Trillium Ballroom Loses Cool Name
Name-For-Sale Trend Results in Lousy Building Names

Here’s a little local news item that may have escaped your attention. The Broyhill Inn and Conference Center’s Trillium Ballroom has been renamed and will henceforth be known as the Helen A. Powers Grand Hall. Evidently, the conference center has renovated the 64,000-square-foot banquet room, thanks to a gift from Powers. Renovations include new carpeting, wood treatments, light fixtures and a terrible new name.

Now, I’ve never met Helen A. Powers and I’m sure she is a very lovely person. I’ll bet it wasn’t even her decision to rename the Trillium Ballroom in her honor. She probably just wanted to make a monetary gift to jiffy up the joint in case she ever wanted to use it for some swanky gathering. Unfortunately, you can’t make a gift to a college, town or conference center without having something named after you.

I understand that this is how the world works and that many of these so-called monetary gifts are really just the purchase price of the name of something, be it a stadium, building or park. But the trend has gone too far when you take a fantastic regional name like “Trillium Ballroom” and change it for the sake of some cash. Nearly every time that I’ve attended an event at the Trillium Ballroom I’ve had someone ask where the name comes from. It has always been my pleasure to go on a long-winded explanation of the little mountain wildflower known as the trillium. Found in shady moist areas of the Southeastern Appalachians, the trillium gets its name from its distinctive three-petaled flowers. A member of the lily family, it blooms in late spring and early summer (right now) and has three green pointed sepals behind the petals, giving the petal-sepal combination a distinctive Star of David shape.

Along with “Star Pink,” “Bloodroot,” “Lizard’s Tail” and “Blue Toadflax,” the trillium is one of those Appalachian wildflowers with a spooky Wiccan name that conjures up images of old mountain women using herbal recipes to cure skin rashes or put hexes on nosy tourists.

The noble wildflower known in the Southeast as the trillium. It has no money, so its chances of having someone name a building after it are slim at best. Photo by Jeff Eason

I don’t even know where this trend of naming things after people started but I really hope it ends soon. In the old days, naming something was an attempt at finding an identity for the thing, not imposing one on it another source. That philosophy gave us classic names like The Empire State Building, The Golden Gate Bridge, Tiger Stadium, and Madison Square Garden. Now, most of the really big projects are named after really rich people or, worse yet, corporations who underwrite the gift and pass the lack of savings on to us, their customers.

While it is always a good idea to get some financial backing for a project, selling a name outright can be a tricky business. When the Houston Astros moved out of the outdated Astrodome (You want a name? The Astrodome was a great name) a few years ago their new stadium was called Enron Field. When Kenneth Lay and his corporate cronies made the name Enron synonymous with dishonesty and greed, baseball fans in Houston found themselves with egg on their faces and a stadium name that could’ve only been worse if it had been dubbed Osama Bin Ballpark. The field where the Astros play has been renamed Minute Maid Park and folks in Houston are praying that a scandal involving orange juice doesn’t make the headlines anytime soon.

Which brings us back to the Helen A. Powers Grand Hall in Boone. What do we really know about this Helen? Well, we know that she was the first woman to serve as secretary of the North Carolina Department of Revenue. She was also the first woman to become a senior vice president of a North Carolina bank and the first businesswoman to be inducted in the North Carolina Business Hall of Fame.

That sounds pretty good to me, but who knows if she might become notorious in the future for more—how shall I say this—unsavory behavior? What if she decides splash around naked in the reflecting pool in Washington D.C. singing “Carolina Uber Alles” at the top of her lungs? What if she robs one of those banks she knows so much about, buys a Harley Davidson and becomes a permanent fixture on future episodes of America’s Most Wanted?

If that happens then I guess we’ll all feel pretty foolish for having changed the name of the Trillium Ballroom.