The House | Hayslope

June 22, 2022June 22, 2022

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.

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.

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.”

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:

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.

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.

June 21, 2022June 22, 2022

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

May 15, 2022June 22, 2022

Springtime in East Tennessee

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

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

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

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

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

Treasures

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

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

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

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

And also

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

P.S.

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

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

April 23, 2022April 24, 2022

And so it begins

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

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

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

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

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

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

Split level?

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

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

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

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

But what about this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clean-out

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

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

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

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

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

Chinky

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

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

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

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

Etc

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

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

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

April 4, 2022April 4, 2022

Chris and Dakota’s Excellent Adventure

Not sure I would do it, but my friends Dakota (of The Old History Project) and Chris (who lived at Hayslope for a while) crawled under the old house the other day.

They didn’t find much – Dakota tells me it’ll take a few more trips to get down far enough – but they did turn up some nails, a broken cup, a very interesting blue rock, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon (I think it might have been a Sleestack).

The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Or maybe a Sleestack. Also a really nice notch in the beam.

Even without a lot of amazing finds, their Excellent Adventure gave us our first really good look at the underside of the house – the piling stones, the support beams, the floor beams, the floor itself, and of course the base of the chimney. And all of that was pretty amazing all by itself!

First off, not bad for a 237-year-old house. There’s damage, as would be expected, but what there is is very much reparable. And the floors! They’re really looking good. Guess it helps to be up off the ground, plus old James Roddye built this thing on the perfect spot to avoid water.

When you’re on the property, it’s easy to see the house is on a slight rise and that the land slopes away from it in all directions. Underneath, that’s pretty obvious too, judging by the complete lack of water damage down there.

I had an inspector check it out last fall, and he said he was impressed with how little damage there was, particularly from water. He did find termite damage, and that’s gonna have to be repaired, but it could have been much, much worse. And we had termite treatment done last time I was up, so we’re good to go there.

The guys’ trip down under confirmed what we already knew – the worst damage is on the newer sections added by Escoe Thomason in the 1930s. The foundations under those parts are really bad, and as a result, those sections will have to come off.

We were already planning for that. It’s good to actually see what we’re dealing with, though, and to know that we’re thinking in the right direction.

The guys got a terrific look at the base of the kitchen chimney, making us wonder just how the whole thing was constructed. There’s a floor support beam across some of the chimney brick, and one of the main supports ends a couple inches from the brick. And it’s BIG.

The chimney base, beams, and the floor. The base keeps going into the dark!

The other end of the base. Dakota and Chris actually crawled under that big beam to get over there.

It’s also possible that the outside of the chimney we can see is a reconstruction, although it does appear that it’s more or less in the same position and design as it was to begin – it’s visible in the old photo of the house.

It was a little like Christmas morning when these photos started coming in and we could actually see what’s under there. Maybe I will crawl under myself …

There’ll be more explorin’ to come! Oh, and if you’d like to see the video of this exploration, here it is:

February 6, 2022February 6, 2022

I did a thing

After threatening to do it for a while, I did it. I wrote the book about Hayslope. It’s small, 61 pages, with a few pictures, but it tells you everything we know and don’t know about the house, the land, and the people who’ve lived there.

And it’s ready for purchase. “A Brief History of Hayslope and Its People” is $13, including shipping, and available here on the website. So if you’d like a copy, now’s the time. Shipping begins mid-week.

And thanks to all of you for supporting this project of love in all the ways you have!

November 27, 2021

The magic begins …

I know I still owe you Our Man James, Part Three: Statesman. But first I want to tell you a little about our plan for the house.

We’ve set up a non-profit corporation in the state of Tennessee and applied for and received our tax exempt 501(c)(3) status with the IRS. With that we’ll be applying for grants and accepting donations from those of you who’d like to help preserve this piece of East Tennessee history. And it’s almost the end of the year, so if you’re looking for a place to make a tax deductible donation, please consider Hayslope. There’s a pretty straight-forward (and safe) process on our website at https://hayslope.org/donate. We’d be delighted if you joined us.

It’s big, our plan. But I’ve wanted to do this project for almost as long as the state of Tennessee has said it was gonna widen US-11E, so I’m happy to be using my resources here. It won’t be enough, though.

It starts with the renovation, of course, although there are other parts that will be going on simultaneously – like developing a kitchen garden and digging into the orchard to see what fruit varieties are actually growing there and if we can revive them. We’ll be holding our collective breath to find out if there are any heirloom varieties there, and if so, we’d like to propagate them and make them available to other growers.

Along with the kitchen garden, where we’ll grow edibles from ALL the land’s time periods, we’ll have a medicinal garden, again harking back to traditional plants and varieties that really aren’t the weeds we think they are.

We’re working to be added to the already fantastic stops in our area on the Civil War Trails, and that will come sooner rather than later because we’d like travelers to be able to see what we’re doing from the start.

And that brings me to the renovation. The work begins after the first of the year, and we have a couple of important tasks before we can really get the ball rolling. We have a mold problem, which appears to be mostly connected with the 1930s additions, so that will have to be mitigated so work crews can safely work, and we’ve got both some termite damage and some active termites, so we’ll have to treat for those little critters (and pine bore beetles) and repair the damage.

After that, one of the first steps will be removing the whiteboard so we can finally see what those 1785 logs really look like under there. Then the work will begin in earnest. There’ll be chinking and rewiring and repairing logs that need repair and reroofing and building a new front porch and plumbing and and and … well, it’ll be a lot. And I plan to keep you posted right here about our progress.

The kitchen chimney on the south side of the house.

You can sign up for our newsletter at the bottom of any page on the website or follow our Facebook page to keep up with our work (and by all means, go like our page over there, because if I’m being perfectly honest, while all the posts from here end up there eventually, I’m often adding little bits of info or fun links there that don’t end up here).

We’re all super excited about it, and equally excited about sharing it with you. There’s so much more that we’re talking and thinking about, and probably just as much that we haven’t thought of yet.

So please, if you can, become a Friend of Hayslope. Join us in the hills of East Tennessee.

October 23, 2021October 23, 2021

The week that was

This past week has been a productive one, to say the least. I started it by traveling up to Tennessee to get some things moving at the house. It was also my replacement vacation, since I canceled my beach trip a few weeks ago.

View from my cabin. Calf neighbors in field to right.

So – shout out to Linda and Vic at Mendin’ Fences in Rogersville, where I spent three very comfortable nights in a cabin next door to a couple calves and had coffee on the porch each morning watching the deer family and listening to pileated woodpeckers.

The business end of things went smoothly. I now have a key to the house – none of the ones my dad had worked! – and chatted with an electrician about how to go about rewiring the old girl.

Old History

Day 2 was super exciting. My friend Dakota of The Old History project took me to the Coffman House, which is about the same age as Hayslope and probably a little older. Had a wonderful chat with the current owner and toured the house and property.

The Coffman House was built by David Coffman, another of the Overmountain Men who fought at King’s Mountain and got a land grant from North Carolina for it. At one point in its history, the house was a dogtrot or breezeway home, built with an open breezeway through the center. That part has now been enclosed, but the renovators left the original, hand-hewn logs on the walls of the breezeway. I couldn’t stop looking at them! A couple of them were more than a foot square.

Outside, we walked the property, saw the home’s original spring, now on the front of the house. It was out back originally, because the main road – the old stage coach road – passed through the small valley on the other side, so what’s now the back of the house was at first the front. No turning this house around when the roads changed, like at the Nenney House where the Longstreet Museum now is – the Coffmans just started using the back as the front and vice versa.

We also wandered around the oldest barn in Hamblen County, and then out front sat on the large granite (? I guess … I don’t know my rocks) rocks that stretch all the way under the house and then under the highway – meaning we could feel the traffic passing by!

That afternoon, it was back to Hayslope to meet up with a home inspector to get some basics about what we’re looking at. Since we already know we’re redoing the electricity and tearing the addition off the back, he didn’t look closely at that part. Instead, he gave us a good look at the structure of the house – and as I was hoping, she’s pretty strong.

Gerald crawled up under the front part of the house – and told us that while the original structure is good, the supports under the front porch, which were added in the 1930s like the back add-on, just aren’t salvageable. The front porch has to come off. Then into the cellar, where we found a poured concrete wall about 3 1/2 feet high all the way around and topped by bricks. This was great. Gerald found no signs of water ever having been down in there, which doesn’t surprise me – our man Roddye set this house in the perfect spot for water to drain everywhere EXCEPT into the house.

The house is built on stone pilings, which are in good shape. There is termite and powderpost beetle damage in some of the original beams – but not all. We know at least one of those beams is gonna have to be replaced, while others will be ok with repair. The worst damage was of course in the 1930s add-on, which is gonna all come off.

There was also some termite damage in the ceiling beams on the first floor – either from downstairs or the back add-on. While some of the termite damage was old, there were some new spots. The termites are active, so we have termite treatment coming sooner rather than later.

The chimneys aren’t bad, considering. There’s a couple cracks that need repair and the tops obviously need work. Recommend capping them to keep water out until they’re repaired.

Gerald also did a mold test – waiting on the lab to send those results.

Speaking of barns …

After a quick run to Greeneville to pick up a couple books I bought from an estate sale, it was back to Russellville to join a tour of the Longstreet Museum with the good folks of the Grainger County Historical Society. The museum’s Mike Beck – whose dad worked with my mom at the electric coop for years – was pretty amazing telling the story of the Civil War in the Russellville area – a story that’s often glossed over or just ignored completely in the history books. I enjoyed connecting with the museum folks and am really looking forward to how Hayslope and the museum and coordinate to tell our stories.

While there, I spotted a photo I’d never seen before on one of their interpretive panels inside. It was labeled as showing the Russellville depot, but it just didn’t look like anything I recognized – and apparently some at the museum agreed. So the next day I went over to the spot where the photo would have been taken – if it really showed what it said it did – and I came away convinced that it does indeed show the depot. And the Hayslope barn. I’d been wondering where the barn would have been, and if I’m right here, then it was in the same spot where my grandfather’s barn stood years later.

The Russellville depot is nearly dead center in the photo. Because there’s a drop off on this side of the tracks, the depot is built on stilts. In the foreground is a sawmill. I remember the frame house to the left of the depot when I was young. And on the far left – with a barn cupola – is, I believe, the Hayslope barn.

I went from comparing current landscapes with 100 year old photos to the county register’s office, where Becky patiently helped me find all the deeds transferring Hayslope farm property to the individual children of Theo and Louisa Rogan.

When Theo died in 1904, his will left the property to Louisa. Louisa died six years later without a will. So Hugh, Griff, Cassie, Ellen, and Maggie divided the farm into five lots and divvied it up between them. Ellen, as we already knew, got the 28 acres that I now own. And it was Griff, not Hugh as I previously thought, who got the property directly south, where the two-story house and several cabins from the resort were. Hugh’s property was south of that, then Maggie’s and then Cassie’s.

I’m hoping to use all this information to eventually reconstruct Roddye’s original property, since I know that was 467 acres in 1829, and several people have asked about it. There’s a lot more to tell about all this land, but we’ll save that for when I firm up the info.

Home again, home again, jiggity jig

And after all that, I got to spend some time yakking with my cousin and her daughter-in-law before loading up the car with the last of my dad’s things that had been stored at her house. Then it was back to Rogersville. On the way, the Hunter’s Moon coming over the hills in its brilliant orange simply took my breath away. By the time it came over the hills at the cabin (where my camera was), it was no longer that beautiful orange, but I got some shots anyway.

I left Rogersville in the rain the following day to return to Georgia, but the productive week wasn’t over just yet.

This morning, we got notification from the IRS that our application for 501(c)(3) status had been approved. We’re officially tax exempt and tax deductible!

September 27, 2021September 28, 2021

Did not see that coming

So there I am, writing up the story of how East Tennessee, before it was East Tennessee, tried repeatedly to be its own place, and making sure I tie our man James Roddye, the builder of Hayslope before it was Hayslope, into the story, when I come across some some documents connected to said Roddye and sold at auction a few years ago.

Now, I’ve seen these documents before. There’s three of them: One is a land survey, 210 acres, conducted for Roddye in 1810. Another is a 1797 document allowing William Deaderick to use some of his land for a mill race on Fall Creek. And the third is an “indenture” between Thomas Roddy and John Donaldson.

I never read the Thomas Roddy document, but yesterday I did. And it’s way more than an “indenture.” If I’m reading it correctly, it’s the document that conveys the future Hayslope property to Hugh Graham (and his mother-in-law, Lucy Nenney) in 1829, which means that Graham had the property long before he gave it to his daughter and Theo Rogan. And it also means that Graham did, indeed, get it from James Roddye’s son Thomas and not Thomas’s son Thomas. Graham and Lucy Nenney are also in-laws of James’ son Thomas, who married Lydia Nenney, another of Patrick and Lucy’s daughters, in 1824.

And how did that come about? As I read this document, Thomas Roddye was in debt to Patrick Nenney – Hugh Graham’s father-in-law – to the tune of $2,120 when Thomas executed a deed of trust to John Donaldson securing that debt, Patrick Nenney having died in 1824 and Graham and Patrick’s widow now holding Patrick’s estate.

According to the indenture, if Thomas were to default on this debt, Donaldson was to sell the property “at the court house in Dandridge” and pay Graham and Lucy Nenney out of the proceeds. But apparently, Roddy, Graham, and Nenney came up with a better idea a few years later. Graham and Nenney would buy the property from Roddy for $2,500 ($75,000 in 2021 using the consumer price index, although it’s buying power would be about $65 million) “being the whole of said debt, interest, and charges” and release young Thomas from further claims.

The document includes a description of the boundaries of “four hundred and sixty-five acres more or less” on Fall Creek, bordering the Cheek and Witt properties and “the road leading from Russellville to Cheeks x roads.”

The document was witnessed by Needham Jarnigan and William V. Roddy – presumably Thomas’s brother, who had inherited the property from their father along with Thomas when James died in 1822 – and recorded in the registry in Jefferson County. And now I have the specific book and page number to look for.

Hastily typed transcript with typos Download

Needless to say, I’m gobsmacked.

September 2, 2021September 9, 2021

The waiting game

That’s where we are now … waiting waiting waiting.

Can you tell anything about this room? I sure can’t.

The IRS has gotten up to May 20 in assigning 501(c)(3) applications, so we’re still about two months out getting ours assigned. I couldn’t get the interior photos I needed to start the application for the National Register of Historic Places, so that’s on hold until I can – possibly not until the tenants are gone at the end of the year.

We’re also waiting – and this is a terrific thing to be waiting for – for Dr Carroll Van West of the Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area to pull his team together and come up for an assessment of the property and recommendations for rehab and reconstruction work. The TCWNHA gets federal money to provide these type of assessments in the heritage area, which covers the entire state of Tennessee, so to say I’m excited about this is a grand understatement. Dr West is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University where he’s the director of the Center for Historic Preservation AND he’s the Tennessee State Historian. He tells me he visited Hayslope once before, many years ago, so it’s a bit of an exciting thing all the way around. More to come on this!

“the home of Mrs James Roddye.” Courtesy of the Tennessee State Library and Archives.

And what do I do while I’m waiting? More and more research, of course. I’ve learned that the old photo of the house before the clapboard – used in the Garden Study Club of Nashville’s 1934 “History of Homes and Gardens in Tennessee” – is in the collection at the state archives, where it’s titled something akin to the “the home of Mrs James Roddye.” That’s an interesting title … if it refers to Mrs Col James Roddye, then she died in 1825 and I SERIOUSLY don’t think the photo dates from then. But does it mean that the house belonged to another James Roddye? Our James had a son James, but our James left the house to Thomas and William, and Thomas lived in it while his mother went to Rhea County, where the son James lived and where she died. Thomas died in 1844, and I’d assumed the house went to his oldest son, also named Thomas. But did it go to his second son James? If that’s the case … it throws into question the story about Hugh Graham buying the house in 1853 to give to Theo and Maria Louisa, who we know didn’t live in it at least until 1862, when Theo came back from Texas. What if the Hugh Graham story is just wrong, and James A Roddy, son of Thomas, inherited the house? He died in 1877, and the photo could very well have happened after that. Theo’s family was living in Jefferson County District 15 in the 1870 census – Witt’s Foundry – and in Russellville, Hamblen County (which was formed in 1870) in the 1880 census. We shall see, I reckon.*

Anyway, what else am I doing? Thinking about what the property can be. I do want to live in it, of course, but I’d also like to find a way to share it, in the tradition of the Roddyes and the Rogans. In that vein, I’m building a library! Books about the area and its history, and who knows what else. If you’d like a look at what I’ve collected so far, it’s right here … and growing.

And finally, I’m thinking about adding the house to the Civil War Trails, which is a pretty cool system of markers of Civil War sites. The Longstreet Museum and Bethesda Church & Cemetery are already on that system, so it makes perfect sense to add Hayslope. So, while I’m doing all this waiting, I started working on the text for the Trails sign. I’ll include it here – let me know what you think:

Hayslope

“Hundreds are without blankets or shoes”

Gen. Lafayette McLaws, headquartered in the home you see before you, wrote his wife before even arriving here in late 1863 that “many of my command are without tents,” shoes, or blankets, and that “the ration is not sufficient, and many are sick.”

After failing to take Fort Sanders in Knoxville, shivering Confederate soldiers camped in the fields around the house in all directions throughout the winter of 1863-1864, as sleet and snow pelted them and temperatures dropped below zero. When winter ended, these weary men followed Longstreet into Virginia and on to Appomattox.

Blaming McLaws for the loss at Knoxville, Gen Longstreet relieved him of command, although the order was countered in Richmond, and McLaws eventually survived a court martial.

Both Union and Confederate troops stayed here over the course of the war, but it was this final winter that left its mark on both civilians and fighters.

Pull quote:

“Out of 300 men in the 13th Regiment, only 32 are reported today as having shoes. The balance have been going barefoot over the frozen ground and a great many were without shoes during the campaign of the last two months. I have seen them marching on the frozen ground with their feet bleeding at every step.”

-December 31, 1863. Sgt William H. Hill, 13th Mississippi Regiment, McLaws’ Division

Sidebar:

This house was built in 1785 by King’s Mountain veteran James Roddye, a signer to Tennessee’s first constitution. He operated his home as the Tavern with the Red Door here on the Kentucky Road. Many a traveler from North Carolina to Kentucky stopped here for a hot meal, a swig of Roddye’s whiskey distilled on the property, and a good night’s sleep.

Alternate sidebar:

Both Federal and Confederate troops occupied the area throughout the war. Longstreet’s chief of staff, Moxley Sorrel, noted: “When the Confederates came on the ground, then was the time for acts of brutality against their Union neighbors …. Burnings, hangings, whippings were common — all acts of private vengeance and retaliation. When the turn came and the Unionists were in authority, Confederate sympathizers were made to suffer in the same way, and so it went on throughout the bloody strife.”

Soldiery artifacts at the Museum of Appalachia

I’m hoping to include the photo of the house, if I can obtain a copy from the state archives, possibly a photo of some soldiery artifacts found on the property, and a couple others I’m considering.

Whachyall think?

back of the photo of the house. Courtesy of the Tennessee State Library and Archives.

So … shortly after writing this post, the Tennessee State Archives emailed me with a scan of the original photo of the house – and the back of it. And it doesn’t say “home of Mrs James Roddye” at all. It says “home of Col James Roddye” and that the photo came from Mrs John Trotwood Moore, the great-great-great granddaughter of the colonel (if he really was a colonel) and his first wife (Catherine Chase). Anyway, I’ve tracked her lineage back to James’ son Jesse, who was one of the sons who moved to Rhea County. Now I have some leads to see if I can’t find more old photos of the house … that particular one has to be pretty old. And also, I’m gonna get a high quality print of the photo from the archives!

Category: The House