Our "Family" Home

When we moved to Maryville, TN in July of 2010, we found a nice brick home in an upgraded area to rent.  We were reluctant to purchase a home when we first arrived for fear that we might settle in the "wrong" neighborhood, put the kids in a not-so-good school district, along with other concerns, when we did not know anything about the area.  We were lucky to get a great landlord who basically let us live there as if it was actually our home.  We liked the house, but we also knew that it wasn't what we wanted to settle in for the next several years.  So, as one can imagine, our hunt for that perfect home started not long after we moved in to the rental.

When we lived in Tehachapi, CA, we lived in a log home and loved the log home experience.  Thus, we decided that we wanted to find a log home to live in.  We thought that that task would be somewhat easy...this is Tennessee, for crying out loud...the home of log homes.  But we soon discovered that finding that perfect log home was not as easy as we had told ourselves.  Oh, we found several log homes that would have been perfect, but they were either a days trip by covered wagon to get to town, or in some instances...civilization.  We did find one particular place that would have been great.  A beautiful house on some nice property.  It was a little off the beaten path, but decided it would be doable, but only because the place was so exquisite.  When we started to leave, we noticed that the only other home in the immediate area was right across the street.  Both Sarah and I stood by the car and watched the scene in front of us for a long time.  There was a old dilapidated home with a covered porch that ran across the front of the house.  The roof of the porch looked like it would cave in with a good sneeze from the old guy in the rocking chair next to the front door.  Dressed in overalls with no shoes he sported a long dark beard and smoked a pipe.  There was a tired looking old bloodhound plopped down right next to the rocking chair and he was flicking flies with his tail.  The old man was sipping something from a Mason jar that he held in his left hand and his right hand softly caressed a shotgun, which laid comfortably across his lap.

"Howdy, there!" I hollered in my best neighborly voice.

"Don't provoke him!" Sarah admonished.

We stared at the figure on the porch for what seemed an eternity when finally he turned his head and spat out a big glob of some kind of dark goo.  "Ya'll gonna be here long?" he drawled in an almost inaudible voice. 

Without so much as a "nice to meet you" we were in the car and scooting down the road back to the 21st century. 

The log home search continued off and on for a few months without much luck.  We were starting to wonder if that perfect timber home was anywhere out there.

Oddly enough, on one day in December, Sarah noticed an add on the Internet about some vacant property for sale, and an address was given.  We plugged the address into the GPS and decided to go take a look.  It should be noted that we had almost decided that the only way we were going to have that perfect log home, was to build it ourselves.  That is why we were looking at property.  We drove to the area the GPS took us to but there was no vacant land for sale.  We checked and rechecked the GPS again, and again, it told us to go where we were already parked.  Deciding to give up, we started for home.  As we drove down the road...Binfield Road, to be exact, we saw an old farm house with a "for sale" sign posted in the front yard.

"Let's stop and take a look at this house." Sarah said.

I pulled the car into the driveway and we got out.  The house was empty, so we peeked through the windows and really liked what we saw.  We liked it so much, in fact, that we called the number of the realtor posted on the "for sale" sign to see if we could schedule a time to go through it.  As fate would have it, the realtor, Mark, was already in the area and said he could be there in just a few minutes.  So we decided to wait.

While we were waiting, we decided to check out the property itself.  We saw that on one side of the house was a large, probably close to half an acre, enormous bamboo forest.  What fun the boys would have playing in the bamboo, we thought.  As we walked into the backyard, we were really taken back by the two-seater out house that stood in the middle of the large back yard.  We weren't sure, but it appeared that there was some ample property that came with the house, as well.  We would find out soon enough, as we saw Mark's car pull up behind ours.

Mark showed us through the house and we were in love with it before we got upstairs.  The home was built in 1917 and there have been a several renovations and reconstruction projects since that time.  We were told that the couple that currently owned it purchased it a few years ago with the intention of fixing it up with the best products money could buy.  The man worked on the house over the next few years making it a modern, up-to-date, exquisite piece of property.  He and his wife were now ready to live comfortably for the remainder of their years in a modern, old farm house.  However, as so often is the case, the wife took ill shortly thereafter and passed away.  The home was now up for sale.

We spoke with the realtor, who talked with the owner, and within a couple of days, an offer was made and accepted.  We were moving in.  Literally, within a few weeks, we were in our new home, which was about as far away from a log home one could get.  Even so, Sarah and I and the boys, feel at home and in an odd way, almost like we were meant to be here.

Now...as Paul Harvey would have said...is the rest of the story.

We were so excited about our new home and sharing it with all our friends, we downloaded the pictures and quickly posted them on our Facebook accounts for everyone to see.  We especially wanted them to get a clear slice of life in Tennessee because we were blazing a trail in that respect. One of the reasons we chose to settle in Tennessee was because we knew absolutely no one that lived there. And, except for a few distant family ancestors that were from Pulaski, TN, we knew no one that was from Tennessee or even had any connections to Tennessee.  That was when things started to get a little weird, if not down right creepy.  We could play that "What if?" game all day, but the fact is we were, indeed, drawn to that house. 

What if...we hadn't decided that the only way we could find our dream house was to build it ourselves, thus started to look for vacant property? 

What if...we hadn't chose that particular piece of real estate to look at on that particular day?

What if...our GPS had led us to the right place in the beginning?  We plugged the address into the GPS a few days later, and this time it did give us the correct directions...hummm?

What if...we had decided to enter the address to the vacant lot into our computer in Google maps and thus taken a different route to the alleged piece of land, for there was more than one way to get there.

What if...we had been unable to get hold of the realtor, that day?

And, so the guessing game goes on and on.

With pictures posted, we sat back and waited for our friends and family to ohh and aah over our newly found castle.  Shortly thereafter, I get a message from my cousin Susie, who's mother and my mother are sisters.

"Charlie!  This is unbelievable!  You do know that my dad (my uncle Bob) is from Maryville.  In fact, they are from Binfield.  AND, the home you just purchased, is the home my grandfather was born in...you have just bought our old family home!" 

She wanted to know if we had met our neighbors, Mark and Gay, who live across the street and down a quarter of a mile or so.  They are her cousins.  And, the home directly across the street, which is  currently vacant, is the home of her aunt, who passed away about two years ago.  Susie then went ahead and described some of the features of the original home and brought us up on the history of the old homestead.

She said that across the street is the old barn. (Now a State Historical Landmark.)  She said somewhere in that barn is the initial "N".  It was bore into the side of the barn by one of her uncles, I believe, with some kind of tool and she said she was told that he got into a lot of trouble for it.

Sure enough, we went exploring a day shortly thereafter and looked through the barn and found the "N" drilled into one of the doors on the inside.

She said the last time they were at the old place was 40-45 years ago.  She said she remembers that there were like hundreds of giant oak trees all over the place.  I don't think there are hundreds, but there are a lot and some of them are about 200 years old.  Susie's younger brother, my cousin Jim, says he remembers that the sidewalk from the street to the front door is about a mile long.  Not quite a mile, Jim, but close...probably about 75 feet or so.  They shared many memories about the old farm and we still have fun speculating and wondering what it was like here in 1917.

Mark and Gay told us that the original home was moved from where the "new" home was built in 1917 to a site across the street near where his mother's home now sits.  Several years later, the old original home, the one that Susie's grandfather was actually born in, burned to the ground.

In the beginning the property was a tobacco farm.  Several crops were planted and harvested through the years on this property.  At one time it was even a dairy...they had 16 cows and sold the milk to a couple of markets in the area.  Not far from the back door is a 2 foot by 4 foot concrete vat, which is about 2 feet in depth.  Apparently, this vat was filled with cold stream water and the fresh milk was stored there until it was picked up for processing.  Aidan, our youngest, wanted to know why they just didn't put it in a big refridgerator?

The history connected to this property is not just intriging, but mystifing.  We feel, that for some reason, we were led to this home.  We are here because in some unexplainable way, we were meant to be here.