It was a surreal experience for Dr Samuel Waymon, Nina Simone’s youngest sibling, to walk back into the renovated childhood home that he once shared with the singer and civil rights activist. On that day in the fall of 2025, Waymon, an 81-year-old award-winning composer, said that memories flooded back of him playing organ in the house and cooking on the potbelly stove with his mother as a child in Tryon, North Carolina. He was overjoyed to see the large tree from his youth still standing in the yard. Simone, born Eunice Waymon, lived in the 650 sq ft, three-room home with her family from 1933 to 1937.
After sitting vacant and severely decayed for more than two decades, the recently restored home is now painted white, with elements of its former self sprinkled throughout the interior. On the freshly painted mint-blue wall hangs a shadow box that encases the rust brown varnish of the original home. A small piece of the Great Depression-era linoleum sits on the restored wooden floor like an island of the past in a sea of the present.
