The House | Hayslope

March 9, 2024March 9, 2024

‘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)

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 & Archives Download

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.

December 8, 2023December 8, 2023

The mark by the door

Welp, I was hoping to get up to Hayslope before Christmas, but like last year, that’s just not going to happen. Early January. New goal.

I’ve not even had a lot of time for research lately, but there is one little thing I’ve not talked about here before, and that is the geometric shape Dakota found by the back door when we pulled the chestnuts off the walls.

Because it was etched onto the log and beneath the chestnuts, we can be certain someone associated with James Roddye – perhaps even the man himself – put it there.

It consists of several concentric circles containing a “daisy wheel” or “hexafoil,” a symbol that was quite common in the British isles during the Middle Ages – and is even attested into Roman times and the Bronze and Iron Ages

In Colonial America, the design is often seen on gravestones but also pops up, as it does here, in structures, frequently by doors or fireplaces.

Is it a design to keep out bad spirits or witches? That’s a common enough interpretation, but honestly, nobody really knows. The symbols are just there, and there’s little discussion of them in contemporary records

In some European cultures, it’s a sun symbol. In others, it represents thunder and is believed to be used to protect against lightning strikes.

If indeed it’s for protection, it falls under the category of “apotropiac” marks, coming from the Greek word αποτρέπειν and meaning “to ward off.” They show up a lot in medieval churches.

A hexafoil in the ceiling of the Great Parlour at Little Moreton Hall, Cheshire, United Kingdom/National Trust Images/James Dobson

They’re more common in New England, including Pennsylvania, where the Roddyes lived after coming over from Ulster.

Whatever it is, Hayslope has one, likely etched by someone using a compass, scissors, or even a pencil and string as the house was being built. And just now it strikes me that there could be one by the front door – there are still some chestnuts over the logs on the left side of the door, the same side where this little rosette is found.

July 11, 2023July 11, 2023

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.

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.

June 13, 2023June 13, 2023

Summertime

What a trip! And a busy one that included lots of clean-up, a visit from kids, and getting an award!

But before all that, I stopped by Rose Center in Morristown to see an Empire-style sofa that had once graced Hayslope. And what a beautiful piece of furniture!

The piece left Hayslope after Cassie Rogan’s death with Margaret Rogan Millar, Theo and Louisa’s granddaughter and the daughter of Margaret Louise Rogan and her husband William H. Millar. Margaret Millar was by then married to Kenneth Barnes, originally of West Virginia, and when she died in 1976 the sofa was donated to Rose Center, which was around that time becoming the museum and arts center it is now.

The sofa is in the center’s lobby in excellent condition — I am certain Mrs. Barnes had it reupholstered! Beccy Hamm, Rose Center’s executive director, told me she believes a Jenny Lind bed in the Center’s museum upstairs also came from Hayslope. The center has the paperwork for all the donations, and she promised to look it up to confirm.

It does make me wonder, though, if there’s other furniture around somewhere, or other items – maybe the silver candlesticks that Ann Kendrick Walker said were on the table for Theo and Louisa’s 50th wedding anniversary and had been part of Hugh Graham and Catherine Nenney’s wedding celebration? Who knows?

James Roddye in da house!

Next up was all the aforementioned cleaning. I mean, it’s not possible for Hayslope to be spotless right now, but it did need a little straightening up because Marisa Simmons’ history club kids were coming to visit. Ridiculously, I didn’t count the kids, but I’d say we had 10-12 plus 4 or 5 adults.

Everybody was attentive and asked great questions as Mr Roddye (Dakota) and I discussed the history of the house and the families who lived here as well as generally talking about life in East Tennessee from colonial times forward.

We thoroughly enjoyed hosting the group and sure hope they come by again as we progress further in our renovations!

Off to Knoxville

That was on Monday, and I was going to be heading back to Georgia on Tuesday. Those plans changed, though, when I was notified that we’d been nominated for one of the East Tennessee Historical Society’s Awards of Excellence, and the ceremony just happened to be on Tuesday.

Dakota was nominated too, for his work with the Riggs House. And we won! I’m so thrilled and thankful to the ETHS for this award, what I hope will be the first of many as we take our place in our region’s storied history.

Congrats to Dakota, who picked up his third Award of Excellence, and to all the other award winners who are dedicated huge parts of their lives to preserving and promoting East Tennessee history.

Things grow

I brought a chainsaw with me this trip, intending to chainsaw a view of the field north of the house from our “office” under the “carport.” But alas, the vines did not lend themselves well to chainsaws, so I’ll be bringing up a hedge trimmer next time, along with the chainsaw.

And I’ll be wearing long sleeves, because all I ended up doing was giving myself a nasty case of poison sumac, the only one of the poison three (oak and ivy being the other two) that I’m not immune to.

And since I came back to Georgia, contractor Thomas and his guys have been by, removing the trash from dismantling the upstairs back portion of the house. That part was added in the 20th century and will be replaced by a two-story back porch, as we’ve seen in photos from the Rogan era.

The cedar room built by my great uncle was carefully dismantled, and the wood put into storage, because it’s going to be used in our bathrooms.

And soon, we’ll have a split rail fence and actual gates across the front, so keep an eye out!

April 22, 2023April 25, 2023

So nice to be back

It’s been a while, but finally this past week, I put my feet down at Hayslope again. Not much had changed. The birds still sounded like they did before, maybe a little more since it’s spring. The greenery was spring green instead of that shifting over to fall muted color.

I didn’t get to see the turkeys … oh, did I tell you about the turkeys? They’ve been wandering through the property, along with a baby groundhog who is getting bigger all the time. But the turkeys must have been at another spot on their rounds and not at Hayslope.

Didn’t see the baby groundhog either, or any of the many cats, but I suppose they do like it better when I only see them on the cameras and not in person – and I can tell you I’ve seen them since I got back to Georgia!

Anyway, it was a short trip, but a productive one. I got the smoke alarms working again (sorry about all that noise, Ma Hurley!) and added a new camera – now I can see the outside of the house itself instead of just around the house.

The big plan for this trip was to get ready to have a split rail fence and real gates installed across the front of the property, and that’s done. It’ll be six to eight weeks before it’s installed, but Brown’s Custom Fencing & Construction in Bulls Gap is signed up to do the job, and I couldn’t be more excited. I’m sure you’ve notice that I like to use local contractors whenever possible, and it really helps when those folks are already the best for the job.

I’m pretty excited to get real gates. I know I coulda waited on this, but I’m just tired of the cable across the drive. The fence will be installed behind the boxwoods and the parking area, keeping the gate into the field behind the fence. On the other side, it ends at one of the stone pillars beside the Kentucky Road, which used to be the drive into the Hayslope property before it got chopped up into smaller lots and was just the drive into the Blair-Patterson pro.

I’ll be back up in June, unsure if before or after the fence goes in (maybe during!). I think I’m gonna clear out the view from the house to the spring. I was sitting in what we like to call our office on the side of the house, listening to the birds, as one does, and kept looking down toward the spring, which I couldn’t see. I think I should be able to.

There’s a spring down there somewhere ….

Until then!

March 15, 2023March 15, 2023

Long time no see

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

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

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

Let’s recap

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

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

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

Fire it up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Onto the land

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the way it is

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

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

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

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

September 17, 2022September 17, 2022

Stacks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mystery chimney

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

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

2 flues

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

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

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

All aboard

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

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

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

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

But wait there’s more

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

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

August 21, 2022August 21, 2022

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.

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.

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.

August 15, 2022August 15, 2022

In the heat of the summer

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

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

Look what we found

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

Treasure trove

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

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

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

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

Inside the house

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next?

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

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

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

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

Lotta work. And I for one am loving it.

July 18, 2022August 15, 2022

Hayslope is coming alive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEx6jvMarQo

Megan’s report on finding the 1800 stick framing

Whatever happened to Thomas Roddye?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An illustrious visitor

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