And so it begins

With my friends Chris and Dakota over cleaning up the outside of the house this morning, I figure it’s as good a time as any to recap last week – the first opportunity I’ve had to actually be in the house working.

And it was some work – dirty, sometimes frustrating, always fascinating. Uncovering decades of grime also meant revealing centuries of history – forged nails, hand-hewn logs (BIG logs), and curious elements that often didn’t have quick and easy answers.

Like a tiny closet-room off one of the upstairs rooms, above the stairs. What was that? Our current guess is that it was the access point to the original attic, before the last renovations. Right now, attic access is through a small opening by the chimney OUTSIDE that room, but as is clear from an access point in the other room, that’s not likely to have been the original attic.

And speaking of stairs … well, it looks like the stairs once opened to an outside door. We’d noticed an anomaly in the wall on the closed-in porch on the front – the walls out there are covered in bead board – but there’s a door-sized spot to the right of the front door, where there is bead board fitted in to cover that door-size spot. Was the front door there at first?

Well, no. As we stripped some of the bead board off at the bottom, we found an opening underneath – we could see into the closet beneath the stairs. And there – we could also see supports for stairs, leading all the way down to the porch instead of turning into the front room (this room is going to be our kitchen, so I’ll be calling it that from now on) as it does now.

Now this actually makes sense, both for the Roddye era and the Rogan era. James Roddye turned his house into the Tavern with the Red Door (and yes, we’re gonna have a red door) where weary travelers could spend the night, and the Rogans began around 1880 to rent rooms – so it’s a good idea to have an access to the sleeping quarters that doesn’t send guests traipsing through the living quarters of the family. While we can’t really know for sure that was the purpose, it’s certainly a logical conclusion.

Split level?

Digging around the stairs also provided some evidence to another thought we’d been having – that James Roddye’s original cabin was a one (possibly two) room affair, and that the second room (and possibly the upstairs) were added later. Right there on the edge of the stairs, we found a very obvious dovetail corner – in a spot that doesn’t make sense to have one if the house was built the way it stands now.

And that wasn’t the only thing that led us to believe the house wasn’t built all at once. There’s a step down into the second room on the downstairs for one. And in the upstairs room above that one, it’s clear that the current floor has been raised to reach the level of the other floor — there’s a gap between that floor and the older floor. And there’s what looks like a boarded up window in the other upstairs room – overlooking the second room.

So here’s our theory. Roddye came to Russellville with a wife and three children in 1785. He built a one-room cabin – maybe two, if he had an upstairs above that, possibly accessible by a ladder instead of stairs. But his family was still growing (8 more children) and his house became a regular stopping point on the Kentucky Road. So he did the logical thing: He added on. It wasn’t too much later, so for the most part the construction matched.

We also think he may have reconstructed the kitchen chimney around that time. The twin chimneys match now, although one is bigger than the other and the smaller one includes a fireplace upstairs. But as Chris and Dakota discovered in their Excellent Adventure below the house, the chimney base doesn’t match the outside.

But what about this?

OK, but then there’s the brick wall I found upstairs that we subsequently traced to a round opening in the ceiling of the added-on kitchen. That looks like a vent stack for a pot-bellied stove or something similar, and looking up inside, we could see where it’s now capped off and currently does not actually show up above the roof line.

The bricks are obviously hand-made, but whether it was purpose-built from repurposed brick when the kitchen was added on – or if it was an older, repurposed fireplace – we just don’t know.

I found that brick tucked in a corner closet-like space in a small room off the upstairs room with a fireplace. That room turned out to be Uncle Escoe’s legendary Cedar Closet, although I’m now calling it the Cedar Room because it seems to me to be more than a closet.

I’d never seen this room before. It’s on the back side, tucked into one of the dormers of the room with the fireplace. Now, I’d seen the closet in the other room – which has cedar bead board on the walls and ceiling – and had long thought THAT was the famed Cedar Closet. While it is a cedar closet, THE Cedar Closet is this other room, with high-quality cedar planks on the walls, a bookshelf built into where a window once was, and a beautiful view into the back. Seriously – it’s no wonder this room reached legendary status in my family. It’s truly beautiful.

It’s not likely that the room is gonna survive our renovations though since we’re pretty sure the back addons are going to have to be demolished. Don’t worry – we’ll be salvaging the wood, perhaps to be used on the walls of the new bathroom, where cedar will do well with moisture.

Clean-out

Before we get to any renovations, cleaning out is the main task, and that’s what I spent most of last week on. The Cedar Room and both upstairs rooms are, for the most part, cleared of garbage, tossed into the dumpster we had for a week, and hauled off. This work was arduous to say the least, and there’s much more to come (downstairs, for example!).

Still, it felt pretty magnificent to be finally getting to it. And clearing away debris made some other things pretty clear.

Prior to last week, there was just one place where’d I’d ever seen the original logs to the cabin, starting waaaaaay back when I was a wee child. And that was the start of my fascination with this house. The logs I saw were at one point the outside front wall of the original cabin. They can be seen in a space just off the front dormer in the room above the front door.

Those logs are in pretty pristine shape, just beautiful. And after moving some of the junk around from that room, we found some other gems – the floor joists, for one, and notches cut into the top log for roof support for another. The roof line has been raised to accommodate the dormers, leaving that top log just sitting there. Amazing.

We got a look at other logs inside that room as well – over in the corner by the closet, and on the back wall. Those logs were not in as good shape. It looks to be water damage from the bathroom, which is currently behind that wall. Looks reparable, though.

Chinky

Saving the best for last, even though it was actually on the first day. I don’t even remember how it started, but Dakota ended up taking off a lot of the older wall board around the inside of the front door in our future kitchen and wow oh wow. We both promise to be more careful in board removal in the future, but I gotta say, it was super exciting.

Stripping through the Thomason layers, to the Rogans’ board walls, down to Roddye’s hand-hewn logs – complete with chinking. I mean … not much else to say but wow. The chinking is really dry and crumbly now, after a couple hundred years. We’re looking for someone who can do an analysis of it to see exactly what they used.

And we’re gonna preserve some of the board walls, take it off carefully, clean it up, and reinstall it on a portion of the wall (or maybe a whole wall) to show the Red Door Tavern right next to Hayslope.

This being our future kitchen, we’re gonna restore the fireplace. It’s obviously huge (and huger than it looks inside, judging by the chimney outside) and actually recreate a cooking fireplace. The kitchen, I think, will be the centerpiece of restored Hayslope – a place for gathering, cooking, laughing, telling stories. And remembering the history of the place.

Etc

It wasn’t all log reveals and cleaning out garbage. The week before I arrived, we got electricity via a temporary pole outside (very helpful) and while I was there, we hooked up Holston Connect, which allowed me to install security cameras. In addition to being for security, I can now see the place anytime I want to. Score!

Also installed a new mailbox, with our name right on it. That makes me pretty darn happy.

So now I’m planning my next trip up, for more cleaning out and whatever else pops up. As I said in my first Facebook post from up there last week, “Hayslope is real.” The loooooonnnnng awaited restoration is real too.