Category: The People

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An Act to establish the town of Russellville

OK, last time I gave you a rundown of the ownership of the Roddye property through the years (specifically narrowing down to the 28 acres where the house now sits). Today, we’ll talk about the founding Russellville.

Our little town was named either for George Russell, the colonel’s friend and father-in-law, or for the entire Russell family, and it’s pretty certain that James Roddye was behind the choice of that name. Roddye married Russell’s daughter, Lydia, either just before or just after King’s Mountain, while both were still living in the Watauga settlements. After King’s Mountain, Russell and Roddye were among the men who came looking for land further west and landed in our area.

Roddye’s land grants are all along Bent Creek, which puts him in what’s now Whitesburg, and Russell’s were along Fall Creek, which plants him in what we call Russellville (I have seen one or two mentions of “Russelltown” in some really old documents, but apparently it was the ville that won out).

I’m not altogether certain that George Russell ever lived here. He was living across the river in what’s now Grainger County (German Creek, to be specific) fairly early on, and the documentation we have says the Roddye built his house in 1783, which is the same year that both men applied for their land grants.

One of Russell’s surveys, showing Fall Creek

Now, applying for the grants and actually having them officially recorded in the deed book sometimes took quite some time. The reasons for that involve the time it takes to send a surveyor out to do the official survey, come back and record it, which takes people to handwrite them into the deed book, along with copies of the deed and survey for the new “owners.” And there were a lot of them. The Europeans were grabbing as much Cherokee land as they could and making a fortune selling it to other Europeans, all the while heading out to force the Cherokee further and further away from their newly grabbed land. It takes a lot of time, all on horseback or foot.

So Russell’s Fall Creek grants, applied for in what was then Greene County, North Carolina, moved next (and very briefly, since it didn’t make it to actual state-ness) to the State of Franklin. The deeds were finally written into the deed book in 1787, still in the not-really-real Franklin and also North Carolina at the same time. At about that time, William Armstrong’s land around his Stoney Point and some acreage around it, including Roddye’s and Russell’s, ended up in the newly formed Hawkins County, North Carolina. So the deeds are transferred to the new county seat, Rogersville, and the following year – 1788 – the idea of Franklin bit the dust forever.

Meanwhile, Russell has sold the Fall Creek properties to Roddye for 300 pounds. That deed is recorded in Rogersville in 1790, and at about that time, North Carolina cedes the territory west of the Appalachians to the US government, and it become the Territory South of the Ohio River. Two years later, Jefferson County is formed, and our area falls into that county. Four years after that, the territory south of the Ohio is admitted to the union as the 16th state, Tennessee.

Whew. Once Tennessee is a state, Roddye got really busy buying and selling. He even briefly disappears from his Jefferson County lands in the early 1800s. I once thought he may have gone down to Rhea County, where his son Jesse had gone, but it appears that instead he went to Claiborne County, where he operated a ferry over the Powell River on the Kentucky Road as well as a tavern. He was there for a few years before returning to Russellville, where he owned most of what eventually became “downtown.”

1810 deed from Roddye giving Deaderick the rights to run a mill race over his property

In 1810, he gave William H. Deaderick, a Hawkins County doctor, a deed to build a dam on Fall Creek and a mill race to cross Roddye’s property for a mill the good doctor built on his own property, adjacent to Roddye’s. It must have been around this time that Roddye and Deaderick began talking about the idea of an actual town.

In about 1819, the two men created a plan for said town. I’ve not found that plan yet, but I’m still searching. I know there was one because it’s mentioned in the official act to create the town of Russellville, which we’ll get to shortly.

Meanwhile, from about 1819 forward, Roddye and Deaderick are involved in selling land along what they call the Cross Roads Street – what we’ve known as Russellville Pike, Main Street, or just the old road. Deeds show that there were 18 “town lots” created along Cross Roads Street, each 1/4 acre. Some of them have alleys between them. Here’s a very rough sketch of those lots (not to scale!!!):

Somewhere I wrote down the size of the lots, but just now I can’t find it. They were about 60 feet by 160, but please don’t quote me on that. Fall Creek ran probably through lots 1 and 3 on the east side of town, which were owned by Roddye. Deaderick owned 2, 5, and 6, so the 1810 deed gave Deaderick the right to run a mill race across Roddye’s property to reach his mill, probably on lot 5 or 6. I say that because Deaderick later sold lots 5 and 6 to Patrick Nenney, and the mill race is mentioned in those deeds – which also leads me to believe that the Nenney House/Longstreet Museum probably sits on the back side of those two lots (the old town lots of Russellville got further chopped up in the 1910s when the Russellville Land Company bought up most of the Nenney property and sold it with a new layout).

Anyway, there’s a lot of buying and selling of the town lots during this time, and Roddye’s son Thomas continues that after his father’s death in 1822. Since Roddye and Deaderick had created this plan, I have to believe that they were working to get the Tennessee legislature to officially create the town of Russellville. Maybe there’s even correspondence about this somewhere. But we do know that in 1826, the legislature finally did just that, establishing the town (citing Deaderick and Roddye as the ones who laid out the plan) and naming “commissioners,” who may or may not have ever met, but they certainly had the right to do so.

The act creating the town of Russellville (Chapter CLXXXVII)

The commissioners were William Felts, who owned a tavern probably on lot 3 (which later became the Riggs Tavern), James Phagan, James L. Neal, John Cox, and Joseph Austin. Another maybe, but maybe somewhere there’s correspondence about these commissioners and what they may or may not have done in their official capacity.

Oh – there’s also the handwritten bill creating the town of Russellville. You’ll see on the third page the notations about all the readings in the Tennessee House and Senate before it’s officially passed, signed by the governor (William Carroll), and recorded in The Acts of Tennessee:

The original bill establishing the town of Russellville

Obviously, Russellville ended up being just a little village, with no commissioners. I have not yet found anything in the Acts of Tennessee disestablishing the town, so I can’t say how that may have come about. It was a bustling little town for a while, though, right up through the establishment of Hamblen County in 1870 and into the 20th century.

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Jackpot!

Well, I kinda feel like I hit the historical document jackpot anyway. I’ve been using Family Search’s experimental AI search of online documents, and it’s kinda working out – although I can say that I can read cursive marginally better than the AI can. Still, the machine function gets me close to where I want to be in the scanned documents, then all I have to do is page through and find all manner of surprising things.

It’s a little tedious, but also fun. Today, Imma give you the biggest news first: I found the document in which George Russell, the colonel’s father in law, sells his Russellville property to James Roddye. We knew something like that happened, since Russell’s land grants were on Fall Creek and Roddye’s were mostly on Bent Creek, but had not found the proof of it. Now we have. But we found it where we hadn’t looked before – in Hawkins County, not Greene as we’d supposed. Here’s how it went down.

George Russell’s deed to James Roddye

Russell put in for the property in 1783, around the same time that Roddye put in for his grants on Bent Creek (there is a grant for Roddye from 1780 on the south side of the Holston, which might or might not be in Russellville, but I’ve not sussed out details on that one yet). The 1783 Russell grant is for land on Fall Creek, bordering Donalson’s and Cheek’s lands and definitely corresponds to what we know of the Roddye-Nenney-Graham-Rogan property of the 19th century. Anyway, Russell put in for the property in 1783, the same year that Greene County was carved out of Washington County, then in North Carolina.

The grant wasn’t issued until nearly four years later, in 1787. Now, this is fairly common. It took 11 years for one of Roddye’s grants to be officially issued, and most of them took anywhere from three to eight years. As far as I’ve been able to tell, that has to do with there being a lot of land grants and the time and personnel to do all the recording and surveying. By hand. In duplicate and sometimes triplicate. Not to mention travel times.

And then, of course, there’s the changing political landscape in East Tennessee. By the time Russell’s grant was finally issued, that little corner of Greene County had just become Hawkins County, still in North Carolina. Meanwhile, in between 1783 and 1789, Roddye is selling his properties on Bent Creek (to names like Kilpatrick, Horner, and White that you’d recognize from our area’s history). And it takes time to record all those too.

So over in Hawkins County is the deed transfer from George Russell to James Roddye for the property listed in the 1787 grant. That’s mentioned right in the deed, which was recorded in January 1790, by which time records show Russell living across the river in what would later become Grainger County.

I have no doubt that Roddye built the house on the property, apparently before he officially owned it. Russell was the colonel’s father-in-law, after all, and the two were apparently very close. Roddye served, with Russell’s wife Elizabeth, as Russell’s executor when he died in 1798. Russell, Roddye, Bean, all those guys – they came to our area from the Watauga settlement after King’s Mountain. Bean settled on the north side of the river immediately, and apparently Russell yeeted over there pretty quickly. Roddye stayed on the south side, and, I suspect, saw to it that Russellville took the name of his wife’s family.

Lot-tery

I’ve mentioned before that most of these guys were land speculators, buying and selling and farming and running businesses, and Roddye was no different. As best as I can tell, he owned a large portion of what we know as Russellville – the little village, in particular. The Jefferson County deed book tells us that somewhere around 1820, probably just before, the colonel divided up his property in Russellville proper into lots – at least 22 of them – and began selling them at $50 a pop. These lots appear to start around where Fall Creek crosses what’s now the Andrew Johnson Highway and the old Main Street and move back west from there. That starting point is also where the colonel sold the rights for a mill race to one William H. Deaderick in about 1810, and mention of that mill race shows up frequently in the deeds. That tells me there was a mill right about there before Cain Mill was built a little further north along the creek.

Russellville now. Photo by Dakota Carmichael/The Old History Project

The colonel didn’t sell all his lots. His son Thomas sold several in the late 1820s, around the same time he signed the bulk his father’s property over to Patrick Nenney’s estate to pay for a debt he owed. Patrick was Thomas’s father in law, and he owed this debt at the time of Patrick’s death in 1824 but never paid it. The Nenneys got the property in 1829. At the same time, Thomas was having a fire sale, disposing of properties – including enslaved people – before he split Tennessee to try his hand at gold in Georgia. And before the sheriff of Jefferson County, James Bradford, seized what property he had left in downtown Russellville and sold it on the courthouse steps in Dandridge in 1835 to pay a substantial debt he owed some folks in Baltimore. His debtors bought the whole “lot” of it for $100, and, I’m assuming, made more than that selling it again, but I haven’t gotten that far in the deed book just yet.

What happened to Thomas Roddye is still a mystery. There’s an 1834 JeffCo document that says he is “lately deceased,” but I don’t know how accurate that is. Needham Jarnigan, who travelled with him to Georgia, wrote to Charles P. Nenney (both Roddy and Jarnigan’s brother in law) in 1837 saying that his whereabouts are unknown and that he suspects rumors that he killed himself over the substantial debts he owed, a sizable portion apparently incurred while in Georgia, were true. It was around that time that Thomas’s wife, Lydia, came back to Russellville/Whitesburg.

Charles P. Nenney was by then almost certainly living at what would eventually be known as Hayslope. The executors of Patrick’s will, Hugh Graham and Lucy Bramblette Nenney, Patrick’s widow, signed the property over to him in 1835. He was living there in 1845, when he sold it to Graham. So there you have it – the Nenney ownership was from 1829 to 1845.

Lydia Nenney Roddy, Charles P.’s sister and Thomas’s wife, lived in Whitesburg on property she inherited from her father for the rest of her life, by the way.

The Rogans forward

Graham’s will, written in 1861, designates how his children were to divide his property after his death. As far as the old Roddye property is concerned, the will says for Theo Rogan, Louisa’s husband, and Absalom Kyle, Mary Ann’s husband, to hire surveyors to divide it in half, and then Louisa, “being the youngest,” gets first pick. She picked the half with Roddye’s old home on it

The will gives the property to Mary Ann and Louisa (specifically the daugthers and not their husbands) on January 1, 1862, or Graham’s death, whichever comes first. Graham died in 1865, and we know the Rogans were living at the house in the latter part of the Civil War, but we also now know that the official deed transfer didn’t take place until 1868, likely because of that war.

The Kyles held onto the other half until the 1880s, when their heirs sold it to another Graham sister, Connie, and her husband William Houston Patterson. The Rogans kept the their half until their deaths, Theo in 1904 and Louisa in 1910, when it went to their five surviving children. They divided the property up and drew lots from a hat to see who got what.

The colonel’s property south of Russellville. Dakota Carmichael/The Old History Project

Ellen, the youngest, got the 28 acres with the house. As she was married to a citrus magnate and living in Florida, with no intentions of returning to Tennessee, she told her sister Cassie she could live in the house. Cassie, the oldest Rogan and the only one who never married, sold her own lot, which was down by Sugar Hollow, and moved into the old Roddye place, now called Hayslope by her mother.

The other three children – Griffith, Hugh, and Maggie – eventually sold their portions as well. Griffith and Hugh eventually moved to Florida, near Ellen, and Maggie already lived in Virginia. Cassie lived in the house until she died in 1932, and Ellen sold it to Escoe and Briscoe Thomason – whose family by that time had bought a substantial portion of the colonel’s Russellville “town lots” and sold many of them again — in 1937. Escoe sold his portion of the property to Briscoe about 10 years later.

My dad inherited those 28 acres from his dad, and I inherited from him.

And that, my friends, is the story of James Roddye’s property in Russellville.

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‘Col. Roddye seems to be a man who loves the savior and is not without the experience of grace in his heart’

“By the side of Lick Creek the road led us through a long bottom with beautiful trees, but the land cannot be cultivated because the creek, in spite of its high banks, covers the entire bottom in times of heavy rain. A very high wooden bridge, with only a single span, is used then, and one must pay 12 cent toll. We rode through the water, which was low. We saw few farms.

Our night quarters we took with Colonel Roddy in Jefferson County. The overseer of this farm was very busy when we arrived, and apparently wanted to show us his authority, but rode away without taking care of us, going to a Baptist meeting, which was held tonight some miles away by a Baptist preacher from South Carolina. With the lame colonel, we had a meagre evening meal. As the mill pond had broken, there was no bread in the house, in place of which we were given sweet potatoes. Colonel Roddy belongs to the Baptists , and seems to be a man who loves the savior and is not without the experience of grace in his heart, as we concluded from his conversation with Br. Steiner. He inquired about things in the United Brethren, saying that he had always like the good order in the town and in the meetings which he had often attended in Salem, and that although he could not understand the language he always been impressed.

We had been traveling the Great Road leading to Kentucky and Cumberland, and some miles behind Colonel Roddy’s we reached the place where the road forked, going right to Kentucky and left to Cumberland. 

So reads the report from Abraham Steiner and Frederick de Schweinitz, two brothers from the Moravian congregation in Salem, North Carolina, the  Unitas Fratrum (United Brethren), on November 4, 1799. I think we all know exactly where the brothers crossed Lick Creek before coming on to Russellville (although, to be precise, the crossing was not where 11E now crosses the creek but likely about 1,200 feet north, where old 11E crosses on its way to Blue Springs. As you can see from this August 2023 shot from Google Maps, it’s still a bit on the floody side.

Flooding Lick Creek in August 2023, looking north from old !!E bridge/Google Maps

I’m guessing the brothers traveled on to Cheek’s Crossroads after leaving the colonel’s house, just a mile away, where they could have gone north toward Kentucky and the Cumberland Gap or west to the “Cumberland settlement” – the Cumberland River and the Nashville area. They apparently chose the left road, as their story continues on to Knoxville shortly after this. The brothers from Salem eventually established a mission in Georgia aimed at the Muskogee tribe living there, although this particular trip was aimed at the Cherokee.

From the brethren, we learn that the colonel was a pious fellow, something others have written about, and that he didn’t speak German, the language of the Moravian congregation. But he told the brethren had often attended their meetings in Salem (now Winston-Salem), some 200 miles away. Don’t know why – does this give us a clue to his whereabouts before Watauga and after Pennsylvania? Possibly. We believe he had relatives in the area of Statesville, about 40 miles from the Moravians, although we have no indication that he – or anyone named Roddye – ever lived there. That relative was an aunt, a sister of the man we believe was the colonel’s father, who married a Hall and moved with her family to that area a couple of decades before the colonel came to Watauga.

This short passage also tells us that the road they traveled out of Greeneville was known as the “Great Road to Kentucky and Cumberland” – and may well explain why the Kentucky Road section that’s right by Hayslope is at a right angle to Warrensburg Road. We’ve always assumed that the road came from the Newport area, probably over what’s now Warrensburg Road , but if the Salem brothers came from the Greeneville area, on the Kentucky and Cumberland highway to Russellville, it may have been THAT road that passed by the house, rather than coming from the mountains the way we thought.

What if the Kentucky Road by Hayslope is the same road as the Stagecoach Road that runs between Bulls Gap and Whitesburg, ending by the Coffman House? Because what’s now the front of the Coffman House, facing 11E, used to be the back. What’s now the back was the front, facing the original road. I’ll bet that road – the Great Road to Kentucky and the Cumberland, later Stagecoach Road – followed the route the railroad now follows into Russellville. In 1799, there was no railroad – that came in the 1850s. Following that route, the road would have slid right by the Roddye place and then turned to Cheek’s Crossroads, where it split, heading north to Kentucky and west to Knoxville and what’s now Nashville.

View from the back of the Coffman House (formerly the front), over the pond toward the railroad. Pullen Road follows the railroad for a short distance before it cuts off and heads to Beacon Hill.

At some point a little later, the road extended into “downtown Russellville” and formed what would later be known as the Russellville Pike, or Main Street.

Interestingly, the brothers didn’t travel directly west from Salem and over the mountains. They went northwest, into Virginia and crossed over to Abingdon, then came down the valley on what they called “the Carolina or Great Watauga Road,” arriving in Sullivan County on November 3. From there they traveled through Watauga and Jonesborough, then Leesburg and New Washington in Greene County before arriving at their Lick Creek crossing. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant day, they wrote: “Yesterday it was warm and threatened rain; today a sharp wind blew and it froze, yet the trees were remarkably green for the time of year.” Seems the brothers made good time on that Monday, November 4, 1799, coming down from Sullivan County all the way to Col Roddye’s to spend the night.

‘Beautful black curly hair’

I came across this report in a book I hadn’t closely perused before – Samuel Cole Williams’ “Early Travels in the Tennessee Country,” although this particular translation comes from the journal of the North Carolina Historical Commission in 1944. I found that reference in a treasure trove of genealogical data from Mary Daniel Moore, the wife of former Tennessee State Librarian and Archivist John Trotwood Moore, who served in that position herself after her husband’s death.

Mrs. Moore provided the photograph of Hayslope that’s contained in the Garden Club of Nashville’s book on historic Tennessee homes, and she was a descendent of the colonel through his son Jesse. She collected an amazing amount of data, and ran into the same dead ends I’ve run into about Our Man James and his family. She was certain he came from Pennsylvania, but never made the Sidney connection with the repeated use of that name, including, James’ daughter and, I believe, his sister.

I’ve found her correspondence with Roddye descendants fascinating, especially because they’re all much, much closer to his time than I am. Mrs. Moore’s letters come from the 1920s and 1930s, often older people who had solid information, and there’s one from 1877 that discusses some of the colonel’s descendants, including daughters Sidney and Polly.

Sidney Roddye Hale Moore (1802-late 1800s)
Mary “Pollly” Leuty (1796-1879)

The correspondence includes several letters from the colonel’s great-granddaughter, Annie Roddy Taylor, who was also related to the Nenneys, Grahams, Pattersons, and Rogans and was living in Dandridge during her correspondence with Mrs. Moore. Mrs. Taylor, born in 1869, provides us our first description of James Roddye, although it is of what she was told and not from meeting the man himself.

“Had beautiful black curly hair,” she wrote. “Was small of stature, and had a small foot.”

Small foot, she wrote – could that be why the Moravian brothers wrote that the colonel was “lame”?

Mrs. Taylor was the daughter of Thomas F. Roddy, who was the son of Thomas Roddye – the man who gave up his father’s property to the Nenneys because of a debt he owed. Mrs. Taylor says she doesn’t know how the property got into the hands of the Nenneys and that her grandfather died when her father was quite young – Thomas Sr. vanished in Georgia when his son was about 7. I imagine it wasn’t a subject that was talked much about in the family, as his wife Lydia had to come back to East Tennessee from Georgia and make do without him while raising seven children (although the two oldest, Lydia and Miranda, both died young, according to this correspondence record).

And speaking of Thomas, I have now found a Jefferson County record that appears to show him buying property in Russellville from his brother William in the mid 1820s. I am assuming this would be Thomas buying out his brother’s part of the Russellville inheritance he received from James’s will, since Thomas was able to use the property as collateral for the debt without William’s signature.

And, Mrs. Taylor gives us a clue about William’s whereabouts afterward – she says he lived on the Chuckey River.

Mrs. Moore’s collection also located information from Watuaga that says the colonel was appointed property assessor there in 1778. So now we know he came to what we know as East Tennessee no later than that.

Down by the old mill stream …

And then there’s the thing about the mill pond being broken through, and no bread. I’ve seen no other reference to the colonel having a mill on his property, so I’m wondering if this is not in reference to Roddye’s mill but to a mill where Roddye would’ve had his grain ground. Fall Creek, as it flows through what we know was the colonel’s property is pretty flat. The creek doesn’t drop until it gets to where 11E currently is, when it begins its drop to head toward the Holston River, and passes through the location of the old Cain Mill in the process.

Now, in 1810, Roddye sold the rights to dig a mill race on Fall Creek to William Deaderick. Haven’t determined where that was yet, but that does imply that there wasn’t one in 1799 when the Moravian brothers came through.

The document detailing William Deaderick’s mill race through James Roddye’s property.

I’ve also heard that George Russell, Roddye’s father-in-law, may have had a mill – and we’re pretty certain that Roddye got his Russellville property from him (Roddye’s original land grants from his King’s Mountain service were along Bent Creek in what’s now Whitesburg). And that makes me wonder if the property might have extended northward, toward the river, and included the location of Cain’s Mill – which is a darn near perfect spot for a mill – or at least to the spot where the creek does drop sharply from the former Chestnut Avenue down to old Russellville’s Main Street. And THAT makes me wonder if the property that Thomas Roddye gave to the Nenneys in lieu of his debt might have included a chunk of land on the north side of the railroad, including the property where the Nenney House/Longstreet Museum now sits.

Mrs. Moore’s documents tell us that Charles P. Nenney, who eventually sold the Roddye property to Hugh Graham, actually lived in the old Roddye House for a time, probably until he moved to the newer house in Russellville proper. This is pure speculation, but now I’m curious to know if he kept the property on the north side of the railroad (which was being built in the 1850s) and sold the rest to Mr. Graham.

Roddye did build a mill over in Claiborne County in the early 1800s. Apparently, he lived over there for the time I previously thought he might have been in Rhea County. But Claiborne County court documents include one that says he was living there, and there’s a lot buying and selling of property there and in Grainger County during that time. The docs say the colonel also ran a ferry over the Powell River for a time. He left some of the property he had over there to his son-in-law, James Lea, in his will.

Rigged election!

And finally, the Tennessee State Library and Archives had this gem: a letter completely in the colonel’s hand, written to Gov. John Sevier in 1796 complaining that the recently completely election (presumably the vote for a US representative in the newly formed Tennessee) was illegally held because the Jefferson County sheriff only advertised it for 5 days instead of the constitutionally required 20 days.

Roddye letter to John Sevier, 1796/Tennessee State Library & ArchivesDownload

Now, the colonel was up against future President Andrew Jackson and lost badly in that election, but he didn’t mention that part. I’ve not located any information about a response from Sevier.

The colonel by that time had, of course, served on the state’s constitutional committee to draw up the constitution,and was later elected to the state legislature and served as Jefferson County’s appointed registrar.

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Family stories

I tell people I’ve wanted to restore Hayslope for a really really long time, and it’s true. I don’t remember ever not being fascinated by the house and its history, and I would tell whoever would listen that I wanted it to take its rightful place in Russellville’s story, beyond a Tennessee Historical Commission sign on the highway that pointed in the wrong direction.

I can’t say how many people really listened as I’d tell the story. My parents didn’t have much choice, so they got an earful. I think they pretty much just humored me when I was a wee tyke, but they did make sure that in between tenants, I got to go over and go inside. That’s how I knew about Uncle Escoe’s cedar room and that one closet in the front where I could see James Roddye’s logs – pristine, like they’d never been touched by rain or snow.

They probably didn’t, come to think of it. Those logs are high up on the front side of the house, just under Roddye’s original roof line and just above the front porch. They were well protected, and fairly quickly covered over when the roofline changed to include the porch.

That was the only place to see the logs. The house had long been sided, with a variety of sidings over the years. Walnut, cedar shakes, and plain old whiteboard on the outside, and chestnut and wallpaper on the inside.

Heck, we didn’t even know the north side, what we call the annex, wasn’t log until we started taking all that siding and wall cover off. Surprise! Stick frame! Hand sawed stick frame.

We believe the colonel built the annex right around 1800 – that’s the date on the brick we found under the stairs. The stairs didn’t come right away, though. The original cabin, one room with a loft and a ladder to reach it, became two rooms with a loft and ladder. A door was cut dead center on the north wall to access the new room.

Later – and we don’t know when just yet – the stairs were put in and that door was covered over. A new door was cut back on the northwest corner, the roof was raised, and the upstairs loft became two full rooms.

That’s the house we know today, except for Uncle Escoe’s addition of a kitchen and bathoom (and cedar room) on the back, which took over where the old two-story back porch stood.

In between was the Rogans’ dining room – a large room off the northwest side of the annex. We have one for sure picture of the outside. Uncle Escoe, we believe, cut that room off and made part of it into his addition.

Anyway, I talked a lot about the house when I was growing up. And after I grew up and would come back to visit. The house needed to be restored, I pleaded. Dad wouldn’t budge though. Mom started telling me the logs weren’t even there anymore, that they’d all been eaten by termites.

“You can’t know that,” I’d tell her. And hoped it wasn’t true, becasue to be honest, I couldn’t know either.

And finally, Hayslope is mine. I wasn’t sure for a while that I’d ever even start on this project, because I’d gotten kinda old over the years myself. I did though. And when we took those chestnuts off the inside walls, we found that Roddye’s logs weren’t eaten up by termites after all. There’s some damage, mostly water damage, on the logs, and a bit of termite damage, most of it in the cellar.

But the colonel’s logs are right there, thick and darkened with age.

The Roddyes were gone from the old house by 1830. They went to Rhea County, to Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Georgia, and other places – including Whitesburg, just down the road here in East Tennessee, and where James Roddye’s original lands were, along Bent Creek. Whitesburg is where the children of James’s son Thomas lived, where his wife Lydia Nenney Roddye returned after her husband disappeared in Georgia.

And it’s where some of them remained. There are relatives of this line living in Whitesburg still, and then some who headed farther than any Roddye had ever gone, at least since James Roddye’s grandfather came across the Atlantic from Ulster.

Thomas Roddye’s family

Patrick Nenney Roddy was Thomas and Lydia’s oldest son, and the only one born in Tennessee, before the family lost Hayslope and moved to Georgia. He and his brothers and sisters came back up to old Jefferson County with their mother, around about 1837, when Thomas disappeared.

The family lived with the Nenneys for a time – Lydia was the daughter of Patrick Nenney and the sister of Catherine Nenney Graham and Charles P. Nenney. I imagine Patrick, at 11 or 12, might have seen himself as the man of the house in the absence of his father.

I’ve seen mention of an older sister born in Tennessee – the name Maranda has popped up, but she must have died young. A possible younger sister may also have been born before the family headed to Georgia. The name Lydia shows in some records but again, the child appears to have died young. The others – Thomas, Mary, James, and Elizabeth – were all born in Georgia, in the area of Villa Rica and Carrollton.

When the elder Thomas vanished, though, Lydia and her children began the trek back to Jefferson County, after first making a stop in Rhea County, where several of her in-laws lived. She lived with the Nenneys for a time back in Whitesburg but appears to have had her own place for most of the rest of her life, with her school teacher daughter Elizabeth living with her. Not much is known about her life, but a look at the purchases she made at her family’s store gives the impression she may have taken on sewing for an income.

Of her children, only Mary’s family, and some of Patrick’s, remain in the Whitesburg area. Mary married James Day, and she was a bridesmaid at the wedding of Theo Rogan and Louisa Graham in 1853, before they moved to Hayslope in about 1862. Thomas remained in Whitesburg, but his children scattered. James moved away. Elizabeth stayed but never married.

Patrick, or P.N. Roddy as he was often known, became a lawyer, a justice of the peace, and an elected magistrate. He married Mary Ellen Stacks in 1866, and they had three children – Mary Ellen, James Patrick, and George Edward.

Patrick Nenney Roddy
Mary Ellen Stacks Roddy

Mary Ellen, known as Dovie, married her neighbor, Jacob Haun, and stayed in Whitesburg, Her descendants still live in the area. James Patrick moved to Knoxville, started a bottling company and brought Coca Cola to East Tennessee, and George Edward headed West.

A grocer by trade, he lived in Texas and for years in New Mexico, spending the final years of his life in California. He married Maggie May Reed in Texas, and their son Daniel was born a couple years later in Roswell, New Mexico. George also served as justice of the peace in Albuquerque for several years.

George Edward Roddy

The photos of P.N., Mary Ellen, and George come from George’s granddaughter, who contacted me through this website, totally making my day when she did! She also sent me a photo of George in his later years and another of her father, Daniel, posing by the Hayslope sign on 11E.

Back to the present

If you’ve driven past the house recently, you may have noticed a change – we have a fence and real gates now! The gorgeous split rail fence was built by Brown’s Custom Fencing and Construction in Bulls Gap, and I couldn’t be happier. They even custom-built the wooden gates.

Inside the house, things are moving apace. Thomas is sourcing some logs to replace badly damaged ones – there aren’t too many, but the one there are pose a problem structurally until they’re replaced. Same goes for some floor beams in the cellar. Meanwhile, he’s got it nicely shored up and ready for the new wood to go in.

Most of the addition on the back is gone now, so we’re working on determining how to rebuild the old two story porch while also adding modern bathrooms. The plan so far will keep the plumbing outside both the original cabin and the north annex, just like Uncle Escoe did.

Then there’s the question of the door between the original cabin and the annex – it’s dead center on that wall, hidden behind the stairs until we uncovered it. I really want to use that door between the two downstairs rooms, but when that door was in use, a ladder led upstairs. It was covered when the stairs were built for obvious reasons, and it’s just not clear at this point how we can use the original door and keep the stairs!

So that’s the update for now. I’ll be making a very quick trip up next week to deal with some computer issues.

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A woman named Sidney

Turns out that looking for Colonel Roddye in Pennsylvania was a pretty good idea, not that it’s particularly easy. I mean, there are so many James Roddyes. Or Roddy. Or Roddie. Or Rhody. Or Roddey … you get the picture. 

As I mentioned last time, I think I’ve figured out which of them was our man’s father. That would seem to be James Joseph Roddy Jr, a miller who also served as a constable and a coroner at various times in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. 

Roddy Jr. was born about 1710 in County Donegal in the north of Ireland. His father was James Joseph Sr., born in the same place about 1680. Roddy Jr. had two brothers and two sisters: William, Prudence, Barbara, and Alexander. They were all born in Ireland, and the whole lot of ‘em – Sr., his wife Mary, and all the kids, except apparently William, came to Pennsylvania sometime between 1719 and 1722.

Once there, Sr. built a mill, and then another, and maybe more, and he and his sons were successful at it. 

I zeroed in on Jr. as the colonel’s dad because of his children: William, James, and Sidney. We already knew that the colonel had a brother named William, and he named one of his daughters Sidney (although down in the Tennessee the spelling became more like Sidnah or Sidneh, as spelling appeared to be both random and closer to actual pronunciation), so the idea that he might have had a sister named Sidney seemed to make sense. 

Sidnah Roddye

Now, that’s a bit of an unusual name for a woman, particularly back in the 18th century. But the name seemed to be of some import in the colonel’s family. Along with his daughter of that name, daughter Polly named one of daughters Sidney, and one of Sidnah’s granddaughters had the name. There may be more, although that’s a far as I’ve gotten on descendants so far. 

What I didn’t expect was to find where the name originally came from. That happened when I found the colonel’s mother – Jane Smith. Now, the colonel’s sister’s full name was Sidney Smith Roddy, so that tracks. And it turns out that Jane Smith also had a sister named Sidney. 

Where it all began

So the colonel’s daughter, sister, and aunt are all named Sidney. But that wasn’t all. Colonel Roddye’s grandmother – the mother of Jane and Sidney Smith – was ALSO named Sidney, and her family has a little legend about how her name came about. 

Colonel Roddye’s grandmother Sidney was the daughter of John and Hannah Gamble of County Tyrone in Ulster. She later married a man named Samuel Smith, and that, of course, is where the Smiths come in. But the story of how the name Sidney came about was handed down the Smith family until Gen. John Spear Smith wrote it out in a family history in 1857 (and the dates do match up). Here it is:

“The legend in the family, for the name of Sidney to a female is this. During the Wars of William of Orange, in Ireland, a wounded British officer, Captain Sidney, was taken into the residence of Miss Gamble’s father, and there nursed until he recovered. Whilst under their roof, she (Miss Gamble) was born. His gentle and resigned conduct had so endeared him to the family, that, in memorial of the event and of their affection for him, they gave her the baptismal name of Sidney. It is still in the family.”

Didn’t make it up to County Tyrone when I was in Ireland. This image is from County Sligo in the Republic of Ireland, south of Tyrone and Donegal, where the Scots-Irish came from.

Grandmother Sidney and Samuel Smith married while they were still in Ireland but came to Pennsylvania, where a whole buncha Scots-Irish lived, not long after. As she lived until 1759, I think we can safely say that the colonel knew his grandmother before he left Pennsylvania. He would have been 17 when Grandmother Sidney died. He likely knew his Aunt Sidney too. She was about 12 when he was born. And no doubt, if the legend about the name is true, he would have heard that story as a child. 

Small wonder, then, that he named a daughter after his aunt, grandmother, and sister, and that the name drifted down through the Roddy family as it did the Smith family. 

So yes, I am absolutely certain I’ve found Colonel Roddye’s Pennsylvania and Irish roots. Now, if only I can get him from Pennsylvania to Tennessee …

Part of the story here is the movements of the Scots Irish. They came from Scotland to Ulster then from Ulster to North America, many of them to Pennsylvania. From there they went all over. We’re primarily concerned with those who came to Tennessee, and that was a lot – the Nenneys, the Grahams, the McFarlands, the Outlaws, the Crocketts, the Kilpatricks… so many. The Scots who went to Ulster and then came over the pond were largely Presbyterians. The Roddys were among them, but by the time they got into Tennessee, our Roddys hooked up with Tidence Lane and were Baptists. That will clearly be part of the story of James Roddye and his brother William ending up in East Tennessee, but for now, we just don’t know much about that.

Underneath the house

Meanwhile, Thomas Fraser, our contractor, has been at work under the northwest corner of the house, shoring up the beams in the cellar because, well, that corner of the house really doesn’t have a foundation. 

The Rogans took out the porch on that end and built their dining room there, extending out into the back, a little like the typical L-shaped farmhouses of the period. My uncle came along in the 30s, and cut the dining room back in size and closed in the rest of the porch to create the kitchen (downstairs) and bathroom (upstairs). 

He also dug the cellar under that corner, leaving the remnants of the dining room sort of floating over it. 

Supports going in down in the cellar to make it safe for people and the house itself to work. For context, this shot looks at the part of the cellar that is directly beneath the northwest corner of the 1810 annex. To the right is the part of the cellar beneath where the old two-story porch. later the east section of the Rogan dining room. was. Part of the problem down here is that the beams were bricked in and couldn’t “breathe.”

So Thomas has been beefing up rotted and termite-eaten beams – this is the area where we found the worst bug damage – and putting in supports for the colonel’s logs. This work has to happen before we can do things like replace the bad beams, add a new roof, recreate the back porch, add bathrooms, etc. 

It’s really exciting to see this interior work going on, because it means we’re getting closer to your being able to see what we’re doing without stopping when I’m there to show you.

I promise you – it’s happening.

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Milling about Pennsylvania

We know precious little about James Roddye’s life. It’s true. Sometimes it seems we know quite a bit, but most of it is just names and dates, and more than a few of those are suspect.

The most of what we know comes after his move to Russellville, and even some of that – well, we know now that James’s land grants were around Bent Creek and not in what became Russellville. Those grants appear to have gone to Roddye’s father-in-law, George Russell. 

While we haven’t found the documentation that tells us how James got what we now call Hayslope, it seems clear that it came from Russell, sometime around his move across the Holston River to Grainger County. The two men remained close, however: James was the executor of Russell’s will.

But what we know about Roddye before he came to Russellville, or even Bent Creek – that’s scant and difficult to find with any certainty. I have mostly tried to trace James backwards from Russellville, but recently I’ve started a new tack. I’ve gone back to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania – where I believe the Roddyes come from – and am trying to work forward to Russellville.

This is made all the more difficult by the various spellings of the Roddye name – Roddye, Roddy, Rhody, Roddey, and on and on.

James and his father James and his father James

I feel pretty confident that James Patrick Roddye’s father was James Joseph Roddye Jr of Lancaster County. But I’ll be honest – it’s not a guarantee. It’s the family names that lead me to believe this is the right family, though. 

James Jr. had three children – the youngest, if I’m correct, was our James Patrick Roddye, born about 1742. The middle child was William, born about 1740 – and we known Our Man James had a brother William. The oldest was daughter Sidney, born about 1734, and a name that our James used for one of his own daughters. Roddyes continued to use that name for generations.

This fellow, James Jr., was in all likelihood born in Ireland in about 1706. His father, James Joseph Roddy Sr, is believed to have come to America in the late 1710s, into Pennsylvania, where a lot of Scots-Irish – the Protestants who were leaving in droves to get away from the Church of England – settled in those years. 

Many of them specifically settled in what eventually became Lancaster County, naming their settlements Donegal, Drumore, Londonderry, and other monikers from their Ulster homes. They joined English Quakers, Swiss and German Mennonites, and others in the new territories of Pennsylvania.

James Jr was likely the second son of five children. William was the oldest, the others were Prudence, Barbara, and Alexander, all born in Ireland. We know these names because of James Sr.’s will — except for Barbara, who had died by the time James Sr died in about 1734, but she married a man named Joseph Work and had a son named James, both of whom were named in Sr’s will. 

Transcribed version of James Sr.’s will

James Sr. and his sons were millers

Sr.’s will leaves his mill to James Jr. Interestingly, he leaves his oldest son, William – quite pointedly – an English guinea, worth a pound and a shilling at the time. That seems quite a pittance for an oldest son, so we can only assume that there’d been something of a falling out. If I had to guess, I’d guess it had something to do with the family’s departure from Ireland.

The will directs James Jr. to take care of his other siblings, Prudence and Alexander, until Prudence is married and a mill can be built for Alexander on Conowago Creek in the same area.

The Roddy Mill on Little Chicques Creek, rebuilt from James Roddy’s original in 1816. It was a sawmill, grist mill, and flour mill. Photo by Donald Kautz.

And that brings us to the mill on Little Chicques Creek, where James Roddy Sr built his original mill. Actually, he built another mill not far away, on Chicques (sometimes spelled Chickies) Creek. The one on Little Chicques was built in 1721 and is north of Mount Joy Township. The other was built the following year south of the township and is now called Newtown Mill. It’s really not clear which of these two mills was still in Roddys possession when he died in 1734, although it may well have been both. 

Ownership notes say that Alexander Roddy and John Roddy (not clear who that is, unless it was meant to be Alexander’s brother James … ) had a hand in running the Newtown Mill until John Flory took over in 1745. The current mill on the site was built in 1804, and it ceased operations in 1922.

The Newtown Mill was also a saw, flour, and grist mill. The limestone structure was built in 1802, on the location of James Roddy’s 1722 mill. Photo by Donald Kautz.

Notes on the other mill say it stayed with the Roddyes until Michael Horst took over in 1802, although it temporarily stopped operations just before that. Peter Horst rebuilt it in the same limestone style as many other mills in the area in 1816. This mill ceased operations in 1940.

Where did those Roddys go?

So far I’ve found no evidence of a mill built on Conowago Creek for Alexander in the aftermath of his father’s death, so it may be that he took over the Newtown Mill instead. There is some evidence that Alexander later built a mill west of the Susquehanna, a mill now called Waggoner’s in Perry County on Bixler’s Run that is owned by an Amish family and has been restored. That’s pretty far afield from the Roddy property east of the Susquehanna, but he apparently ran that mill until the mid-1780s, when he headed south with some of his children for the Spartanburg, South Carolina, area.

Alexander Roddy’s original log mill ground corn meal and flour and was built on this Perry County site in 1762. Frederick Briner rebuilt it in stone sometime between 1812 and 1830. Photo by Robert T. Kinsey.

Some of those Roddys later moved to Tennessee and eventually to Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, while others stayed in South Carolina. These Roddys appear to be the source of Roddy ancestors from South Carolina – not a direct line to Our Man James, but cousins, a direct line to the Russellville James’s grandfather.

James Sr.’s surviving daughter, Prudence, married a man named James Hall. They moved to Iredell County, North Carolina, in 1751, where the family apparently stayed and became a prominent one.

But what about James Jr. and his children? I have him remaining in Lancaster County until his death in 1783. His wife, Mary, however, may have moved to North Carolina with her nieces and nephews, dying there in 1786, although she may have been confused with Prudence there and did not go to North Carolina at all. It’s also not clear if Mary was the mother of Sidney, William, and James. I have seen reference to a first wife for James Jr., and records so far say that he married Mary in 1745, after all three of his children were born.

As for Jr’s children, we know what we know about James. William, we know next to nothing about – he supposedly came to Tennessee with James and may have moved on to Blount County. Sidney, however, we know a thing or two about. She apparently remained in Pennsylvania, married to John McClellan (or McClelland), another Revolutionary War soldier. The McLellans lived in Pennsylvania until their deaths in 1817 and 1818.

This is, of course very early in my Pennsylvania investigations. There’ll be more to come, and as we know from past experience, any bit of this information could later be proved wrong!

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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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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.