Hayslope

When I walk around these places, or any place not covered in concrete and the thorough modernness of today, I can’t help but think about who else might have walked there, whose footsteps I might be following, whose dreams were fulfilled—or not—on that spot.

So naturally, when playing outside the modern brick ranch home in rural East Tennessee where I grew up, my little eyes were constantly drawn across the flat creek bottom, under the railroad bridge, and up the slope to a white clapboard house across the way. There was even a historic marker for this place—Hayslope, or The Tavern with the Red Door, built in 1785 right there on the Old Kentucky Road, although the marker pointed in the wrong direction.

The old road meandered over the mountains from the Carolinas, crossed two rivers before getting to little Russellville, then crossed three more rivers and several mountains before it got to The Cumberland Gap, that renowned place where Daniel Boone once trod. But there in Russellville, this little house stood right by the road, and it was on my grandfather’s property.

And to think I almost let this little gem slide into oblivion, despite my youthful dreams. By the time it came around to me in the 2010s, I didn’t think I had it in me to do any of the things I’d dreamed of for most of my life. That changed when historic preservationist Megan Gray of Kirkwood Preservation, now the project manager of Hayslope’s restoration, contacted me and told me in no uncertain terms that we just couldn’t let the old girl collapse.

I woke up that summer and got to work. Megan leads the actual work, tracking down contractors, telling me how much it will cost, and I do the research, tying actual history to the house already linked to so many stories, some of which we learned weren’t quite true … but that’s a whole other tale. Occasionally, we get our hands dirty too.

Originally around 600 acres when Revolutionary War soldier James Roddye built the place—and about half that when the family of Theophilus and Maria Rogan had Confederate Gen. Lafayette McLaws stay under the roof and later operated the property as a summer resort—it’s now just 28 acres of rolling hills and woodland, a creek and a spring just down that gentle slope from the house itself.

The house. Four rooms, two downstairs and two upstairs. My great uncle, who bought it from one of the Rogan children in the 1930s, had a kitchen and bath attached to the back, an addition we’ve removed. New bathrooms will be built back there, but the kitchen is moving into the cabin’s main room, the one with the giant fireplace where we found proof, in the form of an iron lug pole, that it was used for cooking and now will be again.

The fireplaces and chimneys were the first major construction project. I wanted to cook on that main fireplace, even before we found the lug pole, but it had been bricked up, a Franklin stove sitting on the hearth venting through the chimney. The other main chimney, on the north side of the house, serviced two fireplaces, one in the downstairs room and one in the room above. Those fireplaces were still functional, although from the looks of the chimneys, they probably shouldn’t have been.

We had masons tear the chimneys down to the ground and rebuild them, using the original brick. The masons found bricks with fingerprints, smoothing the drying clay into place, and even one section with the hoof prints of a baby goat or lamb, evidence of the real people and the lives they led.

Newer brick encased the original brick on the chimney on the log cabin side, hiding from view the massive log lintels in place over the perfectly rounded firebox. And the opening hadn’t been filled with concrete, just bricked over, so when the bricks were removed, the masons found two sets of firebacks, one clay and one iron, and the forged iron lug pole embedded in the fireplace.

The masons used a curved wood frame to rebuild the firebox, reinstalling the lug pole and lighting a fire in the newly rebuilt fireplace. It’s first one in at least 80 years.

Growing up, I had few opportunities to go inside the house. My grandfather, and later my father, kept it rented, but in between tenants came the occasional opportunities to see the interior.

There wasn’t much to see. As an 8-year-old, I knew the only place to see the cabin’s original logs was in a strange little closet above the front porch, where a section of the upper reaches of the exterior wall could be seen. Perfect, gigantic logs stacked to just below where the roof would have started, had the roofline not been changed so many times over the two centuries plus of the cabin’s lifetime.

Wood siding covered the outside completely, offering no sign of the logs underneath.

The logs on the interior were covered by what we later learned was early “paneling”—planks of American chestnut attached to the logs, likely in the early 19th Century, by hand-forged nails—and then covered by layer upon layer of paint and wallpaper as the decades marched on.

Those chestnuts are safely stored away and will be reused when the interior decoration begins, but not on the logs again. For one thing, we learned while painstakingly pulling those chestnuts down that the two rooms on the north side were apparently built later than the two rooms on the south, and had no logs at all, other than the wall between the two sides.

The original cabin was but one room with a loft, accessed by a ladder. The other two rooms, we found, were built with stick framing. Stick framing wasn’t unheard of in East Tennessee at the time, but it was pretty rare, particularly in the more rural areas away from the Washington district in the upper east and around what would become Knoxville and Nashville.

While we don’t know for sure (yet) just when the annex came about, we believe it was fairly early, maybe within 20 years of the original construction. And we think that because of a brick we found under the stairs—also added later. It was a hand-made brick with “1800” etched into the mortar, clearly not intended for use in the brick chimneys.

But those logs. Heavy, thick yellow pine, hand-hewn from enormous trees cut on the property, chinked by sand and clay and horsehair mixed by the builders, stacked one on top of another, with perfectly cut dovetails connecting the corners.

They’re 20- to 24-inches wide, 4- to 6-inches thick, and they are heavy. The effort to stack these logs, to place them … I can’t imagine. But these men did it, cutting the trees, hewing the logs, cutting the dovetails, stacking them, then mixing all that chinking and applying it between the logs ….

From the looks of it, the cabin had a door into the front—the “red door” of the Tavern with the Red Door—and a door out the back. We think windows on either side of the fireplace were cut in later and did not exist originally. The only window, then, was a slot window cut high on the back wall where the Roddye men could open fire on any indigenous people who still lived in the area after the new white Americans began pushing them west and south.

And also on that back wall, near the door—a hexafoil, known as a “daisy wheel,” etched into the wood, commonly interpreted as a superstitious protection mark to ward away bad spirits. We know that mark was made fairly early on, because the walls were soon covered in the chestnuts.

The logs weren’t “eaten up by termites” either, like my mom said whenever I’d go off on one my rambling monologues about saving the historic house, restoring it to its rustic beauty. A few had some water damage from the kitchen and bath added onto the back of the house, and there is a bit of termite damage on some floor beams in the cellar.

Those are being replaced by sawmill cut yellow pine, hand-hewn by our intrepid contractor, Thomas Fraser, who noted “a slight discrepancy between my mental age and the age my back says I am when I pick up the adze.”

We’re constantly uncovering little surprises as we go along. The masons found a set of original walnut shingles, preserved when a 19th century renovation added a new roof a little higher than the old, leaving the shingles where they were. We’ve found the remains of a rock house out back, which the Rogans likely used for refrigeration. And we found a stone hearth just in back of the house that may be the foundation of a chimney belonging to a slave dwelling.

And we’re nowhere near finished. I doubt “finishing” is even possible.