Visiting the Homes of My Ancestors

The Taylor House
The first glimpse I had as I walked up Main Str toward the house. It stands beside a large old church.

Yesterday, Jimmy and I drove up to Jonesborough, TN.  I had wanted to go back up since we had taken the long way around into Asheville once and saw the sign on the road that directed visitors into the historical district of the old town, where a cabin that once belonged to the sister of one of my great-grandfathers stands.  Well, make that several greats. I call them my ancestral grandfathers so I don't have to go check exactly how many greats to write in each time I mention them.  It also depends on who we are relating them to.  I will try most of the time to say they are my mother's gr-gr-gr-gr-grandfather, etc.  But for my grandsons....at least 3 more greats must be added. LOL
Anyway....George Rowland, son of Henry (Halley) Roland, (Mom's Gr, Gr-grandfather) married a Sarah (Sally) Edwards.  Her father, James was the son of John Jackson Edwards, Sr.  John Jackson Edward's sister married Captain Christopher Taylor, who moved his family to the Watauga territory of North Carolina in the late 1700s. It was the house the Taylors built and lived out their lives in, that I wanted to go see. It is a log cabin that was listed in 1972 on the register of historical houses, during a time when restoration or preservation of historical was a new idea. The house was dissasembled and moved from it's historical site, about 1 mile from where it is now.  Well, some sources read that it was 1 mile from town, and some put it within a two mile radius of where it now stands.  So I am not exactly sure, from how the sources read, if it still is only a mile away, but there are condos there now.

 Once on the new location, on Main Street in downtown - designated to become a tiny park, the log cabin was reassembled and rechinked. New shingles and landscaping finished the outside, while period funiture dressed the inside. The lean-to that had been on the back of the house was removed, possibly taking it back to its original size. Also the out buildings that were on the property were not moved to the new downtown spot.  Details and more pitures with history are given at This is the Place/Edwards.  After John Jackson Edwards divorced his wife of 22 years, Mary Ruth Crabtree Edwards, he moved to live with his sister in Jonesboro, TN for a while.  She and her husband Christopher Taylor ran their house as an Inn. The pictures here, are ones Jimmy and  I took at the site in downtown. While I sat there on the steps, I felt the same connection I often feel when I realize, my ancestor once lived in this house and I am humbled and proud. I am so thankful for their lives, for their courage to live through hardship and be the trailblazers of a new nation. This little community forged documents that are considered the first declaration of Independence from the heirarchy of England. It was written even before the national one written in the colonies proper, which led to the formation of a new nation.  Who knows if some of those ideas didn't come from discussions held in this very house?  What I do know is that this, one of the oldest remaining log houses in Tennesse, is very special to me. I am so glad we finally took the trip up to see it first hand.

  The house is featured at the Jonesborough Museum of History.  We also drove around there, and were allowed to take pictures inside.  I thought the story boards in the history room were very good. The books and references were also better than most, including some on the internet. Also, here, is a picture of just a few of the many resources which back the story of the Taylor House.  I occasionally find minor discrepancies between references, but most seem to reflect the same timelines and titles etc.

A brick walk runs up to the front door
and around to the back.

Driving by we can see this little house in perspective to its neighbors.  By law the distance between floors had to be at least 8' ceilings. Even though two stories, it appears rather small for a family with 13 children who also roomed boarders!

A replica of the house at the History Museum

The one thing we couldn't find was the buriel site of Mr. Taylor and John's sister.  I was hoping to use them to verify names, and dates.  Many of the oldest of the 1700s buriel sites in the city cemetery were heavily grown over by vines.  It was impossible to get into there to examine them.  Someone was cutting back at the vines a little at a time, but a fallen tree stopped even that effort.  I am going to do more research to discover the exact location and return at some point to try once more to get picts.  Maybe I will also take a weed eater, or portable hedge trimmer. 

This is the original location of the house with fences and the stone <edging.

There was great info in this
Washington Co. Historical Assoc book.

This story board at the museum shared details of how
the house was moved and rebuilt.

Varied books and phamplets feature the log house.
I still can't believe that my ancestral grandfather was able
to live here for a while in the days of Daniel Boone and Andrew Jackson!
Sooooo coool.

For more info:

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~tncjones/taylorpc.htm

http://www.historicjonesborough.com/history/history-jonesborough-tn.php

http://www.tngenweb.org/washington/cemetery/cemT_U.htm

Pioneers

The fields where the children played...looking back toward the cemetery hill.

When my husband first became interested in knowing his ancestry, I was perfectly willing to let this be his hobby.  History was a subject he liked and I hated. His memory was great, so memorizing dates and details came easy to him. I thought that the children would appreciate knowing a little about thier family, so why not give him all the space he needed to take this trek. The time came, however that he wanted to know something about my ancestors to fill in his tree, so he found something he wanted me to see. It was a list of cemeteries in the mountains where my mother's people were from.  He was interested in the ones with her father's name, but I was interested in the ones with her mother's maiden name. I knew that this was where we would find people I knew.  When we read the names on one of them, I recognized them right away. I will never forget what he said. "You can't possibly know if that is your family by just reading their names."  Well, I may have only been a child when I was there, but I knew these people with no doubts. When we read the directions, I told him that was how to get to where they all had lived.  Now most of his ancestors have been found in old church graveyards.  None, that I know of, were buried in their own backyards. So this notion of mine that the directions to the graveyard were also the directions to the old home place, as mother used to call it, was beyond his vision.  But not mine. I could see it in my mind as if it were yesterday. I could smell the earth, and taste my aunts' home made butter and jelly, just as if it were really in front of me.  I saw glints of faces, and imagined myself sitting in the chairs at the long kitchen table.  I could hear the laughter of the children playing in the pastures as they used the excuse of going to this very cemetery as a chance to escape the adults and play pranks on the newby cousins. I knew this place! I knew these people. Their ancestors had lived there before them. They came to the mountains, and the mountains were in their blood, and in mine.

Some of what I knew about these mountains was from the stories my mother told me.  She told them with such love. How she walked out to the spring and the snakes lay long and stretched out along the bank. And everytime I think of that story, I think of how the men said they had to clear the snakes from Aunt Virgie's house if she had been away for a week or two, so she could spend the night down there.  I remembered the barns with tobacco hanging, and the steep hill that went up behind the house.  I had never been up to the cemetery, or out to the spring mother spoke of.  I didn't go when the other kids went out into the pastures. But I had always wanted to. So a desire to go sprang up in my heart, and that would be the beginning of my love of finding family history.  History!  My least favorite subject...how could I be researching History? But my greatest delight was that, when I discovered something about my ancestral history, I found out so many of them were the pioneers I had read about in books. Not the ones with famous names necessarily...even though my grandson is the 9th great nephew of Daniel Boone's brother Israel by marriage - my grandson wanted to know exactly how he was related, LOL.  No, the "pioneers who fought in the revolutionary war, and sometimes fought the Indians to keep the land they were awarded, some of whom were the first white men who settled an area or built a house, or forged westward to see what was on the other side of that mountain."  I can put names to them.  And I was extremely surprised that I could. But my ancestors, got to the mountains of Appalachia and fell in love. From Virginia and West Virginia to North Carolina,  North Georgia and Tennessee, they settled and stayed. And they fought to defend their right to stay after the Revolution, through the Civil War and until now. I know my mother's heart was there when she died. She even thought that her home was there...Of all the things she forgot, she never forgot the house her daddy built in the valley between two hills in Yancey County, NC.  The posts henceforth on this blog will seek to share the history, one story a time, one ancestor's life experience at a time, from what I already know and what I am able to uncover as I find it.  It will take the rest of my life to get even some of it written, but at least I am beginning to try. 
In loving memory of my Mom, Virginia Maude Roland Fuller McCorkle.