Tag: Theophilus Rogan

Posted on

January journey

I just spent nearly a week up in Tennessee, most of it snowed in, sitting in a camper in Morristown, drinking hot chocolate and watching Welsh crime dramas on TV. I did accomplish a few things, though.

Into the orchard area.

And no, the tenants aren’t yet gone. That’s … annoying. It’s going to happen, though. Meanwhile …

I met up with Kenny, who took care of the yard at my dad’s place after his death, and he’s ready to do the same at Hayslope, once the tenants are out and the grass starts growing again.

I also planted some colorful little flags across the lower part of the yard, marking out where the CWT parking area will go, and met with Jerry, who’ll be grading that and dumping in the gravel for it. He’ll have to come back and look at it again when the snow’s gone to price it out, but we’re getting set up there too.

Flags. They were still there in the snow.

While wandering around the yard, I spotted two things I hadn’t noticed before. One, the gate posts at the driveway are for split rails, and two, both of the stone markers at the Kentucky Road entrance are still standing – over the summer I couldn’t get close enough to see the south one because of all the overgrowth.

Both stone markers.

Got the many boxes of books and other items out of my meditation room and into a storage space in Morristown, which was MUCH easier said than done. Turns out storage spaces, particularly climate controlled ones, are in short supply in East Tennessee. The one I finally found is small, but will do for now, and at least when I’m meditating, I’m no longer hidden behind stacks of boxes!

With all the snow – very pretty, by the way – I had a lot of inside time and used some of it (when not watching Welsh crime dramas) to do a little research. First, I tried (again) to map out Cassie Rogan’s property lines, but I’m still stumped by the reference to “old Arnott Road,” which intersects with the Russellville Road (now Warrensburg) – at least I was.

I was looking for a set of hex keys in my basement when I came across a book I’d forgotten I had, called “Historical Echoes of Hamblen County,” signed to my mom by its author, Connie Maloney Haun, who taught school in Morristown for 30 years. It’s gonna take some doing to go through this book – it’s not the best organized. But in the front was a map I’d never before seen – and that map marked “Arnott Road” as what we know now as Warrensburg Road between Silver City Road and Little Mountain Road. At that point, the road becomes Fall Creek Road on this map (which is one of the many names I knew as a child – Warrensburg Road was never one of those). So, FOUND IT. I’ll be trying again to mark out Cassie’s property soon.

Arnott Road, found at last!

A couple other interesting notes on this map, which has no date or provenance – it appears to mark what we now call Sugar Hollow Road as “Old Russellville-Warrensburg Road.” Jarrell Road used to be “Herald Road” (or was there just a mispronunciation/misspelling?) What’s now Beacon Hill Road was “Catherine Nenney Road,” and the spot where the church is was actually a community called Nenney. And a long time question has been answered for me – Silver City was at the intersection of Little Mountain Road and Silver City Road.

The map is specifically of Hamblen County, and clearly after 1942 since it shows Cherokee Lake – or very close to it. Enka Highway is marked on the map, Slop Creek Road is Slop Branch Road, and Interstate 81 – not completed in Tennessee until 1975 – is marked. Now, plans for I81 were made in the 50s, so …. and the highway is marked on the map, in parentheses, “FCA.” Don’t know what that means.

Back at my snowed in camper in Tennessee, I turned back to my search for Cavan-a-Lee, the home Hugh Graham gave to his daughter Connie and her husband William Houston Patterson. The house was built on the other half of the Roddye property, across Warrensburg Road from Hayslope.

Doing some old newspaper searches, I noticed that the name “Cavan-a-Lee” slowly vanished in the 1940s, and yet there was no reference to anything having happened to the house. One of W.H. and Connie’s sons, Hugh Graham Patterson (H.G.), had married Lucy Nenney – the great niece of the original Hugh Graham’s wife, Catherine Nenney – and they lived at the Nenney House, now the Longstreet Museum.

H.G.’s sister Louise and her husband Horace Miller apparently lived at Cavan-a-Lee until their deaths in 1942 and 1940 – which is when the name vanishes from the record. Mr & Mrs J.D. Easterly, who owned Modern Cleaners in Morristown, bought the home in 1952 and began an extensive restoration project, redoing the six-room house, “with its beamed ceiling, pine-paneled den, and wide-open fireplace accessible from both the living room and the kitchen,” Morristown Gazette columnist Connie Helms wrote in her “Connie’s Corner” column.

Connie’s Corner, April 20, 1953. Morristown Gazette-Mail.

And on April 20, 1953, the house burned to the ground, taking with it all the restoration and numerous antiques already put in place by the Easterlys.

But where was this house? Turns out, Connie’s Corner tells us, almost – “at Hayslope near the E.M. Lane residence,” which is over by the railroad. There were a cluster of three houses there at the time – the Lanes owned a sizable chunk of the property there, which leads me to believe they bought it either from WH and Connie Patterson or from their estate.

It also seems to be an unlikely location for Cavan-a-Lee. Maybe. Another possible location – near Hayslope and the Lane home – is past Hayslope and up on the hill above the road. That property was also part of the Lane estate, though, and is supposedly the location of a home that burned mysteriously on a Halloween night – certainly not April 1953. The ruins of that home were still visible when I was a kid

Interestingly, I couldn’t find another mention of the Cavan-a-Lee fire other than in the Connie’s Corner column – or even a mention in the Morristown papers of the Halloween night fire, so …

So where was it? “At Hayslope,” Connie Helms said … could it have been standing just across the road from Hayslope? The property between the road and Fall Creek in front of Hayslope was not part of the Lane estate. Part of it belonged to Hugh Rogan – the part where the spring is. So I suppose it’s possible that part of that property belonged to the Patterson estate, and that’s where Cavan-a-Lee stood. Seems a little trip to the courthouse to find out where the Easterlys owned land is in order.

Such a shame that Cavan-a-Lee’s history seems to have been lost even before the house itself was lost, although the Easterlys were clearly making an effort to bring it back to its former glory.

Let’s see … what else. Well, while trying (again) to figure out Cassie’s property and searching for Cavan-a-Lee, I got to wondering if some of the houses out past Hayslope, on Hayslope’s side, might have been some of the cottages connected with the resort – specifically the house just on the other side of the city’s strip of property. That’ll require some deed research, I imagine. Sure would like to figure out where Cassie’s property was though. She apparently had a house on it, where her father was when he died.

And speaking of Theo Rogan, I re-read his obituary last week and saw something I’d missed. Apparently, Theo kept a daily diary from the time he was 7 years old until a few days before he died. Am I on a search for that? Why, yes, I am. And that search has already uncovered Theo writing a little history of his family, said to be excerpted from some larger “Reminisces,” which I think we can be quite certain came from his diaries.

Posted on

Following a faint trail

There’s only so much research one can do from a living room on a laptop. Sooner or later, I’m gonna have to go to a courthouse or two and start pouring through old records.

I’m particularly interested right now in tracing the ownership of Hayslope, as best I can, through the records. We just don’t have very many of those. In fact, the only ones I’m 100 percent sure of are that I inherited the property from my dad, and he inherited it from his dad, because I have their wills.

A young Briscoe Thomason

My grandfather, Briscoe Thomason, got the property somehow, presumably from his brother Escoe who was living there in the 1940s (and as early as 1938, when mention of the remodeling of his “historic house” appears in a newspaper article). That’s also when the house got its first modern plumbing and electricity, and, I’ll bet, kitchen.

Let’s start from the beginning, shall we? So. James Roddye built the house in 1785 on a sizable chunk of land he apparently got from his father-in-law, George Russell, who got it from a North Carolina land grant. Roddye got land grants too, but his were closer to what’s now Whitesburg, on Bent Creek. Roddye’s Tavern with the Red Door is just up the hill from Fall Creek. All of this was in Greene County at the time, although it moved to Jefferson County in 1792, when that county was formed from parts of Greene and Hawkins counties.

James died in 1822 (he’s buried at Bent Creek cemetery), and he left his “plantation” to his sons William (from his first wife Catherine Chase) and Thomas (from his second wife Lydia Russell) in his will. Now, William and Thomas were both living in Georgia at the time. It appears that Thomas came back to Russellville, but William did not – he remained in Georgia until his death. Thomas stayed in Tennessee but died at 44 in 1844 – apparently during a trip back to Georgia. He too is buried at Bent Creek.

Presumably, Thomas left the estate to his oldest son, also named Thomas, who was 14 at the time. I’ve not yet found a will for the elder Thomas and suspect he may have died suddenly, perhaps without a will.

(Edit: Further research has cast doubt on the above Thomas and William stuff. We’re still checking, although it seems all but certain that James Roddye’s son Thomas died before 1850, when he disappears from census records while the rest of his family continues).

Now it starts getting really murky. Family histories say the house was bought by Hughe Graham of Tazewell from Thomas Roddye (who would have been 23 by then) as a wedding present for his daughter, Maria Louisa, when she married Theophilus Rogan in 1853. Maybe … but … Rogan, who was born in Kingsport, was an attorney living in Lockhart, Texas, in 1853. The wedding took place in Tennessee on December 14 of that year, but it appears that Rogan took his bride with him back to Texas.

Two daughters were born to the Rogans in Texas – Cassie in 1856 and “Little Maggie” (who died at 7 in 1863) in 1858. It’s possible son Hugh was born in Texas, although most histories say he was born in Tennessee – Tazewell specifically – in 1860. Hugh was certainly conceived in Texas, as Theophilus brought his young family back to Tazewell in 1860, according to his 1904 obituary, and then returned to Texas. He came back to Tennessee two years later, intending to again take his family to Texas, according to the obituary, but by that time the fighting in the civil war made the return trip impossible.

Hayslope, before the remodeling. Date unknown.

So did Hughe Graham buy Roddye’s property in 1853? Possibly. Young Thomas Roddy didn’t leave the area – he’s seen living at Witt’s Foundry in the 1870 census and back in Russellville 10 years later. Did Hughe give it to Louisa as a wedding present? Again, maybe, but she didn’t live in it right after the wedding. The Rogans almost certainly didn’t live at the Roddye property until at least 1862.

Whew. It doesn’t get any better, at least not after the deaths of Theophilus and Louisa Rogan in 1904 and 1910, respectively. First is the issue of just how much property they had. We’ll go on the assumption that the land itself was unchanged from Roddye’s ownership, which, of course, may or may not be true. Louisa named the property Hayslope, and it was known by that during their lifetimes through frequent newspaper reports of the comings and goings of friends, relatives, and other visitors as Hayslope became a well known area resort. At least in the latter part of the Rogans’ lives, it appears that son Hugh did much of the property management, as he is listed as overseeing construction of new buildings to accommodate visitors and also on farm matters, although is sister Cassie shows up in that capacity at times.

Hayslope grew during this time. “Rustic cabins” were on the property, and in 1898, Hugh’s brother Griff was said to be building a 6-room cottage for lease to a couple from New Orleans, and a dining room and a 2-story frame home were also under construction. That frame home becomes important to our story in the latter years of Theophilus and Louisa and, especially, after their deaths.

In 1903, the Rogans had a 50th wedding anniversary at Hayslope. Many of the descriptions talk of the old Roddye house, then more than 100 years old, and a dinner for 100 people, presumably held in the recently constructed dining room. It appears, however, that the Rogan children – at least those who hadn’t married and moved away (Margaret to Virginia and Ellen to Florida) – were living in the 2-story frame home. Theophilus died less than a year after the anniversary party, and Louisa six years after her husband. Now the property divides.

We’ve found deed transfers from Louisa’s heirs to Maggie for 55 acres; to Cassie for 51 acres; and to Hugh for 50 acres; but none so far to Ellen or Griff. It’s all but certain that Hugh and Cassie were living in the frame house, and possibly Griff, who didn’t marry until 1919 (Cassie never married).

So that’s 156 acres we can account for. Assuming that Ellen and Griff got about the same, add another 100 acres, and we’ve got about 250 acres in all.

Give or take, because we know that Ellen, who had been living in Florida since her marriage in 1893, owned property in Russellville as late at 1937, when a newspaper article notes that she sold 28 acres that year to Escoe Thomason. Escoe, who the next year had remodeled his “historic home.” And 28 acres? That’s the exact size of the property the old Roddye home sits on today. Have we found the answer? We don’t know, yet, but another trip to the Hamblen County (the county formed from parts of Jefferson, Grainger, and Greene in 1870) courthouse may give us that answer.

Citizens Bank of Russellville, corner of the Russellville Pike and Depot Street. Photo faces roughly southwest. Appoximately 1910.

But what about that 2 story frame house? It appears that house, just a few feet away from the Roddye house to the south, was on Hugh’s 50 acres. Hugh’s health was declining. He had been working as a cashier at the Citizens Bank of Russellville, his obituary said, but in 1913, he sold that 50 acres to a cousin, Robert Patterson, and moved with his wife to Florida, where his sister Ellen lived. Hugh died two years later, and his wife – who was the sister of Margaret Rogan’s husband – moved back to Virginia, where she was born.

Newspaper articles continue to talk about Hayslope comings and goings, now centered on Patterson and his wife, the former Maud Hooper from Selma, Alabama, soon joined by her sister, Ruth, and her Scotsman husband Robert Blair. The Pattersons and Blairs generally spent summers at Hayslope and winters with Hooper family members in Alabama. Patterson, who owned some property in the area prior to buying Hugh Rogan’s 50 acres, put up for sale 60 acres connected with the Hayslope farm in 1921. We haven’t yet learned if he made the sale then or later, but he does appear to have sold property to the south of the frame house at some point, while keeping a narrow strip on which that 1898 house sat.

Gradually, the term “Hayslope” came to refer only to that house and not the old Roddye house where Theophilus and Louisa Rogan lived.

Well after Escoe Thomason lived in the Roddye house, the Pattersons, Blairs, and their friends came and went. Robert Blair and Robert Patterson both died in the late 1940s, and Maud and Ruth continued the tradition of winters in Alabama, summers in Russellville. Maud died in the 1950s, and Ruth kept up the tradition until her death in 1966.

I recall peering into the windows of the house one year while Ruth was in Alabama, seeing the furniture covered with sheets, waiting for her return to open the house again.

That can’t happen anymore, though, as the city of Morristown acquired the property after Ruth’s death and tore everything down. They were hoping to acquire the Thomason property too, to expand their industrial park over to Warrensburg Road, but my grandfather drew a line in the proverbial sand, and the city ended up with a narrow strip of land that is largely useless to them and is now a mass of tangled underbrush and snakes.

And that’s what I know at this particular point in time. I’ll be digging when I get back up to Tennessee, likely both literally and figuratively. Meanwhile, I’d be delighted if anyone has information I don’t have. This journey has been so very interesting, as I both learn things I didn’t know and find out some of the things I thought I knew weren’t true at all!