The Welcome Center's number is 828-693-9708.
2. Out-of-town guests can call 828-341-7081 or email the contact listed on the event page. That helps if relatives are coming for the holidays.
3. Plan your route around the North Main pair. The Waverly and the Charleston are both on North Main Street, at 783 and 755, so you can visit them back to back. Killarney is in Hyman Heights, and Tiffany Hill is the drive out to Mills River.
4. Leave time for Tiffany Hill. The innkeepers' site puts it about 15 minutes from Hendersonville, so a 1-to-5 window covers five stops only if you plan it.

The tour falls the day after the Hendersonville Christmas Parade on Dec. 5 and two days after Olde Fashioned Christmas downtown on Dec. 4. All three fall on the first weekend of December.

If you own a house with its own Killarney-style deed history, whether it's on a Hyman Heights corner or in another of the city's historic districts, its story is part of what it's worth. Hill Real Estate Group knows how to present a historic Hendersonville home's history well. Get a Complimentary Home Valuation, and we'll talk through what your home's history adds to its value.