Author: kwildmoon

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Long time no see

… at least here on the website. Those of you who follow Hayslope on Facebook have seen the occasional post there, but I have been remiss at keeping you up to date here. That’s because I generally use posts here to update after I’ve been on site, and I haven’t been since last September.

There’s a good reason for that. I had a nasty little fall and badly injured a leg right after returning from my last visit. It’s healing, albeit quite slowly, but it’s my driving leg and that makes it tough to drive for the length of time it takes to get up there.

But that doesn’t mean nothing’s been happening. The good news is that we’ve passed the point where there’s much that little old us can do ourselves and well into the time when those who actually have the wherewithal to do the heavy work are on it.

Let’s recap

Stuff!

We started this journey cleaning out the house about a year ago, and that was quite the task. So.Much.Stuff. And then more stuff. For a while, I was pretty sure ole Theo Rogan was putting more junk in there every time we left for the night. Eventually, though, all that didn’t belong was out and gone.

And finally, we could actually see what we were working with. And what we were working with was a 238-year-old log cabin that had an addition, built on stick framing, about 15 to 20 years later. And the walls were covered in chestnut boards. The roofline had been altered probably three or four times during the old girl’s lifetime, and there was the infamous addition put on by my uncle Escoe in the late 1930s which included a modern (for then) kitchen and bathroom, and a room upstairs made entirely of cedar.

We had the two open fireplaces on the north side, one downstairs and one upstairs. And the bigger, original fireplace in the original cabin – which had been closed in with a Franklin stove venting out through the chimney. And after a little outside cleanup, it was on those chimneys that the real work commenced.

Fire it up

We brought in the masons to rebuild those fireplaces and chimneys as well as the mystery chimney we found in the “modern” kitchen. Most importantly to me was the original fireplace – I wanted it open again and redone so that it could be used as it originally was, as a cooking fireplace. This was absolutely gonna be the single most expensive thing we did to the house, but to me WORTH IT.

Taking the big chimney all the way to the ground was necessary to get to the inside of it, mostly because the original had been enclosed at some point, I’m guessing pretty early on, likely to match it with the chimney on the addition. That chimney was taken all the way down too, to make sure it was sound once done. Both chimneys were rebuilt with the original brick and lined with a new stainless steel flue – or in the case of the south side chimney, two flues because the upstairs and downstairs chimneys had separate flues. Then, new caps on the top with dampers installed.

The big, southside chimney

Then there was the matter of the mystery chimney in Escoe’s kitchen. It did appear to be made with handmade brick, but we saw no sign of an actual fireplace on that wall (it would have been the back right corner of the original cabin. It stopped in the ceiling of the kitchen, however, and was clearly used to vent whatever cooking appliance was there originally. We had it taken out and rebuilt from the floor in the basement up. Most of it used the original brick that was in what was there, but our masons brought in some extra, period brick from elsewhere for the base, since there wasn’t enough to do that.

Now, to the original fireplace. It’s big, maybe not giant, but pretty big. Dakota and Megan had been certain they saw an arch when peering down behind the mantel. I couldn’t see it, but it sure was there, and uncovering it was something else. We first saw it from outside as the chimney came down. There were the massive log mantel beams, lots of original chinking, and that arch.

And, once we were down that low, it was time to take out the brick and concrete that had enclosed the fireplace from the inside. Once we were at this point, I could get the measurements for the fireplace and order the cooking crane we wanted to use so that the masons could mortar it in when they rebuilt the firebox itself.

That’s when something amazing happened. The guys took the concrete and brick off – it wasn’t as all-pervasive as we feared – and there, still mortared in place, was an iron rod, a pre-crane, iron lug pole used to hang pots over the fire for cooking.

The guys lit a fire in the big fireplace. Lug pole and clay firebacks in place.

A lug pole was typically a piece of green wood secured high up in a chimney so it wouldn’t burn, with a system of hooks and trammels used to hang pots (and raise or lower them as needed) . The lug pole gave way to the crane, which could be swung out and therefore not be quite as dangerous for the cooks. But this, apparently, was a step in between – an iron lug pole that could be put much lower and closer to the fire and not have to be periodically replaced as the wood lug pole would be.

Needless to say, I quickly cancelled the crane order. We wouldn’t be needing it and would use Roddye’s original iron lug pole for cooking.

Further discoveries included the original iron and clay firebacks, which are also back in place in our fireplace. The masons did have to take down the arch in order to rebuild it, using a curved piece of wood to place the bricks back into their arched shape and keep them in place until the mortar dried.

We’re also keeping the mantelpiece. It would have been far more work than we wanted to do to take it off, because of how it was attached to the brickwork, but it’s early 19th or late 18th century, and so original to Mr Roddye.

Onto the land

I never finished my post about my last trip up, in September, onaccounta the aforementioned accident, but the big deal of that trip (aside from seeing the chimney work for myself) was walking the land.

Dakota, Rhonda, and Nori in the woods.

Friends and board members Rhonda and Leslie, joined on that Saturday by Dakota (and all weekend by dog Nori) walked the land, seeing what native plants abound in the hills, and also a quick look at what invasive species we’ll need to dig or pull out.

And that’s because Hayslope wants to cultivate and propagate these native species, along with heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables we’re all familiar with. It doesn’t look like James Roddye’s orchards have survived the years in any useful format, so we’ll recreate those, and there was plenty else out there to find.

I haven’t talked much about our plans beyond the house, and there’s that whole 28 acres out there. We have no intention of ignoring that treasure! And, oh my, what a treasure it is.

Leslie’s botanical survey, which she said was “a very small beginning,” found passionflower, Dutch white and red clover, sassafras, blue vervain, boneset, goldenrod, poke, sweet violet, lance leaf plantain, mullein, staghorn sumac, great burdock, black stem peppermint and oh so much more. Up in the woods we found some pretty old growth hickory, including shag bark hickory, beech, chestnut, white, and red oak, Eastern red cedar, black walnut, black cherry, and more. Fall Creek was lined with sycamore trees, and tulip poplars (the state tree of Tennessee) popped up in several locations.

The idea here is to create a nursery of native species, another way for Hayslope to present its history and bring that into the present – for the future of us all.

While wandering around out in the fields – including the “swamp” between the spring and the creek (which wasn’t a swamp when I was a kid!) – we did see a few spots on the creek that could do with some clearing. There’s a small lake forming back under the Warrensburg Road bridge and beyond, so we’ll be looking to getting the creek flowing free again. As for the swamp, it’s likely caused, in part, by the creek blockages and in another part by blockages at the spring, which does appear to be bubbling up out of the ground just fine, if not flowing freely to the creek as it should.

What’s next?

Well, next I’ve GOT to get back up there. Soon, I promise …

Meanwhile, we begin work on the interior. Thomas Fraser, our contractor extraordaire, has taken the ceilings off upstairs, exposing the rafters and showing us, for the first time, how the roof really has changed over the years. Escoe’s multi-window dormers, which are prominent on the front and back now, were once just two single-window dormers on the front. One of those is completely gone and the other remains as a weird little closet above the stairs in what we call the Rogan Room.

The cedar room, dismantled.

Thomas has also begun work dismantling Escoe’s addition. That included a careful tear-down of the cedar room, and those boards have been carefully bundled up and put in storage for future use, just as we did the chestnut boards downstairs.

He’s also working to preserve a discovery the masons made when they were taking down the mystery chimney. Thomas opened it up further, but what we found back there were original walnut shingles on the original roof line, preserved beneath the modern roof instead of being torn off.

Annie Kendrick Walker, in her discussion of the Rogans’ 1904 50th wedding anniversary, mentioned the walnut shingles. I never expected to see them, and was planning to find someone who could build a display of what they would have looked like, but now we have the real thing.

Walnut shingles

So next is shoring up the foundation so that when the addition is removed, the back wall doesn’t come crashing down, and so that our new roof can be safely secured. We’ve had the engineer outline what we need to do (pretty much what we knew we needed to do) and are preparing to do that. Most of what needs to happen is beneath the back right side of the house, where Escoe dug a cellar for his wife Etta Mae’s canning. That’s where the worst of the termite damage is (yes, we had some, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as my mom told me it was!), so some beam replacement will be necessary.

That’s the way it is

And now, you’re up to date. The house is standing strong and is visited almost daily by the neighborhood cats, so I’m thinking there won’t be any rodent problems. Just now, as I’m finishing up this post, a new cat wandered by the big chimney. Handsome ginger fluff. At night, the cameras see raccoons and opossums and the occasional dog, and of course, the cats come by at all hours.

One of our illustrious furry visitors. They know all the secrets.

I’ve watched windstorms, rain, and snow through my cameras since I’ve been up last, and gosh I really do miss sitting outside and listening the birds, watching those buzzards and hawks soar overhead.

Typing all this up has just made me want to be there even more.

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Stacks

Chimney going down!

Just got back from another trip up to the ‘Slope, where at long last work has begun in earnest on the outside of the house – if you’ve driven by in the last few days, you may have noticed that the big chimney has come down. Dakota said at one point it looked like the chimney had exploded, and it did, as the crew separated whole bricks and partial bricks, cut limestone bricks and handmade bricks, all the way down to the big limestone base that’s sunk a few feet into the ground.

Don’t fret though – it’s going back up, solid and secure, so the fireplace can be used again.

The south side of the yard was filled with brick and cut limestone and chunks of mortar as Luis’s crew made fast work of the big chimney. We even got a look inside a broken brick or two, so we marveled over the color that Roddye’s bricks were when he first stacked them up by the house.

The color of brick

It was very dusty. And, once Luis and the crew broke into the firebox, sooty. Alas, no treasures were found in the ancient soot. It was pretty clean, as soot goes.

There were other treasures. From fingerprints of the men who made the brick to the hoof prints of the goat or lamb who pranced on the mortar before the brick could be laid, it’s all there. And inside the firebox … well, I had to cancel my order for a new fireplace crane to cook with because I won’t be needing it. And buried in the soot, James Roddye’s original cast iron firebacks, going back in place to at least symbolically continue the work they’ve done for 237 years.

237 years of soot

We learned that the mantlepiece we thought had been added in the 1930s was in place in the early 19th century, covering Roddye’s original, arched fireplace that had no mantle back in 1785. And we saw the massive header blocks … enormous chunks of wood nailed to the mantel to hold it in place while the mortar was drying.

Oh and speaking of mortar – Roddye didn’t exactly use what we’d think of as mortar on his part of the chimney. He used practically the same chinking material that he used between the logs of the cabin. Now THAT was a surprise!

This chimney appears to have been encased three times, bringing it to its current size. We’ll be taking it closer to Roddye’s original size and rather than using the stair-step structure to narrow at the top, the bricks will follow the arch from inside the firebox.

Mystery chimney

The mystery chimney enters the cedar room

All three of Hayslope’s chimneys are being torn down and rebuilt, and that includes the mystery third chimney we first found in upstairs in the cedar room’s closet. It was cut off at the ceiling of the kitchen down below, where very obviously a pot bellied stove of some type vented up and out. It’s possible, of course, that Uncle Escoe built it exactly like that, using repurposed brick because they were in fact hand made. Or he cut off a chimney that once went all the way down to add his kitchen stove. The bricks were held in place up there with metal braces – a little scary.

Whether we’re returning this chimney to its original purpose or not, we’ll probably never know. We’ve had the base taken all the way to the ground in the cellar, and we’ll be adding a firebox on the first floor of our two-story back porch. Imagine having a cup of coffee on the back porch in the morning with a little fire burning there …

2 flues

No pictures from the annex yet. But lookit the size of that block from inside the big chimney!

As for the chimney on the north side of the house, that one will be last, and it’s an interesting structure. I’ll be very curious to see what’s inside there. We know this chimney was added later – likely when Roddye added that north annex, sometimes between 1800 and 1820. It, too, has been encased, so we’re hoping that getting down to its original construction may help us date it more conclusively.

This chimney serves two fireplaces, one on the first floor and another on the second. Amazingly, it has two flues – the two fireplaces are completely independent of one another, and that means we’ll be able to bring them both back to full functionality without too much trouble.

All aboard

Leah Adams Dougherty, mother of Rebecca, Sarah, and Mary Ella, from Allen H. Eaton’s Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands. Photo by Doris Ulmann.

We’ve got quite a crew together now to do the work. Rice Hauling and Junk Removal from Knoxville has already made the grounds presentable (and cleared out the house itself) and will be coming back for some demolition work. Four Seasons Chimney and Fireplace, also from Knoxville, are doing incredible work on the chimneys. And Russellville’s own TF Building Solutions will be handling the roof and interior work.

Everybody’s super excited about this project, maybe none more so than the TF of TF Building Solutions – Thomas Fraser, who is busy with his own renovation – Greystone Cottage, the former home of Frank and Rebecca Dougherty Hyatt. You may know of Rebecca and her sisters Sarah (Sallie) and Mary Ella, who for years ran the Shuttle Crafters, the famed weaving center right over there on Three Springs Road, from 1923 into the 1950s (I believe). All three sisters were very active in our community, and Sallie later was instrumental in founding the David Crockett Tavern and Museum in Morristown.

Of course, the weaving the sisters did predates the Shuttle Crafters. They learned to weave from their mother, Leah Adams Dougherty, who learned from her mother. In fact, there’s a fragment of a coverlet that Sallie wove in 1910 at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. The blue and white piece is a copy of a border she saw on George Washington’s bed at Mount Vernon and isn’t currently on display at the museum.

But wait there’s more

Yeah, this wasn’t all that went down in my very short week at the house. We made some other very very interesting discoveries when the guys took down some of the ceiling in the cedar room. I’m really starting to understand that there’s just no end to finding new things as we go through this long overdue process of bringing Hayslope back to her full glory.

I’m just not gonna tell you what it all is yet.

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Things that aren’t true

When I spoke recently at the Hamblen County Genealogical Society, my first slide was about “Things that’s aren’t true.” It was a short list of things I’d heard all my life about Hayslope and the people who lived there – things that research showed me just weren’t quite right.

I get it. Somebody sometime way back when said something, and from that time on it was just accepted as true. And then there’s the game we knew as telephone – how stories change in the telling over and over. Whatever the origin, I quickly learned that there were some things that had been accepted fact that weren’t.

James Roddye wasn’t a Revolutionary War colonel

No, he wasn’t. Now, it does appear that he was called “colonel” for the rest of his life after the war, but Roddye was a private at King’s Mountain, the only official battle of the war he was actually in. I got my first inkling of this in applications for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution. Roddye indeed fought at King’s Mountain, but in all the applications I’ve seen, he was listed as a private. In some cases, applicants had called him a colonel, only to see DAR officials cross that out and write in “private.”

When the Overmountain men came back to East Tennessee from King’s Mountain, they fought another battle, this one against the Cherokee, at Boyd’s Creek. Roddye commanded troops in that battle – which is not always considered a battle of the Revolutionary War – and may well have been a captain at that time. But he still wasn’t a colonel, and Boyd’s Creek marked the end of his pre-United States military career.

In fact, most of the Overmountain men were never official soldiers. They were militia men who went into battle because their leaders, men like John Sevier and Isaac Shelby, called them to.

So how did Roddye get to be a colonel? Well, that came from the State of Franklin. The men who fought at King’s Mountain wanted to be a state, and not a part of North Carolina across the mountains. The short-lived “state” or “free republic” lasted from 1784 to 1788, and James Roddye, who had lived in Greene County, ended up in the new county of Caswell, on the north side of the Nolichucky River. John Sevier, Franklin’s governor, appointed him lieutenant colonel of the Caswell County militia, serving as second in command to Col. Alexander Outlaw. And from then on, Roddye was known as Col. James Roddye.

Roddye’s land grants did not include what would become Hayslope

We’ve all heard that Roddye built his house on the land grants he got from his service at King’s Mountain. If that’s true, I haven’t found the proof of it. Roddye’s grants were all over in what is now Whitesburg, on Bent Creek, not in what’s now Russellville on Fall Creek. Know who did have land grants on Fall Creek in what would become Russellville? Capt. George Russell, a friend of Roddye’s, fellow King’s Mountain veteran, and Roddye’s father-in-law. And the descriptions of Russell’s property sound just like the property we know to have ended up in Roddye’s hands.

One of Russell’s grants

I’ve not yet found any documentation about the sale of Roddye’s Bent Creek properties or his acquisition of Russell’s Fall Creek property, but I’m still looking. I suspect he bought it from Russell about the time George moved across the river to what’s now Grainger County. The two remained friends for the rest of Russell’s life – Roddye was the executor of his will when he died in 1797.

Russellville was not named for George Russell’s daughter, Lydia, Roddye’s wife

It was named for George Russell. I mean, come on. Common sense would tell you that. The confusion came from poor wording. Something akin to “Roddye married the daughter of George Russell, Lydia, for whom the town was named” became “Roddye married George Russell’s daughter Lydia for whom the town was named” and so on.

But no. Russell was the first of the Overmountain men to settle in what is now Russellville, on Fall Creek, where he reportedly had a mill. Russell strikes me as the kind of guy who just wanted to be left alone, so when more people began moving into Russellville (or Russelltown, as I’ve seen it called a time or two around this time) he bugged out to the other side of the Holston, leaving the town that bears his name to Roddye and those who came after.

Hugh Graham didn’t give Hayslope to his daughter as a wedding present

This one took some serious unpacking. Hugh Graham was a prominent Claiborne County businessman who got his start, with his brother William, as an apprentice with Patrick Nenney. The Grahams later went into business with Nenney, and Hugh Graham in particular grew very very wealthy, with land holdings all over East Tennessee and western Virginia.

He married Catherine Nenney, Patrick Nenney’s daughter, and they had several children, all of them girls except for one. Ultimately, he gave his house – Castle Rock in Tazewell – to his son and other properties to all his daughters and their husbands. The story had been that Graham gave what we know as Hayslope – half the Roddye property, which he bought either from James himself or his son Thomas – to his daughter Louisa when she married Theophilus Rogan in 1853.

Louisa Graham Rogan

There was just one problem. Rogan, an attorney who had worked for Graham, had gone to Texas in the late 1840s to practice law with his brother Leonidas and was still living there when he came back to Tazewell to marry Louisa. Then he and Louisa went back to Texas, where they stayed until Louisa returned to Tennessee in 1860, as the Civil War neared its start, and Theo followed in 1862.

So did he give them the property even though they weren’t going to be living there? Theo and Louisa had intended to stay in Texas, but the war changed those plans.

Graham’s will gave the answer to that, and also opened up more questions. Graham wrote his will in 1861. It was a lengthy and complicated document, with several codicils since he didn’t actually die until 1865. But the disposition of his properties to his son and daughters is very clear.

Graham decreed that “the Rhoddy farm” – which he said he bought from Charles P. Nenney, not a Roddye at all – should be divided between his daughters Mary Ann and her husband Absalom Kyle of Rogersville and Louisa and Theo. He devised an intricate plan for dividing the property equitably into two parts and then said that Louisa, “being the youngest,” should have first choice of which half. And she chose the half that became known as Hayslope. There’s no mention in Graham’s will about a wedding present, and the will further stipulates that the daughters will take possession of the property on January 1, 1862, or Graham’s death, whichever comes first.

Hugh Graham

But wait a minute. Graham bought the “Rhoddy” property from Charles P. Nenney, Patrick’s son and Graham’s brother-in-law? The Nenneys once owned the property? This was news to me, but I soon found the answer to that as well.

Here’s some background: James Roddye, who died in 1822, left his Russellville property to his son Thomas, stipulating that his wife Lydia should have use of it for the rest of her life. This probably worked out well for her, since Thomas was frequently traveling on business, although what kind of business we don’t know. Anyway, Thomas got married in January 1824, to Lydia Nenney, another of Patrick’s daughters. And then just three months later, Patrick Nenney died.

Several years earlier, I’d seen a document sold at auction in Knoxville that said it was an “indenture” between Thomas Roddye and John Donalson, another Overmountain man from our area. I kept copies of the document, but never read it. And because I never read it, I didn’t see the names of Hugh Graham and Lucy Nenney, Patrick’s wife. Nor did I see that the document was actually a promissory note of sorts from Thomas Roddye to the estate of Patrick Nenney.

The following year after Thomas’s marriage and Patrick Nenney’s death, Lydia Roddye, while visiting some of her children who lived in Rhea County, Tennessee, died and was buried there. And later that year, Thomas Roddye signed a document that said he owed the estate of Patrick Nenney $2,120 and that he promised to pay it. If he didn’t, the document said, John Donalson was authorized to sell his father’s property on the courthouse steps and give the proceeds to the Nenney estate, whose executors were Hugh Graham and Lucy Nenney, now Patrick’s widow. Four years later – in the document that was sold in Knoxville in 2013 – the parties acknowledged the earlier agreement, noted that Thomas Roddye had failed to pay his debt, and agreed that he would give his father’s property to the Nenney estate to satisfy it.

And that’s how the Nenneys came to own James Roddye’s property.

Exactly how Hugh Graham got it, we don’t yet know. He said in his will he bought it from Charles P. Nenney, who died in 1857, so we can safely assume it was before that. We don’t know if the property went to Charles in 1829 or if perhaps his mother took control of it at that time, in which case Charles P. would have gotten it when she died in 1853. All we can say for sure is that Hugh Graham bought Roddye’s land sometime between 1829 and 1857 and that the Nenneys, perhaps ever so briefly, once owned it.

Slave cabins were not still standing behind the house into the 1960s

I didn’t hear that until I was a little older. I saw those cottages, back when I was very young, and was told then that they were part of the resort. Later on, after they were torn down, someone suggested they had been slave cabins, which also made sense to me.

Turns out that what I was originally told was closer to the truth.

After Theo Rogan died in 1904, followed by Louisa in 1910, their children divided up the Hayslope property and drew from a hat to see who got what. Ellen Rogan Stephens, married to a citrus magnate and living in Florida, drew the house and its 28 acres. Hugh drew the property directly south of Ellen, Griffin the property behind Hugh’s, then Maggie, who was living in Virginia, the next parcel south, and Cassie the property closest to Sugar Hollow.

Ellen, who had no intention of returning to Tennessee, suggested that Cassie, who was unmarried, live in the old homeplace. She did that, selling her piece of the property. Maggie, in the same place as Ellen not intending to return to live in Tennessee, also sold hers, as did Hugh and Griffin, both of them moving to Florida near Ellen.

A chimney from one of Killiecrankie’s cottages.

Hugh sold his parcel to a cousin, Robert Patterson. Robert promply built a house and three cottages just across the old Kentucky Road from Hayslope, the road having long since become the drive into Hayslope. He called his house “Killiecrankie,” after a Scottish battle his Graham kin had participated in. The house was for the summer use of himself and his wife, Maude Hooper Patterson, her sister Ruth and her husband Robert Blair. The cottages were for the use of his mother-in-law, Maude Philpot Hooper, and other family members and friends. In the winter, they all returned to Selma, Alabama, where the Hoopers resided.

This lasted for decades. Robert Blair and Robert Patterson both died in the 1940s, and the sisters, Ruth and Maude, continued their summers in East Tennessee. Maude Patterson died in the 1950s, and Ruth Blair kept coming until she, too, died, in 1966. At that point, the city of Morristown ended up with that narrow strip of property and tore everything down.

Those three cottages were part of Killiecrankie, not slave cabins from the Roddye era.

We do think we can perhaps locate those slave cabins, along with other structures from older eras, on the property.

And no, that’s not James Roddye either

James Roddye’s signature on Tennessee’s first constitution

So that’s it. Things we thought were true but weren’t. Then there’s the picture in the slide – no one ever thought that was James Roddye; I just used it as an illustration. We’ve not found a portrait of Our Man James anywhere so far, although there are photographs of two of his daughters – Polly and Sednah. James probably did dress like that though.

Oh, and there’s also one famous historian who says that James’s brother William signed Tennessee’s first constitution. I figure he just got confused, because it very clearly says “Jas. Roddye” on that document.

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In the heat of the summer

Chris Hurley

It’s been a while, and I’ve got a lot to share! First, though, I want to thank the Hamblen County Genealogical Society for inviting to me to speak this month and share what’s going on at Hayslope. I had a blast meeting folks and answering questions!

And next, I’d like to welcome our newest board member, Chris Hurley. Chris works for Southern Constructors – and he lived at Hayslope for a number of years! Between Chris and Dakota we’ve really got the local history angle covered big time.

Look what we found

I say “we” because Dakota and I TECHNICALLY found it first. We just didn’t happen to pull it out from under the stairs where it’s been sitting for who knows how long. Megan did pull it out, and what a surprise! We think it’s likely telling us that James Roddye added the north annex in about 1800 and made this to commemorate. Of course, it’s always possible it was something else, but we’ll stick with this story for now!

Treasure trove

Before I even got back up to Tennessee this month, I made contact with another descendant of the Rogans, and she has scrapbooks of family material that her parents put together. There’s Theo’s will, 16 pages of “excerpts” from his reminisces, and tons more photographs. With these photos and Mallory Pearson’s, we’re getting a really good idea of how the house has changed through the years, even if we don’t know exactly what year most of them were taken. And there are some major mysteries. Like, what is that structure behind the house?

And whoa – there were dormers before Uncle Escoe’s! That explains that weird closet upstairs over the stairs!

And we’ve got our first look at some of Hayslope’s “cottages” (don’t blame me – that’s what they called them!). These two were both built by Hugh Rogan, likely in the late 1880s. They have similar plans but are slightly different – the one on the right was called the Yellow Cottage.

And we have a new image of Theo (with serious hat head). We’re not sure where he’s sitting. The rocks don’t appear to be Hayslope’s, nor does the porch behind him, but it’s quite possible he’s at one of the cottages.

Inside the house

I would say I’m saving the best for last, but I honestly couldn’t tell you which of these finds is truly the best. They’re all pretty terrific. But inside the walls of Hayslope, we’ve uncovered almost all of the original cabin’s logs. We now know that Roddye built a 14 x 18 foot cabin with a loft and later added the annex – which was stick framing.

He also cut a door from the original cabin into the annex, but it wasn’t the door we use now at the back of the house. The original door was right in the middle of that north wall, and it got covered when the stairs were added. Dakota found it when he began taking off the bead board on the stairs. The idea was to see if there were logs back there, and there were – yes, we have four walls of logs!

The door
Dowels

But Dakota also found what we initially thought was a window, until we started taking the covering off the wall from the annex side. That’s when we found it was a door, carefully cut into the logs and framed, with 1-inch wooden dowels attaching the frame to the logs. This was quite a discovery, and it changed how we’ll be doing the inside of the house, because we certainly want to showcase this early door.

So, the stairs will change, we’ll close off the door that’s been used to go from cabin to annex and this door will be the passage between the two. We had considerable discussion about whether this might be the original front door to the cabin, but it is not. The front door is still the front door.

Seeing entire walls of these beautiful logs is something else, I gotta say. A big surprise is that there are no windows (unless that door between the cabin and the annex was a window before the annex was built). We kept peeling off chestnut wall coverings expecting to find the elusive window, but there were none. Except high in the southwest corner of the cabin where we found a real live slot window. There may be a slot window on the northwest corner as well – well, there probably is, but the one on the southwest is quite obvious. These windows were used by the inhabitants to protect themselves from marauding Cherokees, who naturally were pretty unhappy with these new Americans setting up shop in what had been their land.

Slot window. We’ll open up the back side later on.

Another thing we found – etched into one of the chestnuts – sure looked to us like a drawing of the house:

What’s next?

Speaking of chestnuts, we’ve got those all secured off-premises now and have made arrangements for later to have them cleaned and planed for use in the house. Meanwhile, we’ve got lots going on.

Currently, the last of mounds of tree stumps and other bizarre things are being hauled off to the dump, and we’ve had a chimney sweep come in and take a look at our three stacks. Work on those will begin presently, starting with the weird little third chimney currently buried in the back addition – but precariously suspended above the kitchen ceiling. The first thing to do there is to secure that.

We’re going to have the big chimney dismantled – carefully, brick by brick – to get us to the original limestone, and then we’ll rebuild it while opening it on the inside. This particular part is very dear to me and I cannot wait to see it happen.

In the meantime, we’re getting very close to a final basic plan for the restoration, which is very exciting. A couple of modern conveniences, the original 1785 cabin, Rogan-era and Thomason-era additions will all be spotlighted in a careful way that doesn’t detract from the historicity of the place.

Lotta work. And I for one am loving it.

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Hayslope is coming alive

‘Twas a very short trip up to Hayslope last week, most of it spent painstakingly removing chestnut wall board from the logs in the main cabin room. But, boy, seeing those 237 year old logs out in the open again is somethin’ else.

The last of the junk outside the house was hauled off last week too, and the week before the inside got cleaned out. A big shoutout to Aaron at Rice Hauling and Junk Removal in Knoxville who took care of both those tasks smoothly and professionally.

The week before I got there, Dakota and Megan uncovered the fireplace header. And when I got there, Megan peered behind the mantle and could see that the fireplace opening appears to be rounded. We do plan to chip out the concrete and brick from the inside of that fireplace, and luckily, we learned that it’s only about six inches thick.

The cabin’s main room.

The big monster chimney you see outside the house isn’t original – it actually encases the original chimney. The smaller one on the other side also encases an older chimney. Our best guess for when that happened is the late 19th century, when the Rogans did some pretty extensive renovations and building for their resort.

But let’s go back to Colonel Roddye’s time. We’re now pretty certain that the original cabin was a one room with a loft/second floor (Megan is certain it was a fully second story, I’m still thinking it was more lofty) and was not the two-room wide house we see today. That became quite obvious when we found out that the north side of the house – what we’re calling the north annex – has no logs. None. Which kinda messed us up a little because of that photo I’d found in the Garden Study Club of Nashville’s 1936 book that was supposed to be Hayslope.

We studied a little closer and determined that it couldn’t be: The logs in the photo are too small (the logs on the house are 20-22 inches), the house in the photo is too close to the ground, and the north annex doesn’t have logs. Oh, and the kicker came last week as I was removing the chestnut boards from the inside front wall and found that the window that’s clearly seen in that photo doesn’t exist. It’s not Hayslope.

This isn’t Hayslope either, but it’s probably a good representation of what Roddye’s Red Door Tavern would have looked like in 1785.

But what about that north annex? It’s been there for quite some time, even if it wasn’t part of Roddye’s original cabin. It’s got a frame construction – pretty rare for the late 18th or early 19th centuries in our parts. We’d just about conceded that it was much later than we’d thought and probably wasn’t even built by Roddye at all when Megan made an amazing discovery.

The north annex is about five to six feet deeper than the original cabin – it’s what creates the front porch. Megan began taking off some of the wall boards there and found wooden pegs, hand-forged nails, hand sawn lumber – all indicating that, while the annex was a stick frame construction, it was built in the neighborhood of 1800, making it one of the oldest stick frame structures still standing in East Tennessee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEx6jvMarQo
Megan’s report on finding the 1800 stick framing

Whatever happened to Thomas Roddye?

I spent a day at the McClung Collection of the Knox Public Library last week. Since Thomas Roddye’s debt to Patrick Nenney landed the house in the hands of the Nenneys, I wanted to see if I could find some clues about who might have lived in it or what may have been done to it during the most mysterious period of the house’s history – from 1829 until the Rogans moved in in 1862. There wasn’t much. Hugh Graham’s will tells us he bought the property from Charles P. Nenney, who died in 1859, so he must have bought it before that time. But I found nothing to tell me anything about that. I plan to try again, and this time I’m gonna be looked at James Roddye’s purchases from the Bent Creek Store, operated by Patrick Nenney, to see if I can spot where he buys the lumber for the north annex.

The documents I looked through did give us some idea of what may have happened to Thomas Roddye, James’ son, after he signed over his father’s property to the Nenneys. It appears he and his wife Lydia went first to Rhea County, where several of his siblings already lived, and then in 1833 or 4 went to Carroll County, Georgia, perhaps chasing after gold. He went there with Needham Jarnagin, another fellow from our neck of the woods and who was married to Thomas’s wife’s sister, Margaret Nenney.

After that, no one seemed to know what happened to him. Lydia came back to the Russellville area, where she shows up in census records from 1850 until 1880. But Thomas? He disappears. There was some indication he may have died in about 1844, but no documentary evidence for anything, just a few notes from church records: Thomas is received at New Hope Baptist Church in Villa Rica, Georgia, by letter from Good Hope Church in Rhea County on February 22, 1834 (the letter was dated March 24, 1833). Lydia was received by letter at New Hope on March 22, 1834. In January 1837, Lydia was dismissed by letter from New Hope – meaning she intended to join another church somewhere else. And on August 25, 1837, Thomas was “excluded” from New Hope.

Then, while going through the Bent Creek store account books, Lydia Roddye’s name pops up in late 1837 and continues (she could appear earlier in the books, but alas, this collections starts in late 1837). The items she buys make it appear she might be taking in sewing. Lydia doesn’t show up in the 1840 census – but the listing for her mother, Lucy Nenney, shows another adult woman living with her and several children. That very well could be Lydia and her children.

But still, what of Thomas? Well, in February 1837 – after Lydia has left New Hope Church in Georgia – Needham Jarnagin writes to his brother-in-law, Charles P. Nenney, from St Augustine, Florida. Times are difficult, he doesn’t like the mosquitos and sand fleas in Florida, the fighting with “the Indians” continues. And then:

Letter from Needham Jarnigan to Charles P. Nenney, February 1837. The McClung Collection, Knox Public Library.

“I have had no news from Carroll since I wrote to Clementina (Nenney Hale, sister of Margaret and Lydia). I should not be surprised to hear that Roddy had become desperate and put an end to his life, but I will still hope for the best though I have but a sandy foundation to base my hopes upon, for it the report is true that he lost his money sporting, he would feel so much shame and disgrace that life would be a burden to him and from what I know of his character I believe he would not hesitate to rid himself of it at once. If this should be the case his family will be in a wretched condition for I fear there will not be property enough to pay the debts contracted since he came to Georgia.”

Letters to and from the Nenneys after that often include a note about providing money for Lydia. I’ve adjusted Thomas’s death date to 1837 and now believe, as Needham Jarnagin did, that he may well have killed himself, which would explain an exclusion from his church.

An illustrious visitor

Hayslope also hosted Wilhelmina Williams, president of the Earnest Fort House in Chuckey, last week. The fort house is a fascinating building built between 1779 and 1784 by Henry Earnest (born Heinrich Ernst in Switzerland). He and his family lived there until about 1800 when he built a larger house across the Nolichucky River on his farm there. Mrs Williams is quite the resource on this period in our history and I look forward to learning as much as possible from her – and to a visit to the fort house in the near future.

The Earnest Fort House
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Who ‘we’ are

It’s high time, probably past time, I introduced the people who are helping make this dream of mine possible, because for sure I need their encouragement and reality checks to keep going sometimes. Especially since I’m constantly talking about what “we’re” doing!

In the very beginning, I set up a non profit corporation so we’d be able to solicit donations and grants for this project, and that required selecting a board of directors. So without further adieu …

Rhonda Reno

Rhonda is and artist and one of my oldest (longest term, not age wise!) friends on the planet, and many many years ago, I talked her ear off about the things I wanted to do with this 28 acre piece of land and its decrepit looking house. She offered tons of suggestions, was an amazing sounding board, and just generally good friend.

Flash forward to the 21st century, and Rhonda now runs a gardening business called Quiet Gardening, because who needs all those loud, gas-powered machines in your precious, peaceful garden?

Leslie Williams

Leslie’s also a long-term friend. She’s a poet, a musician (she can play banjo!), and is a certified bicycle mechanic. Leslie and I share a love of the earth and the living creatures on it, of which there are quite a few at Hayslope.

Leslie is also an herbalist. She knows more about plants and their uses than I thought humanly possible, and she shares that wisdom through classes and consultations at Ordinary Herbalist.

Megan Gray

Megan is Hayslope’s project manager. I was gonna say she has probably forgotten more about historic preservation than I’ll ever know, but in reality, she’s not forgotten anything at all. I am trying to catch up, but I think I’m too far behind. Megan literally hunted me down a couple years ago when she found Hayslope sitting forlorn and unloved up on the knoll above Warrensburg Road. “This place needs to be preserved,” she said, and I couldn’t agree more.

Megan is documenting her work onsite at Hayslope at her website, where she gets into the weeds about the hows and whys and wheres and whats, digging into mysteries and searching for sometimes elusive answers.

Sabrina Cagle

Sabrina is my first cousin, so it’s safe to say I’ve known her all her life (I am older). Her mom and my dad were brother and sister. There was some familial conflict back in the day (not with her!) so our getting close took a little time, since I ran away from home (sort of) when she was about 5.

These days, Sabrina knows her way around home improvement and especially wood, since she works as a designer at Hardwood Specialties in Morristown. Plus the home where she and husband Johnny live (formerly our grandfather’s home) is my soft space to land when I’m up working on the house.

Dakota Carmichael

What can I say about Dakota? Getting to know this guy has been one of the best parts of beginning the Hayslope project. He shares my love of our region and its history, loves research, and certainly isn’t afraid to get down and dirty.

Y’all may know him from The Old History Project, which documents the history of East Tennessee and its people in video, photos, and podcasts – for which he has won awards, most recently from the East Tennessee Historical Society. He’s also a detectorist, and he’s got some secret projects coming along that he’ll be sharing soon.

And finally

There’s me. I’m KC Wildmoon, which is a name that came from … well, a lot … and was mostly a stage name when I played rock ‘n’ roll music. It stuck. I’m from the Thomason family in Russellville.

Along with music and theater, I’ve been a journalist for the better part of 40 years. Now that just keeps me afloat while I pour my heart and soul into Hayslope, something I’ve wanted to do for a very, very long time. I’m so delighted to finally get that chance.

If you’re looking for me, I’ll be the one with some shade of blue hair.

And that’s it

Right now, I’m pretty much in charge – it is my house, after all. For the longest time, it felt like we were never gonna get inside and start doing the actual work, and now that we are, I’ll be leaning on these folks more and more – each of them brings so much more to the project than I could ever muster on my own. And so, here we go – bringing Hayslope back to life!

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The more we learn, the less we know, part two

When last we spoke, yesterday I believe it was, I told you all about the exciting week of visitors at Hayslope, from the termite technician to cousin Peggy. After all that, I came back home to recuperate.

But before I left, I received a message that was about to change everything. OK, maybe not everything, but a lot.

See, a few weeks ago, I put out a few feelers trying to find descendants of the Rogans who could maybe tell me a little about the family’s time at Hayslope or even show me some photos of the people and/or the house.

I received one reply before I headed to Tennessee, from a great great granddaughter of Theo and Louisa Rogan via William Henry and Margaret Rogan Millar’s son Winn. She was headed out of the country, though, and promised to get back to me when she returned.

While in Tennessee, I was put in touch with Mallory Pearson by her son. Mallory is also a great-great granddaughter of Theo and Louisa, via William Henry and Margaret’s other son, Rogan Latimer Millar. And Mallory was excited about my little project, particularly because of the love and memories of her mother, Charlotte, and grandfather.

I sent Mallory the photos of the house that I have, and then on Monday, the treasures began.

26 years ago

Mallory and Charlotte visited East Tennessee in 1996, stopping by Hayslope and Hugh Graham’s Castle Rock, which of course by that time had been moved from Tazewell to Knoxville and was called Speedwell Manor. But let’s take a look at Hayslope 26 years ago.

Hayslope 1996, courtesy Mallory Pearson

Here’s the back of the house as it appeared back then. It’s not terribly different from how it looks now but for one little thing: jutting up from the dormer roof is a chimney, and it’s the mystery chimney we’d found in the closet of the cedar room, now known as Bobby’s room.

It may have been in use in 1996 – it clearly came out into Uncle Escoe’s kitchen and in all likelihood was used for a wood burning stove. Now, however, it’s capped off and roofed over on top, existing only in the closet upstairs.

Mystery chimney in Bobby’s closet

It’s possible, but we sure don’t know yet, that this chimney was the first chimney in Roddye’s old cabin. If that’s true, it would have been in the back right corner of the main room before Roddye added the second room on the north side of the house.

It does appear to be made of homemade brick, which means it almost certainly wasn’t the Rogans’ or the Thomasons’ doing. It’s also gonna be a little tricky when it comes time to take off that back addition – the bottom part of the chimney no longer exists. It stops at the ceiling in the kitchen.

Next up is Charlotte standing in front of a rock building. Mallory tells me this was the ice house and that her mother recalled collecting butter and other chilled items for her grandmother, Margaret Rogan Millar. Charlotte called Margaret (known as Mattie to friends and adult relatives) “Hanka” and her grandfather “Pop.”

Charlotte Miller Keefe at the ice house

Turns out that Dakota knows where the ice house once stood – back of the house near the gate into the field – and it matches with Mallory’s description of its location. I am particularly interested in this house because of a note I found in February while going through documents at the East Tennessee Historical Society. It was copied from the papers of Antoinette Miller Taylor by Sara Mauer, who was researching the Rogans at the time. It was sometime after Cassie Rogan’s death in 1932, likely in 1937 when Escoe and Briscoe Thomason bought the place from Ellen Stephens. Mrs Taylor wrote:

“Hayslope had been sold. The new owner was pressing to take possession. All the furniture and other items had been divided among the heirs or sold. Heartbroken to see the lovely old place to go out of the family where it had been ‘since Indian days,’ I was wandering disconsolately through the now empty rooms when Louisa Rogan’s daughter Margaret (Millar – Mallory’s great grandmother) found me. ‘You may have anything that is left you would like. We are going to burn everything down at the old rock house right away.'”

She must have been referring to the ice house. What must they have burned! We plan a dig around the area to see what we find – no papers or other flammable materials, for sure, but perhaps some metal or stone.

Hayslope’s Rogan family

Mallory sent me a mind-blowing trove of photos of Rogan family members, and immediately I knew that I’ll have to create a gallery of them for the house. The best I can do now for you, dear readers, is to show you a digital gallery:

Margaret Louise Rogan Millar (Mattie)
Edith Millar, daughter of William Henry and Mattie
Charlotte Millar and her mother, Louise Moore Millar
Mattie’s sister Ellen Rogan Stephens, the last Rogan to own Hayslope
Edith, Marie, and Margaret MIllar, daughters of William Henry and Mattie
Rogan Latimer Millar, son of William Henry and Mattie
Mattie’s brother Hugh Rogan
Mattie’s mother, Louisa Graham Rogan
Rogan family members, courtesy Mallory Pearson

There are more. This is but a sampling. Mallory is kindly making me some actual copies of many of these. I’m sure I’ll be sharing more as we go along, but already this post, too, is growing longer and I have a few more delicacies to present.

Princess Donna Miriam DeLiguori and her son Vrin, courtesy Mallory Pearson

There are a lot of stories about famous people visiting the house, either when James Roddye owned it or later when the Rogans did. Mostly we have no proof of those, although they do make a lot of sense. It is likely that Andrew Jackson stopped by. Maybe even Andrew Johnson. The future king of France, Prince Louis Phillippe was in the area in the late 18th century, but we don’t know if he came by the house.

We do know that this princess did, however. Her name is Donna Miriam DeLiguori, and she was the daughter of Prince Ferdinand DeLiguori of Italy and his wife Mary Williams – Louisa Rogan’s niece and daughter of her sister, Lucy Jane. That’s the princess’s son Vrin with her when they were visiting their relatives at Hayslope. I don’t have a date for this photo, nor have I found anything more about the family, but then I’ve only just started looking.

And then, this

Mallory and I spent much of the day passing photos and questions and answers back and forth. It was utterly delightful for me, and I certainly hope she enjoyed it as much. Near the end of the day, though, came the biggest surprise of all. She’d already sent me one photo of the house, but it appeared to be a later photo made after Uncle Escoe had moved in and renovated. Then she sent a second one:

Hayslope in 1935, courtesy Mallory Pearson

At first glance, it would appear to be after Escoe’s renovations. But the date on the back, from the photo shop that processed it, says no: This photo was taken in 1935, before the Thomasons bought the house.

In the 1940s, courtesy Peggy Farmer

That’s when I started noticing the differences. Like the front porch – screened in during Escoe’s time, and now but open in 1935. The rooflines on the right and left appear to still be on the edge of the house, keeping the chimneys outside the roof, not coming through as they do now. The “carporty thing” – obviously not a carport – is wider than it is now, and there’s an obvious porch on top, with a level floor, not the sloping roof it has now. I can’t tell for sure if there are dormers on the roof, but I think not. The faintest hints of the dining room are visible at the back of the house through the carporty thing/roof porch supports and above, behind that porch roof.

My assumption had always been that this construct was my uncle’s doing, but it apparently was not. I had also assumed that the Rogans kept the basic log look of Roddye’s home, but apparently they did not. But Anne Kendrick Walker’s description (when she wrote about the Rogan’s 50th wedding anniversary) of the front porch being of the “small” and “boxed” type suddenly makes more sense.

The back of Hayslope, courtesy Peggy Farmer

With the discovery of this photo, we’re now of the mind that this was the front of the house while the back looked like it does in the photo I got from Peggy Farmer. Escoe did later take that porch off and remove the dining room, but for the Rogans, this may well have been how the house looked from the final years of the 1890s until Escoe began his work.

When I first began this journey, I was surprised at how much I thought I knew about this historic place just wasn’t quite true – but then, stories do change in the telling, particularly when you’re starting 240 years ago. I guess I just thought things might be a little more sure later on in the history.

It’s all perfectly fine though. Coaxing out the history of this jewel is just my cup of tea, or coffee in my case. And I look forward to more discoveries.

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The more we learn, the less we know, part one

I don’t even know where to start. The last two weeks, one up in Tennessee and another here in Georgia, have been … well, pretty darn fantastic. And also surprising.

First, let me tell you that I’ll be speaking on August 4 at the Hamblen County Genealogy Society meeting at the Morristown Senior Center about the house and its families. I’m super excited about it, and really delighted that they asked me. The meeting starts at 5:30 p.m., so hope to see you there!

ETHS’s Dr Warren Dokter with The Old History Project’s Dakota Blade Carmichael

Speaking of the genealogy society, I also traveled to Knoxville that week, to the East Tennessee Historical Society, where the society picked up an award for its Hamblen County Families book and our friend Dakota, AKA The Old History Project, won one for the incredible work he does on our area’s history.

Our county was well represented, as Mike Beck was also present to pick up the Dot Kelley Preservation Grant Award!

I started working on my talk when I came back to Georgia from Tennessee and had a first draft, but some of that has now changed, thanks to these past two weeks. So, what happened? Guess the best way to start is just to dive in!

A second dumpster

I had so hoped that 30-yard dumpster was gonna do the trick for the upstairs, but alas, it did not. So for the trip up, I ordered another dumpster – a 20-yard this time – for another week. The goal was to get the rest of the junk out of upstairs – the stuff that came out of the three closets.

I’m pleased to say that Dakota and I made it happen. I got a lot of it out myself – tossing stuff off that porch roof is kinda fun after all – and then Dakota came in for the larger and heavier stuff I couldn’t handle alone, including two more upstairs televisions, of the very old variety.

The upstairs room with the fireplace, before sweeping.

All that remains up there now are a few items I’m keeping (for now) and a couple boxes of books to donate.

Then I decided I wanted to try to clean out the carporty thing (more on that structure later), so I was tossing more crap into the dumpster from there when suddenly I remembered that my cousin Peggy Farmer – Uncle Escoe’s daughter – and her son Scott were coming over. While the upstairs had even been swept, the downstairs was still quite a mess, so I thought it might be a good idea to at least make a path for Peggy to walk.

So I bagged up some of the debris we left when we revealed some of the logs, dragged a box of something out and got it into the dumpster, and even moved a recliner out of the way. Dakota even got the sofa out! There’s still more in there, but we were able to create a clear path for moving around in there without fear of falling.

The gorilla cart came in handy as we rolled a few big items down to the road, where the county’s Claw will pick them up later on. Used to cart to clear a little bit more out of the carporty thing and some items out of the back yard (still a mess back there), but the result was a rather neater looking front, and just in time for Peggy to come by.

The bells are ringing

But before Peggy’s visit, Sandy Beesley and her husband dropped by. They had a very specific purpose – you see, a few weeks ago, Sandy told me she had Hayslope’s old dinner bell, having bought it several years ago at a sale at the house. Naturally, I asked if she’d sell it to me. She said she’d think about it.

A few weeks later, Sandy messaged and said no, she wouldn’t sell it to me, but if I could find her a comparable bell, she’d trade with me. Naturally, I immediately hunted one down.

The Hayslope dinner bell

So while I was in Tennessee, we made the trade there beneath the shade of the hemlock tree (more about that later too). I’m so tickled to have the bell, and Sandy was pleased with her replacement and to see the old bell come home too. I can’t even begin to say how appreciative I am.

The bell has gone to live in my storage unit in Morristown, because its home location will be in the way of some the construction and deconstruction we’ll be doing soon on the house. It’s an old bell – manufactured by Jenny & Manning in Washington Court House, Ohio – a company that only made bells in 1888 and 1889.

Harry and James

The Beesleys weren’t our only guests before Peggy and Scott came by. Martha and Tom Henard drove over from Rogersville to see the house too. Martha is a descendant of James Roddye through his son Jesse who moved to Rhea County, and boy did we have some fun swapping stories!

Martha and her mother did a lot, and I mean a LOT, of research about the Roddyes, and my favorite story of all that she told me is this: When she and her mother visited the colonel’s grave at Bent Creek cemetery some time ago, there was a docent there who helped them find the location of the grave (because the gravestone and been long since lost). Now, I want to know who this docent was, of course, but never mind. They located the grave, and it was Martha’s mother who later saw to it that the colonel got a new marker.

James Roddye’s grave (with the orange paint). I hadn’t realized he was buried right next to Bent Creek’s first burial, the unknown traveler.

They also notice a depression in the ground next to Roddye and asked who might possibly be buried next to him (since his wife Lydia is buried in Rhea County in what’s now called the Mynatt Cemetery but was previously known as the Washington Cemetery). The docent leaned in and conspiratorially said that the story is that Harry is buried next to James.

Who’s Harry? Harry was Roddye’s “manservant,” his slave. In his will, Roddye freed him and told his sons William and Thomas, who inherited Roddye’s Russellville properties, to make sure Harry was cared for as long as he lived. The story is that James and Harry had known one another from childhood and, as much as can be possible in a white man-Black man relationship in the 18th century, were very, very close. I had wondered where Harry might have been buried, since he survived the colonel. I’m not sure if we can prove this, either, but we know there are other Black people buried at Bent Creek, and that in its early days, the church itself welcomed Black members. This is another instance for more research.

The hemlock

Tom was also a huge help. For one, he identified the large tree in the middle of the front yard, the one where Ralph the Buzzard sits almost every day, as a hemlock, not a cedar as I (embarrassingly) assumed. Tom also told me what to do to protect it from the wooly something-or-others that are swooping down into the south in a bold attempt to kill all the hemlocks. Naturally, I ran right out and took care of that.

I also decided that that hemlock is gonna be part of our logo. Tom said he guesses it to be 100-150 years old, not as old as the house, but the hemlock is an important tree for our area. Plus, I’ve lived on Hemlock Drive in Georgia for more than 20 years.

Homecoming

Before even the Beesleys and the Henards came by, I gave a tour of the house to Daniel, the termite technician from East Tennessee Pest Control who came by to check the termite baits. Daniel had been one of two to install the baits earlier this year, and it was pretty clear he was interested in the house. This time he came alone and told me that he’d had to take the long way around because a train was stopped on the tracks – and if it hadn’t been this particular house, he would’ve just skipped it and noted he couldn’t get to the house. But Daniel is another history buff and was pretty taken by the logs and amazing history of Hayslope.

And then it was time for Peggy and Scott, and Scott’s son Josh. It was an honor to show them around the place, to hear Peggy’s remembrances of living there as a young girl. And she brought pictures!

A pond and an outdoor grill

First though – Peggy confirmed that this structure above was, indeed, a pond, and that the bricks we can see beneath the fallen tree were part of an outdoor grill. Then she told us about riding her wagon across the back yard’s gentle slope, long enough to get a little speed but not so long as to get out of control – sort of, anyway. She told us she distinctly recalls once missing her turning point and crashing headlong into the pond! Maybe when we dig it out and refill it with water, we can get her to recreate the ride for us!

Peggy also told us that she didn’t recall the carporty thing being there, first because nobody used carports then. After what I’ve learned this week, I may know why. But that’s later.

The most amazing photo, though, was one that showed Hayslope from an angle I’d never seen before – the back. Here we see the familiar giant chimney on the south side of the house, but with a double porch across the back! And an addition on the north side on the back that is almost certainly the dining room built by the Rogans in 1898.

The back of Hayslope

These photos are so tantalizing, not just because of what we can see, but because of what we can’t see – or what we can ALMOST see. In this one, we can see stairs on the back porch connecting the two levels and what just might be that mystery chimney we found in the closet of Uncle Escoe’s cedar room, which Peggy told us was her brother Bobby’s bedroom.

Another thing we can almost see in the photo is the front roofline, which appears to slope more steeply than the rear roof, down over the front porch that Anne Kendrick Walker described as “boxed” in her story about the Rogans’ 50th wedding anniversary party. Here, also, the chimney is still outside the roof line rather than going through it as it does now and is in this next photo, which Peggy sent to me. The upper part of the chimney also appears somewhat larger in the above photo – indicating they may have slimmed it down to fit through the roof.

Cool car, porch screened in, chimney through the roof.

Peggy didn’t know a date for the back of the house photo, but it must be before Escoe’s renovation work, when the dormers on the back came along, the porch disappeared (as did the addition), and a kitchen was added to the back (with a bathroom, Bobby’s bedroom, and a cedar closet upstairs).

And what I didn’t know was that I was about to see another photo that would change all my ideas about what happened to the house when, even as it made a lot of sense after seeing this one.

But I’m gonna save that for next time, because this is quite long enough already. Now that I’ve written this much, it shouldn’t be too long before I start telling you that story.

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Springtime in East Tennessee

I’m just back from another trip to my beloved Hayslope (sure wish I lived closer!), this time shorter than the last. It was productive, and also a little frustrating.

Iris in the back yard

The goals for this trip were to get the three closets upstairs cleared out, along with the mattresses still sitting in the upstairs rooms and maybe even get starting hauling stuff out of what will be our kitchen.

OK, I got the closets cleared. Barely. The smallest of the closets – and the one I tackled first – nearly did me in on Day 1. I am pretty sure the former tenants sucked all the air out of it and compressed everything down so they could put even more stuff in there. I mean, there was a television! I filled SEVEN contractor bags, dragged one other, already filled contractor bag, and several more filled boxes and bags along with assorted shelves outta there.

Closet number 1, about half way through
Came out of Closet Number 1
Closet number 1 after
More of what came out of Closet Number 1
What came out of Closet Number 2
What came out of Closet Number 3
More of what came out of Closet Number 3
Closet Number 3 empty
Those logs!

The next closet didn’t have nearly as much stuff, but it did contain some weird things, like the pedestal from a pedestal sink and a broken glider. Also a door. It was red! And then the third closet … frankly I almost gave up on it. It was truly the junkiest of junk closets. While the other two were mainly old and moldy clothes, this one was full of broken things, boxes of pieces of something or another. Another television. An artificial Christmas tree in multiple pieces.

I determined on the very first day there was no way I was gonna go up and down those stairs with all that garbage to get it out to the road (my original idea) and decided then and there it was gonna stay upstairs until next time, when I can bring another dumpster in. While I’d like nothing more than to be able to donate this stuff, it’s in no condition to go into anyone else’s home, let alone be worn on their bodies!

Treasures

I didn’t tear anymore wall boards off to find logs, although getting all the junk out of Closet Number 3 allowed for a clear view of the original front outside wall of the cabin (photos in the gallery in the first section). Closet Number 1 contained some really old vinyl records, including one that was specifically recorded for use with a Victrola – it was recorded on only one side – and featured early 20th century opera singer Enrico Caruso. Now I want a Victrola for the house.

The bestest treasure came from Dakota of The Old History Project. He had taken a couple pieces of the wall boards that we tore off last time home with him. What I didn’t know is what he did with them.

Courtesy of The Old History Project

First, he planed all the paint off and had an arborist take a look. The arborist confirmed that the wood covering the walls in what’s to be our kitchen (at least) is indeed American chestnut. And that’s not all. Then he researched what font would have been used for signs in the two historical eras of the house – Roddye’s Red Door Tavern and the Rogans’ Hayslope – had an artist sketch out signs, and then painted them. It was all I could do not to cry when he gave them to me. They’re going to have places of great honor when all this is done!

I got another treasure when I stopped by the Crockett Museum in Morristown. Actually, I stopped by twice – I wanted to give them a copy of my Hayslope book and drop off some brochures and also chat with the museum director, Sally Baker. Sally wasn’t there the first day I stopped by, so I tagged along with an absolutely terrific tour by guide Christina (who really knows her stuff – and it was her FIRST day staffing the museum alone). I came by the next day and caught Sally. We had a wonderful chat and she gifted me a book of the ledgers from the general store at Cheek’s Crossroads, about a mile from Hayslope where the Kentucky Road crosses the great trail that comes down from Virginia. Editor Ann Bloomquist did an amazing job – she created an index of the people who bought things at the store AND an index of what they bought, which also serves as a glossary of sorts because some of the items are just not known to us now (do you know what “fearnaught” is?). Naturally I looked up Our Man James. He bought a lot of thread and fabric and other assorted things, including some “small blue-edged plates” and a “fine man’s hat.”

And also

Roofers on board!

Figuring it’s good to have some things going on at the house that are visible, I actually started out the week doing some outdoor things. I had roofers come by and install a tarp over the dormers, where there was a significant leak on the second floor. I’ve not found any other spots where there’s leaking, but I’ll be keeping a close eye out in case we need more of the blue stuff up top.

I also added the Hayslope sign I had made some time ago. It’s down closer to the road, in the middle of the two driveways. I specifically left out the Civil War history – touching only on Roddye and the Rogans’ resort – because the Civil War Trails signage will cover McLaws stay at the house as well as Father Abram’s preaching there.

The sign was my final outdoor chore, and it’s second post was a problem from the start. Ran into a giant root, I know not from whence it came, about six inches down and had to shift the hole slightly, then the post hole setting foam I was using expanded weirdly and made the post lean, and finally when I tried to do something about that, I grabbed one of my leveling sticks too soon and got that crap all over my hands. For future reference, alcohol removes the stickiness.

The first thing I did this past week, though, was dig the first of the three post holes, this one for a 20 foot flag pole. It’s looking good, in the center of the driveway curve closer to the house. Hayslope is flying the 15-star, 15-stripe flag that was the official US flag from 1795 to 1818. It was the official flag when Tennessee became a state in 1796 and was the flag flying over Fort McHenry when Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Tennessee, interestingly, didn’t have an official flag until 1905. There were several designs in use prior to that, but the flag we know and love today is the only one that can be said to be the official state flag. It was designed by a Tennessee National Guard colonel named LeRoy Reeves, who was an attorney from Johnson City. And that’s the flag that’s flying under our 15-star flag.

By the way, did you know that the governor and the state general assembly have their own flags?

The governor’s flag
The legislature’s flag
An unofficial official flag, in unofficial use from 1897 to 1905
A flag that was proposed i 1861 but never adopted. It looks really similar to Georgia’s current flag because the both use the red-white-red stripes of the Confederacy’s flag with a blue field and the seals of the state.

Anyway, that’s a recap of last week’s trip. Stay tuned to our Facebook page, the easiest way to find out when my next trip up will be. I’ll post it there as soon as I settle on the dates.

P.S.

Oh, I almost forgot! I’m super excited about this. I’ve been asked to speak at the Hamblen County Genealogy Society about Hayslope and its people We’ve scheduled that for August 4. Society meetings are from 5:30 p.m. to 7 -7:30 p.m. at the Senior Citizens Center in Morristown.

Dinner time!

And one more thing – a comment on a post in the Hamblen County History Group on Facebook alerted me to Hayslope’s dinner bell, bought by a local woman at an auction on the property in the late 70s or early 80s. She says the yoke isn’t original, but it has a clapper, and she’s thinking about if she wants to sell it to me. It’ll just go right back to Hayslope!

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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.

Forged nail

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?

Covered door
Going down?

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.

That dovetail

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.

Left: the inside of the brick (right) found upstairs

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.

The Cedar Room

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.