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.
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.