Jackpot!

Well, I kinda feel like I hit the historical document jackpot anyway.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lot-tery

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

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

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

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

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

The Rogans forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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