PARKS & RECREATION
Key Assets: Johnston County is genuinely the birthplace of Hollywood Golden Age icon AVA GARDNER, one of American cinema’s most celebrated leading ladies; Ava Lavinia Gardner was born on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1922, in Grabtown, a small rural farming community in Johnston County, the youngest of seven children born to Jonas and Mary “Mollie” Gardner; her family’s circumstances were genuinely humble – after a fire destroyed their barn and much of the family farm in 1924, the entire Gardner family relocated to a boarding school (a “teacherage”) where her father served as caretaker and her mother cooked for the school’s residents, until the Great Depression forced the school’s closure in 1935; following her father’s death in 1938, Ava and her family moved first briefly to Newport News, Virginia, and then to the Rock Ridge community in nearby Wilson County, where she graduated from Rock Ridge High School in 1939 before attending secretarial school at what is now Barton College; her extraordinary Hollywood trajectory began almost by chance – at age 12, a young fan named Thomas “Tom” Banks met Ava on her college campus, and when he later spotted her photograph in a newspaper announcing an MGM movie contract, he began collecting memorabilia related to her career, a personal collection that eventually grew into the founding basis of today’s Ava Gardner Museum; signed by MGM in 1941, Gardner rose to become one of the defining leading ladies of Hollywood’s Golden Age, and in 1999 the American Film Institute ranked her No. 25 on its list of the 25 greatest female screen legends in classic American cinema history; she continued acting regularly until 1986, four years before her death in 1990, and her final resting place remains Sunset Memorial Park in her home county’s seat of Smithfield; today, the Ava Gardner Museum in downtown Smithfield holds the largest collection of Gardner-related artifacts anywhere in the world, spanning roughly 5,000 square feet and drawing approximately 7,000 visitors annually, and the museum hosts an annual Ava Gardner Festival each October, drawing devoted fans from around the globe for film screenings, historian panel discussions, and guided tours to significant sites from her early life, including her birthplace in Grabtown
Notes: Ava Gardner’s genuine, extensively documented status as one of Hollywood’s Golden Age’s most celebrated leading ladies – born into genuine rural hardship in Johnston County and immortalized today in the world’s largest collection of her memorabilia – is one of the most distinctive cultural heritage sites found anywhere in this project.