#Aunt bee siler city house full#

Earle and his horticulturalist wife, whose long-ago commitment to beauty Nail is trying to resurrect in the yard. High on that list: new wiring, gutting the kitchen and her master bathroom and extensive renovations to the basement, once the site of exquisite parties thrown by the home’s original owners and occupants, Dr. In addition to the cost of the acquisition, Nail estimates she’ll need to spend about $250,000 on improvements and fixes, the list of which is lengthy. “At least now the grass in the back yard gets some sunlight.”Īs for the house: “It needs a lot of Band-Aids,” she says.Īnd a bit of surgery, too. Together with her right-hand-man, Robert Jones of Pittsboro, they’ve toiled in the heat to take down about 250 trees, she estimates new friends Joyce and Earle Stout are frequent guests and help out, too. As that begins in earnest, though, this summer’s ongoing focus has been mostly on the yard - a labor of love, but still, labor: Nail says she’s lost 35 pounds in the last few months working by hand to clear the property of brush, tree stumps, unsightly boxwoods and saplings, and in unearthing hidden flagstone walkways and generally sprucing and clearing up the yard. The house was formerly owned by actress Frances Bavier, who starred as Aunt Bee in ‘The Andy Griffith Show’.įirst, it’ll need work. The front porch of the property formerly known as Aunt Bee’s house in Siler City is filled with various planters, put in by new owner Kathy Nail. So as its new owner and occupant, Nail is mulling, as she works on renovation plans for the home, about opening it as a bed & breakfast - or, alternatively, as an official tourist destination - for fans of “The Andy Griffith” show who remember, and love, Aunt Bee. And a relatively new discovery: Nail’s former home near North Hollywood was also a scant five minutes from the home Bavier lived in before she made her move to Siler City in 1972. She once lived not five minutes from the property known as the Brady Bunch house, always shown in long exterior shots on the ‘70s sitcom of the same name. Nail is also familiar with the impact and draw “TV homes” can have on fans. after acquiring the house was a massive collection of vintage toys and games and ephemera of all kinds - among them, for example, the world’s second-largest collection of books of matches and memorabilia from “Big Boy” restaurants, some of it dating back more than 60 years, as well as collections of water pistols and a marshmallow shooters.

#Aunt bee siler city house full#

Proof can be found throughout her new home, which she first learned was for sale exactly a year ago this week: among the tractor-trailer and a half full of personal belongings she shipped to Siler City from her triplex in L.A. She knows a thing or two about antiquities, and her life’s journey has given her a refined sense of nostalgia. She became an Egyptologist after her rearing in Kansas, and ultimately worked in Cairo for two decades. Some of those know about Bavier’s house, just minutes away, and drive by.Īnd some of those, of course, think: Why not? After shooting some obligatory pictures from the street or front yard, they knock on the door.Ĭan we come inside, they ask? Maybe take a look around? “Andy Griffith Show” fans who flock to Mount Airy as “Mayberry” tourists sometimes make the 90-minute jaunt to Siler City to see Bavier’s gravesite at Oakwood Cemetery, off U.S. Nail’s home, at 503 West Elk, has for years attracted the curious. “I didn’t really care who lived there,” says Nail. In the sitting room of the regal three-story brick house where actor Frances Bavier, Mayberry’s real Aunt Bee, lived and died, though, Nail makes an admission: she’s as interested as anyone else in all things Mayberry.īut she adores - absolutely adores - the Aunt Bee house.Īnd for the record, it wasn’t the legacy of Frances Bavier or Aunt Bee that drew her to Siler City. Nail’s actual stops - Cairo, Bangkok, London, the Isle of Man, and most recently, Los Angeles - were far more exotic than the fictional hometown of a folksy North Carolina sheriff, his precocious, freckled son, and a dowdy housekeeper known to everyone in town, even her elders, as “Aunt Bee.” The circuitous route that delivered Kathy Nail from the windswept plains of her birthplace in Wichita, Kansas, to her new home on West Elk Street in Siler City didn’t pass within a country mile of Mayberry.

From Bill Horner III, Chatham News + Record