This York home has seen thousands of weddings. One couple returned to celebrate 50 years
Tonda Shaddix first met her husband of 50 years on the side of Independence Boulevard in Charlotte.
He was a “nice-looking soldier” hitchhiking back to Fort Bragg. She was a 17-year-old student driving to Shoney’s with a friend.
The girls picked up David Shaddix and his friend, and told them they would drive them as far as the Shoney’s restaurant then on Independence.
“We ended up taking them all the way to Laurinburg, North Carolina, which is right outside of Fort Bragg,” Tonda said.
That’s almost 2 hours farther than they had planned.
On Saturday, exactly 50 years after they got married, Tonda and David renewed their vows in the same room they first married – the same room that has seen thousands of couples married since 1946.
That room is Pam and Nick Schronce’s living room in York County.
Pam said she and her husband bought the York house at 3 W. Madison Street in 2000. They didn’t know how many people had been married in the house’s parlor until they realized her husband’s parents — and grandparents — had been married there.
The house has a second front door, where couples would walked into what was then the home of Judge E. Gettys Nunn. It was known as the “Marryin’ Door.”
The late judge Nunn, who took office in 1930, and his son, the late Charles Nunn, who followed him as probate judge until 1979, married more than 100,000 couples in the courthouse and their homes on Madison Street and Smith Street.
Nick Schronce’s parents renewed their vows in their son’s parlor on their 50th anniversary, too.
“It was very cool because he comes from a large family, so when we had the recommitment ceremony, all his aunts and uncles on his dad’s side who were also married in the house were there,” Pam Schronce said.
She said the history of the house has been a surprise for them over the 18 years they’ve lived in the Madison Street home.
“But what a great story,” Pam said.
The Schronces now spend most of their time in Rock Hill, so they’ll be putting the four-bedroom house with the “Marryin’ Door” up for sale soon.
The Madison Street house hosted weddings for many of Tonda Shaddix’s friends, too.
“Everyone in Charlotte came here,” said Patsy Thomas, who was at Saturday’s recommitment ceremony. She and her husband Robert were married in the parlor in 1968.
When Tonda was married at the York house in 1969, she remembers a line of couples in cars out front, all waiting to be married.
The Shaddix’ were married after just three months of dating. David was set to be deployed in Korea, Tonda said. He was 18 at the time, and she was 17, so her dad had to sign off for her to get married.
“The odds were actually totally against us,” she said. “I was still in high school but he was getting shipped out. So we knew if we didn’t get married then, that we probably may not get married, because we’d known each other for just a short amount of time. We thought we were in love – we evidently were in love.”
It was David’s idea to go back to the house where they were first married, Tonda said.
Tonda, who lives with David in Tennessee now, wrote the Schrones a letter in October, after reading a Herald article about the house from 2007. It was a small chance they still lived in the house, she knew. And it was an even smaller chance they’d respond to a letter from strangers. But Tonda and David have always embraced small odds.
“The odds of the marriage succeeding was like winning the lottery,” David said. “But we were young and dumb. I think we realized life would be better together than apart.”
This story was originally published January 5, 2019 at 5:02 PM.
