The Cherokee, the Yuchi, and Beyond
The first people to set foot in what’s now East Tennessee likely did so more than 10,000 years ago, probably stalking mastodon across the mountains. Little remains from that far back, but archaeology has found evidence of people in the region nearly 10,000 years ago. Those people likely didn’t live in the area, instead passing through on a semi-annual basis, probably stalking smaller game over the mountains after the mastodon were gone
Forests were on the increase during the next several millennia, along with game animals and plants, making it possible for the people to build semi-permanent to permanent camps, although the East Tennessee region remained sparsely populated.
More significant finds have come from the Woodland period (3,000-2,000 years ago) as climate stabilized, and with it, water and food sources. On the edge of the Blue Ridge, a culture known as the Red Jasper Focus developed toward the end of the previous era, known for their extensive use of red jasper, lasting almost to the end of the Woodland period. Several areas along the French Broad and Nolichucky Rivers have been studied.
The Mississippian period saw the most growth in population during a period of just a few hundred years, and Spanish explorers visited places like Chiaha in the French Broad valley. Those visits took place in the late 16th Century, and the Spanish likely encountered Muscogee, Yuchi (Tsoyaha), and Shawnee peoples – especially Yuchi, who appear to have been the dominant group in our area until white settlers began pushing Cherokee down from the north and then following into the region themselves.
Most of the larger towns concentrated from the Knoxville area down to the south, along the Tennessee and Little Tennessee Rivers, especially as the Cherokee moved in and kept going with Europeans right behind them. We had our share, of course. Chiaha on Zimmerman’s Island, visited by both De Soto and Pardo. Another large settlement was on Fain’s Island on the French Broad, both now under Douglas Lake. Pardo noted a settlement at the confluence of the Nolichuckey and French Broad Rivers that he called Tanasaqui, and there were Yuchi (Chiska) sites further into our northwest called Guasili and Canasoga.
Early explorers, mostly French, called the Holston River the Cherokee River, and the English initially named it after a man named Stephen Holstein, which is why it’s sometimes spelled that way in older histories. The Algonquin called it Hogohegee, which appears to have been a name for the Yuchi people.
The Nolichuckey was known as Nonachunkeh to the Yuchi, meaning “foot of the mountains river” and the French Broad was Agiqua, meaning “long tow river.”
A quick note: It’s quite possible that much of the lore found in our families about Native ancestry is not Cherokee at all, but rather Yuchi, as the Cherokee and Europeans decimated their large and prosperous society, forcing many to flee and others to hide. The Yuchi fled south, allied with Muscogee or, further south, Seminole. They were forcibly removed along with the others by President Andrew Jackson and are today not considered a separate tribe by the federal government. Instead, they’re enrolled members of other tribes, most notably Muscogee.
The Cherokee, like the peoples before them, put villages mostly along the rivers – the Holston, the Nolichucky, and the French Broad – and used the vast and lush valleys for what was surely plentiful hunting.
And then, of course, there’s the Long Island of the Holston – Amoyeli Gunahita in Cherokee – in Kingsport, an island that is both on the National Register of Historic Places and is a National Historic Landmark District because of its importance. Sadly, the island has been nearly lost to industry and development, and little of its history remains visible. The city of Kingsport has given nearly 4 of its 840 acres to the Eastern Band of Cherokees, but it’s heartbreaking to see this once magnificent island in its current state.
And it got into that state because the English moved in.
James Roddye
The traditional view has been that James Patrick Roddye was born in Ireland, or perhaps England. Our research, however, concludes that our particular James Roddye was born in Pennsylvania in 1742 to James Joseph Roddy Jr and his wife, whose name may have been Mary or Prudence or something entirely different. James Joseph Roddy Jr was likely born in Ireland – Donegal to be more precise – to James Joseph Rhody Sr and his wife, whose name was definitely Mary. Research is ongoing that may clear up some of these issues, but the discovery of Rhody Sr’s will, written just before his death in 1734 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania – where he was a miller – clears up several issues. It’s not clear exactly when James Sr came to Pennsylvania – so it’s possible that James Jr was born there – but the entire family was in Lancaster when James Sr died. The timing lends this researcher to think the family was of a Protestant Dissenter group opposed to the Anglicization of the Church of Ireland (there’s no indication they were Catholic, but Dissenters were treated much the same way) and fled Scotland and England to escape religious persecution, which only got worse, culminating with an outright rebellion in 1798 that left many Irish wanted for treason, executed, or exiled – including many in the families of our areas earlier European settlers.. But the Roddyes were already gone by that time, one of the earlier families to flee to the colonies.
James Sr apparently had a falling out with his eldest son William (perhaps even over religion?), leaving him but an English guinea – England’s first machine-struck gold coin containing a quarter ounce of gold and with a fixed value at 21 shillings in 1734. James Jr got the bulk of the estate, with specific orders and promises to take care of his mother, sister Prudence, and brother Alex (until he’s old enough to take care of himself). Junior appears to have done that. James Sr had another daughter, Barbara, who was no longer living at the time of his death, but he did mention “my Son in Law Joseph Work his son James,” to whom he left “a suit of New Clothes.”
Junior’s known children were Sidney, born the year Junior’s father died, William, born in 1740, and James Patrick – our James Roddye – born in 1742. As the youngest, our James likely had few prospects and at some point set out for the wilderness – although there’s some indication William was also in the mountains with him – following such colonists as William Bean, recognized as the first European colonist in what is now Tennessee in 1762. Roddye settled in the same area, present-day Washington County, originally on Roan Creek. He appears to have married Catherine Chase in 1766, either in Washington County or Pennsylvania before heading south, and they had at least three children – Elizabeth (1767), Jesse (1775), and Rachel (1777).
Once in the future Tennessee, Roddye was part of the Watauga Association, a semi-autonomous government organized in 1772 by Bean and the other colonists. Roddye was a member of Bean’s militia, which came in handy when war broke out, particularly in 1780 as the British prepared a southern sweep over the Carolinas. A ragtag group of colonists set out from the mountains – in Tennessee, they were organized by future Gov John Sevier – to head off the British advance. Roddye was among them, marching quickly into South Carolina, where they confronted the British in the Battle of King’s Mountain, an affair that lasted less than an hour and scuttled the British ideas of Carolina conquest.
These Overmountain Men returned to their homes and were rewarded with land grants from the newly formed state of North Carolina at the end of the war. Roddye was known as “Colonel Roddye” following the war, but he was not a colonel in the war. He was a private in Bean’s company at King’s Mountain and may have held the rank of captain at the battle of Boyd’s Creek against the Cherokee. But he was pointed lieutenant colonel of the militia in the failed state of Franklin, and that’s the origin of his title. He is, however, recognized as a Revolutionary War soldier for the purposes of Daughters of the American Revolution membership, where he is typically listed as a private.
Roddye’s wife Catherine died before her husband set off for King’s Mountain, and when he returned, he married again, to Lydia Russell, the daughter of another Overmountain Man, George Russell. Russell and Roddye both received land grants in the newly formed Greene County to the west of the Watauga settlement, Russell’s along Fall Creek and Roddye’s along Bent Creek just to the east. Roddye bought Russell’s land on Fall Creek, and it was on that property that he built the Tavern with the Red Door in 1785. More children came to the Roddyes – perhaps as many as nine.
While living in Greene County (Jefferson County after 1792), Roddye served in the North Carolina House of Commons and was a delegate to the North Carolina convention to consider ratification of the US Constitution. He also served at the constitutional convention for the failed State of Franklin, and then to the convention that framed and wrote Tennessee’s first constitution. He was a signer of that historic document, and served in the Tennessee House.
Roddye died at Hayslope in 1822 and is buried at the Bent Creek Cemetery in Whitesburg. The church he helped organize is no longer standing and has changed its name several times. It’s now the 1st Baptist Church of Whitesburg, about a mile north of the cemetery. A portion of Bent Creek Church’s congregation apparently split from the original church at some point and moved about a mile south of the cemetery, where it’s now known as Catherine Nenney Memorial Baptist Church, after the daughter of Patrick Nenney who married Claiborne County merchant Hughe Graham — another part of the Hayslope story.
James Roddye left Hayslope to his sons William and Thomas – married to Lydia, another daughter of Patrick Nenney. Several of Roddye’s children had moved to Rhea County in Tennessee by that time – and his wife Lydia died there in 1825 while visiting them. William eventually moved to Cocke County and sold his interest in his father’s property to Thomas. Thomas fell into debt to Patrick Nenney (who died in 1824), founder of the Bent Creek store, and signed a document to pay it back or forfeit his father’s property if he didn’t.
He didn’t, and in 1829, Patrick Nenney’s executors – his business partner Hugh Graham and widow Lucy Nenney – took possession of the house for the Nenney estate. Patrick’s son Charles was given the deed to the house in 1834 and lived there until he sold the property to Graham in 1845.
Thomas and his family went to Rhea County, and a few years later went further south to Carroll County, Georgia, with Lydia’s sister Margaret and her husband Needham Jarnigan, perhaps to take advantage of a gold rush there.
But in January 1837, Lydia left the church in Carroll County and returned to East Tennessee. The following month, Needham Jarnigan wrote to his brother-in-law, Charles P. Nenney, that the story goes that Thomas Roddye lost all his money “sporting” and was believed to have “ended his own life.” In August of that year, Thomas was “excluded” from his church. He was not heard from again.
The Nenneys
From Patrick Nenney on, the Nenneys were a very prominent family in the Russellville-Whitesburg-Bent Creek area. Patrick’s daughter Catherine Nenney married Hugh Graham, the Claiborne County businessman and landowner who worked with Patrick Nenney, and his own brother William, at the Bent Creek Store. Nenney’s son Charles Patrick Nenney was Russellville’s postmaster and continued his father’s store, and Charles Patrick’s son, Charles Grandison Nenney, was the stationmaster at the Russellville train depot. Charles P. lived at Hayslope from about 1834 until he sold it, in 1845, to Hugh Graham. It’s about to become Hayslope.
The Rogans
Hughe Graham most definitely was from a Dissenter family in Ireland. He fled to the newly formed United States in 1798, at the age of 14, as the Catholic/Dissenter rebellion against English rule was quashed and its participants sentenced to death or exile. The Grahams came to East Tennessee, where Hughe, his brother William, and Patrick Nenney went into business together. They were very successful. Hughe built Castle Rock in Tazewell and married Nenney’s daughter Catherine. They had many children, but the one who concerns us here is Louisa, who was born in 1833.
Louisa married attorney Theophilus Rogan, from an old Kingsport family, in 1853 and returned with him to Texas, where he had been practicing law with his brother Leonidas. There’s even a connection between the Rogans and the Roddyes: One of Thomas and Lydia’s children, Mary, was a bridesmaid at Theo and Louisa’s wedding.
As the Civil War loomed, Louisa returned to Tazewell, followed by her husband two years later. Meanwhile, Hughe Graham bought James Roddye’s property from Charles Nenney and arranged for it to be divided with very intricate instructions contained in his will to split equally between the Rogans and another of his daughters, Mary Ann and Absalom Kyle. Graham’s will gave the daughters possession of their new homes on January 1, 1862, or when Graham died. Graham died in 1865, so it’s safe to assume the Rogans lived in the new home from 1862.
The Rogans lived at Hayslope until their deaths (Theo in 1904 and Louisa in 1910). After Louisa’s death in 1910, the property split amongst their remaining children – Cassie, who had never married, Hugh, Griffith, Ellen Stephens (married and living in Florida), and Maggie Millar (married and living in Virginia). Hugh sold 50 acres to his cousin, Robert Patterson, in 1913, just two years before his death, but the 28 acres that included the house went to Ellen. Ellen had no intention of returning to Tennessee, so she suggested that her sister Cassie live there, which she did until her death in 1932.
All the other children – including Cassie – sold their parcels of the estate.
The Pattersons
Hayslope winds deeper into the Graham family with the sale of part of the property, directly next to the homeplace, to Robert Patterson, son of William Houston Patterson and another of Hughe Graham’s daughters, Cornelia (Cornelia and William had already bought the other half of Roddye’s property from the Kyles). The Pattersons came from the same Irish county, Tyrone, as the Grahams, although it seems they may have moved there from England earlier. This family, too, fled the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion. Francis Patterson, in fact, was married to Graham’s sister Ann, and fled with her and their son Robert – later to become a well-known American general in the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War, whose better days were behind him when he served for just three months as a Union general in the civil war – to Claiborne County. William Houston Patterson was the general’s son.
Robert Patterson sold all but a small strip of land just across the Old Kentucky Road from Hayslope. On the remaining land, he built a two story house for his family and three cottages for his mother in law and other guests, and the summer trips to Hayslope continued.
Patterson called his new home Killiecrankie, after a famous Scottish battle, but the newspapers and locals rarely used that name and called it Hayslope, as they’d been used to.
Robert and his wife, Maud Hooper, and Maud’s sister Ruth and her husband Robert Blair, spent their summers at Killiecrankie and winters at their homes in Selma, Alabama, where the Hoopers were from. After the two Roberts died within a year of each other in the late 1940s, the sisters remained in the house. Maud died in 1954, and Ruth in 1966, after which that small strip of property just to the south of the old Roddye home passed to the city of Morristown.
But the ties of these Russellville families continued. Another son of William and Cornelia – Hugh Graham Patterson – married Lucy Ellen Nenney, a great-granddaughter of Patrick Nenney, father of Hughe Graham’s wife Catherine, sister of Thomas Roddy’s wife Lydia. Hugh and Lucy lived in the Nenney House in Russellville, now the Longstreet Museum, and passed it to their son Charles, a World War II veteran and long the librarian in the village, when it had a library.
But Hayslope left the Roddyes, Grahams, the Nenneys, and the Pattersons, when the old house was acquired by Escoe and Briscoe Thomason, of a family with Georgia roots.
The Thomasons
There is one very distant connection between the Thomasons and the Roddyes. James and Lydia’s daughter Sednay (or perhaps Sidney) married Patrick Hume Hale in Tennessee. He was the grandson of one Nichols Haile II, who in turn was the great-great-great-great-grandfather of Mary Leona Hale, wife of T. L. Thomason Sr. Tom was the son of James and Rebecca Thomason, who moved to the Russellville area in the late 1860s.
James had been a blacksmith in Gaddistown, Georgia – in the southern Appalachians – where he met and married Sarah Rebecca Cavendar. They had five children while still in Georgia, in the midst of James’s conscription to serve in the Confederate army. It was late in the war, and he was wounded somewhere in Virginia. He was subsequently hospitalized when the war ended and his unit mustered out without him. His wife was never able to receive his pension because of that.
It’s not clear why the Thomasons moved to Tennessee – perhaps they had friends, or other relatives. They settled in the Shinbone/Slop Creek area, where James continued his work as a blacksmith. Six more children followed. One of their children, a daughter, died an infant in Georgia, and a son, born in Tennessee, died at 8. The remaining nine lived to adulthood, with several of them moving west to Missouri, Arkansas, and what’s now Oklahoma and beyond.
Three of the boys – Young Pinckney (Y.P.), Joseph Dedmon (Joe D), and Thomas Luther (T.L.), all born in Tennessee – opened a dry goods store. They prospered – perhaps too well. The brothers split their holdings, with all three operating stores in Russellville at one point.
After his death in 1934, Joe D’s business holdings passed to his sons Briscoe, Roscoe, and Escoe while some of his accumulated property passed to his daughter Birdie. Escoe and Briscoe bought the Hayslope property in mid-1937 from Ellen Rogan Stephens – and Escoe lived there for a time with his family. When the brothers’ partnership dissolved in the late 1940s, Briscoe ended up with the property. And with Briscoe’s death in 1983, it passed to his son, Charles Dedmon (C.D.). C.D. passed it on to his oldest daughter upon his death in 2017.
Sources
- Genealogical research. Carole Thomason
- Will of James Roddye
- Birth of a Culture: Red Jasper Focus Culture of Middle Eastern Tennessee. Teresa K. Putty and Don R. Ham, 2003.
- Memoirs of the Graham Family. Annie Kendrick Walker.
- Obituary of Theophilus Rogan. R.N. Price, Morristown Gazette, 1904.
- The Industrious Hen
- The Pattersons of East Tennessee. Wiliam F.K. Marmion.
- Personal recollections. CD Thomason