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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
