The Great Valley
Hayslope rests in the Great Valley of Tennessee, between the Holston, French Broad, and Nolichucky Rivers. Beyond the Holston to the north are the Cumberland Mountains and the Cumberland Gap, past where the Holston and French Broad join to become the Tennessee River is the Cumberland Plateau, and over the French Broad and Nolichucky is the Blue Ridge range of the fabled and ancient Appalachians, some of the oldest mountains in the world. The area’s gentle rolling hills host innumerable creeks and springs, with limestone caverns, both discovered and practically unknown, winding beneath the surface. And yes, one of those caves is on the remaining Hayslope property.
North Carolina Land Grants
European colonists moved westward over the mountains to the east and down the valley from Virginia prior to the Revolutionary War, settling in the areas around present-day Kingsport. They formed the Watauga Association, negotiating land deals with the Cherokee, very much against the wishes of the governments of the North Carolina and Virginia colonies. Before the colonies could do anything about it, however, war broke out, and by the end, North Carolina and Virginia were states in a new nation and looking to expand. The Watauga settlers, who had battled the British as the Overmountain Men, were at the forefront of that expansion, with many of them receiving land grants elsewhere in the East Tennessee wilderness, if it can truly be called a wilderness while occupied by Cherokee peoples. But the Cherokee peoples had sided with the British.
The names of those land grant recipients still reverberate in the Valley. Of particular interest to this story are those of George Russell and James Roddye, Both were part of the Watauga Association and both served at King’s Mountain during the war and both received land grants in the area of what would become known as Russellville. Russell married Elizabeth Bean, the sister of William Bean, said to be the first European settler in the Watauga region. Roddye married Russell’s daughter, Lydia.
Russell’s grants placed his property around Fall Creek, the creek that meanders through the current Hayslope property and much of Russellville. Roddye’s original grant was a little further away from what would be Russellville, in what became Whitesburg, but he bought Russell’s land, and that’s where he built his home, on a slight rise just above two springs on the Kentucky Road.
Roads and Ridges
It’s not clear how much of Russell’s land Roddye obtained, but it was at a very prominent spot on the road that followed the French Broad River through the mountains from North Carolina, across the valley and on toward Cumberland Gap. This is not the Wilderness Road that Daniel Boone followed decades earlier when he walked through the gap, now on the line between Kentucky and Tennessee, but it’s likely he later wandered by and may have stopped at the Tavern with the Red Door. Certainly others on their way to Kentucky did. Less than a mile before Roddye’s home, those travelers would have topped a ridge that gave them a clear view across the valley to the next gap in their journey, Bean’s Gap above Bean’s Station on Clinch Mountain. It’s easy to imagine that, after a glimpse of the famed gap, Roddye’s tavern would have been a welcome sight and a timely place to rest before the next part of the journey.
Farming Hospitality
Little is known of what happened to the property immediately after Roddye’s death in 1822. His will left it to his sons William and Thomas. But Thomas lost the property to the estate of his father-in-law, Patrick Nenney, in 1829 over a significant debt. Patrick’s son Charles lived there until he sold it to another Nenney son-in-law, Hugh Graham, in 1845 and left it to his daughter Louisa and her husband Theophilus in his will in 1862.
This was only half the old Roddye property however. The other half, roughly across what’s now Warrensburg Road, went to another Graham daughter, Mary Ann, married to Absalom Kyle. Still another Graham sister – Connie, married to William Houston Patterson of Philadelphia – bought the Kyles’ property after their deaths.
But the Rogans lived on the property they called Hayslope, hosting travelers and gatherings, and building new structures to house them, especially in the late 1800s. They farmed as well, growing vegetable and selling chickens and eggs.
Theo died in 1904 and Louisa six years later. She died without a will, so her five children divided up the property and drew from a hat to see who would get what part. Maggie, married to William Henry MIllar and living in Norfolk, Virginia, got 55 acres – the Bayne’s Hill section. Cassie, the oldest Rogan child, got 51 acres in the Sugar Hollow section. Hugh, who married his brother-in-law’s sister Bertie Millar, drew the section directly south of the old homestead, made up of 50 acres. Griffin inherited the 50 acres closest to the old Taylor property. And Ellen, married to a citrus magnate named S. Minor Stephens and living in Florida, drew the old homeplace and the 28 acres around it.
Ellen immediately suggested that Cassie, who never married, live in the old home, which she did until her death in 1932. Cassie, Griffin, and Maggie all sold their parcels, as did Hugh, but he sold his to a cousin, Robert Patterson.
Patterson sold most of Hugh’s old property, keeping a slim parcel next to Hayslope, where he built a large frame house for his wife, Maud Hooper, Maud’s sister Ruth and her husband Robert Blair, and the Hooper sisters’ mother, Maud Philpot Hooper. They had all been accustomed to spending their summers at Hayslope, and Patterson’s purchase and the house he built there, although with three cottages, allowed them and their friends and family to continue the tradition into the 1960s.
Patterson called his home Killiecrankie, after a famous Scottish battle, but the newspapers and Russellvillians just referred to the property as Hayslope, as they always had. The two Roberts died in the 1940s, and Maud and Ruth continued the tradition, summers in Russellville and winters in their hometown Selma, Alabama.
When Maud died in the 1950s, Ruth carried on alone until she, too, died, and her heirs sold the property to the city of Morristown, which tore down all the structures on it.
Once and future
Ellen Rogan Stephens sold Roddye’s original cabin and its 28 acres in 1937 to Escoe and Briscoe Thomason, two of a trio of brothers whose father, Joe D Thomason, had started a dry goods business in the village. The deed transferring the property notes that it is the same parcel “conveyed to the undersigned grantor (Stephens) by the heirs of Mrs M.L. Rogan, to wit, Catherine Mary Rogan, Hugh Graham Rogan, Griffith Callaway Rogan, and Margaret Louise Rogan.
The original deed transfered the property only to Escoe, but a correction just a few days later made Escoe and Briscoe “tenants in common.” When the brothers’ partnership dissolved in the 1940s, Briscoe ended up the sole owner of the property, and Escoe headed to Bulls Gap. While the house has languished in recent years, the property has served as grazing land for cattle and a fine sledding hill when the snows come.
The current owner now hopes to restore the home as a remembrance of Russellville’s history, to allow it to again welcome visitors, and to showcase land that holds within it the essence of the hills.