I’ve periodically been inside the house over the past few years, although I’ve not looked as closely at the structure as I did this weekend.
We have a lot of work to do.
And I feel pretty confident that the old house’s bones are strong. There’s one place I knew for sure I could get a look at the original, hand hewn logs, and sure enough, there they were. The photo doesn’t do ’em justice, of course, although in my defense I was at a truly weird angle and juggling a light at the same time.
The chinking and daubing is gone, no surprise, at least up top where I was. If nothing else, the weatherboarding has protected those logs for quite some time now.
The oak plank walls, while painted over who knows how many times, seem solid as well. The ceilings in the main part of the building still look good, although the ceilings over the add-ons – the kitchen in the back and the dormers upstairs in particular – are not in the best shape.
The fireplaces, too, remain as they were when I first saw them – no longer functional as fireplaces and blocked up, making them normal sized instead of the giant, cooking fireplaces they were in the beginning. I’m pretty sure they used the fireplaces to vent whatever heating the house once had. The chimneys, though – they’re huge, just like they would have had to have been when the house was built. And THAT leads to me believe those twin chimneys are original, built from the bricks that Roddye’s people made on the property.
Being askeered of snakes, I decided to fly my drone down to the spring and see if I could see what was going on there. Alas, the overgrowth was too much, and I couldn’t get in to see anything. I walked across the street to see the other spring, too, and was disappointed to see that the current owners of that house have let that part of the property get quite overgrown as well.
My 6th grade teacher lived there when I was younger, and they kept it cleaned out. A subsequent owner was quite proud of having one of the Hayslope springs on their property and put a sign up about it. They also built a gazebo around it with a lovely sitting area. No more. The gazebo is gone.
The dip to the left of the house that is the Old Kentucky Road is still there, and it appears to me that there are remnants of a couple of steps from the property down to the level of the road. That would have been needed back when Hayslope was a full on resort, with other building that were across this road, by that time no longer a thoroughfare but instead a drive into the property. The city of Morristown owns that strip of property where the road and the other buildings once were, remnants of the time the city wanted badly to expand its industrial park onto the Hayslope property. They got that strip, but my grandfather refused to sell the rest. Good on him. Now, if only we could rejoin that strip to the rest of its family …