The Ramsey House is a two-story stone house in Knox County,

Tennessee Tennessee (, ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders Kentucky to the north, Virginia to the northeast, North Carolina t ...

, United States. Also known as Swan Pond, the house was constructed in 1797 by English architect Thomas Hope for Colonel Francis Alexander Ramsey (1764–1820), whose family operated a

plantation Plantations are farms specializing in cash crops, usually mainly planting a single crop, with perhaps ancillary areas for vegetables for eating and so on. Plantations, centered on a plantation house, grow crops including cotton, cannabis, tob ...

at the site until the U.S. Civil War.Lisa Oakley
Ramsey House
''Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture'', 2009. Retrieved: 11 February 2013. In 1969, the house was added to the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

for its architecture and its role in the region's early 19th-century history. Francis Alexander Ramsey arrived in what is now Greene County in 1783, and shortly thereafter made a surveying trip down the

Holston River The Holston River is a river that flows from Kingsport, Tennessee, to Knoxville, Tennessee. Along with its three major forks (North Fork, Middle Fork and South Fork), it comprises a major river system that drains much of northeastern Tennessee ...

, where he first identified the future site of the Ramsey House. Throughout the 1780s, he served as an official of the fledgling

State of Franklin The State of Franklin (also the Free Republic of Franklin, Lost State of Franklin, or the State of Frankland) was an unrecognized proposed U.S. state, state located in present-day East Tennessee, in the United States. Franklin was created in ...

, and later served in various capacities in the governments of the

Southwest Territory The Territory South of the River Ohio, more commonly known as the Southwest Territory or the old Southwest Territory, was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from May 26, 1790, until June 1, 1796, when it was ...

and the State of Tennessee.Elizabeth Bowman Scaggs, "Swan Pond: Francis Alexander Ramsey's Stone House, a Tennessee State Shrine." ''East Tennessee Historical Society Publications'', Vol. 27 (1955), pp. 9-18. Ramsey's children included early Knoxville mayor, W. B. A. Ramsey, and early Tennessee historian and businessman, J. G. M. Ramsey, both of whom occupied the Ramsey House at various times. Due to their

Confederate A confederation (also known as a confederacy or league) is a political union of sovereign states united for purposes of common action. Usually created by a treaty, confederations of states tend to be established for dealing with critical issu ...

sympathies, the Ramseys fled Knoxville when the Union Army occupied the city during the Civil War,Lisa Oakley
James Gettys McGready Ramsey
''Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture'', 2009. Retrieved: 11 February 2013. and the family sold the house in 1866. The Knoxville Chapter of the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities (APTA) purchased the Ramsey House in 1952, and currently maintains the house and grounds as a museum.

Location

The Ramsey House is situated in a broad valley just over a mile east of Forks-of-the-River, where the Holston River and

French Broad River The French Broad River is a river in the U.S. states of North Carolina and Tennessee. It flows from near the town of Rosman, North Carolina, Rosman in Transylvania County, North Carolina, into Tennessee, where its confluence with the Holston R ...

join to form the

Tennessee River The Tennessee River is a long river located in the Southern United States, southeastern United States in the Tennessee Valley. Flowing through the states of Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, it begins at the confluence of Fren ...

. The property managed by APTA, which includes the Ramsey House, a visitor's center, and gardens, covers . The house and grounds are located at 2614 Thorngrove Pike, just off John Sevier Highway (TN-168).

History

Early history and development

Francis Alexander Ramsey was born in

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania, officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a U.S. state, state spanning the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern United States, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes region, Great Lakes regions o ...

in 1764 to Scotch-Irish parents, and moved to Greene County, Tennessee in 1783. That year,

North Carolina North Carolina ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, South Carolina to the south, Georgia (U.S. stat ...

(which controlled what is now

East Tennessee East Tennessee is one of the three Grand Divisions of Tennessee defined in state law. Geographically and socioculturally distinct, it comprises approximately the eastern third of the U.S. state of Tennessee. East Tennessee consists of 33 coun ...

) opened up

Cherokee The Cherokee (; , or ) people are one of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States. Prior to the 18th century, they were concentrated in their homelands, in towns along river valleys of what is now southwestern ...

lands north of the French Broad to settlement, and Ramsey, James White, and several other explorers began making excursions into what is now the Knoxville area in search of new land. On one such expedition, Ramsey discovered a game-rich

beaver dam A beaver dam or beaver impoundment is a dam built by beavers; it creates a pond which protects against predators such as coyotes, alligators, cougars, foxes, eagles, wolves and bears, and holds their food during winter. These structures modify th ...

pond which he named "Swan Pond." He was issued a grant for Swan Pond and its surrounding land in November 1786. Ramsey's rise to prominence in the failed State of Franklin (1784–1788) kept him occupied for the remainder of the decade, and it wasn't until 1792— after he had been appointed clerk for the newly formed

— that he decided to move to Swan Pond, which lay just outside the territory's new capital at Knoxville. Ramsey chose to build his new house on a peninsula in the pond, although due to

malaria Malaria is a Mosquito-borne disease, mosquito-borne infectious disease that affects vertebrates and ''Anopheles'' mosquitoes. Human malaria causes Signs and symptoms, symptoms that typically include fever, Fatigue (medical), fatigue, vomitin ...

concerns, he was forced to drain the pond before the house was constructed.

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

-trained architect Thomas Hope designed the house, and probably built it between 1795 and 1797. In the years after its completion, the Ramsey House came to be part of a sizeable plantation. Upon Ramsey's death in 1820, the house passed to his eldest son, W.B.A. Ramsey. In 1840, W.B.A Ramsey sold the house to his brother, J.G.M. Ramsey (1797–1884), who had taken an active interest in the region's history, and had built a large mansion nearby to the east, known as "Mecklenburg," overlooking the fork of both the French Broad River with the Holston River and the no longer extant Lebanon In The Fork Presbyterian Church, along the nearby and present-day Asbury Road. Mecklenburg was noted for its 4,000-volume library containing numerous 18th-century documents pertaining to the settlement of Tennessee.J.G.M. Ramsey, Willam Hesseltine (ed.), ''Autobiography and Letters'' (Nashville, Tenn.: Tennessee Historical Commission, 1954), preface. In 1857, J.G.M. Ramsey gave the Ramsey House to his son, also named Francis Alexander Ramsey, as a wedding present.

The Civil War

J.G.M. Ramsey played an active role in the economic development of East Tennessee. He helped establish the region's first medical society, served as president of the Bank of East Tennessee, and fought to bring railroads to the region. In the late 1850s, as one of the directors of the Bank of East Tennessee, Ramsey ran afoul of Knoxville's fiery newspaper publisher, William G. "Parson" Brownlow. Brownlow relentlessly accused the bank's directors, who along with Ramsey included Ramsey's brothers-in-law, John H. Crozier and A.R. Crozier, of defrauding the bank's clients. He also accused Ramsey's son, John Crozier Ramsey (1824–1868), whom Brownlow called "a few degrees removed from an idiot,"William Gannaway Brownlow, ''Sketches of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Secession'' (Philadelphia: G.W. Childs, 1862), pp. 289-290. of creating false pension funds for employees. His continued attacks helped

Horace Maynard Horace Maynard (August 30, 1814 – May 3, 1882) was an American educator, attorney, politician and diplomat active primarily in the second half of the 19th century. Initially elected to the House of Representatives from Tennessee's 2nd Cong ...

defeat John Crozier Ramsey for the district's Congressional seat in 1859.Robert McKenzie, ''Lincolnites and Rebels: A Divided Town in the American Civil War'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 49. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Ramseys, who were states' rights Democrats, sided with the Confederacy, drawing them further into conflict with Brownlow, who was a radical anti-secessionist. In December 1861, John Crozier Ramsey, who had been appointed Knox County's district attorney, had Brownlow jailed on charges of conspiring to burn railroad bridges in East Tennessee. The Ramseys demanded Brownlow be hanged, but the Confederate Army, fearing a public backlash, released him. Due in part to Brownlow's influence, J.G.M. Ramsey's Mecklenburg mansion— with its invaluable library— was burned when the Union Army occupied Knoxville in 1863. With Mecklenburg in ruins, the Ramseys, who had fled to South Carolina on approach of the Union Army in 1863, decided not to return to Knoxville. The Ramsey House was sold to William Spurgien in 1866, and afterward began to deteriorate. J.G.M. Ramsey eventually moved back to Knoxville in the 1870s, and was deeply saddened at the state of the Ramsey House. His autobiography, written during this period, included a poem lamenting the house's decline.Ramsey, ''Autobiography'', pp. 9-11.

Preservation

In 1927, the Bonnie Kate Chapter of the

Daughters of the American Revolution The National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (often abbreviated as DAR or NSDAR) is a lineage-based membership service organization for women who are directly descended from a patriot of the American Revolutionary War. A non-p ...

placed a marker at the Ramsey House commemorating the site as the birthplace of J.G.M. Ramsey, whose book, the ''Annals of Tennessee'', had become an important work on the state's early history. In the following decade, the house was documented by the

Historic American Buildings Survey The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , , "little star", is a Typography, typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a star (heraldry), heraldic star. Computer scientists and Mathematici ...

. In 1952, APTA's Knoxville Chapter purchased the house with the help of state and local governments, and began restoring it. The roof and windows were replaced, and an old log cabin was moved to the site to represent the cabin used by the Ramseys in the 1790s while the main house was being built.

Design

The Ramsey House is a two-story Late Georgian house, built primarily of local pink marble with blueish-gray limestone trim. This blueish-gray limestone forms a "belt" around the house about midway up the walls, and also forms the house's four corners. The house has a "dogtrot" kitchen wing, with the southwest corner of the kitchen wing joining the northeast corner of the main house. Exterior ornamentation includes hand-carved

cornice In architecture, a cornice (from the Italian ''cornice'' meaning "ledge") is generally any horizontal decorative Moulding (decorative), moulding that crowns a building or furniture element—for example, the cornice over a door or window, ar ...

s and window arches consisting of nine narrow stones each. The house's interior follows a central hall floor plan. The front door opens into a hallway, with a library/parlor room to the left and a dining room to the right. The second floor has two bedrooms, a bonus room, and a door which used to lead to the roof of the porch (the porch is no longer there). The kitchen wing is also two stories, although there is no passage from the second story of the main wing to the second story of the kitchen wing. The house has three chimneys— one at both ends of the main wing, and one at the end of the kitchen wing— and six fireplaces in all. The interior has been outfitted with period furniture, most notably two Chippendale chairs given to Francis Alexander Ramsey and his wife, Peggy, as a wedding present.

References

Resources

* Isenhour, Judith Clayton. ''Knoxville - A Pictorial History.'' (Donning, 1978), page 20. * Rothrock, Mary U., editor. ''The French Broad-Holston Country: A History of Knox County, Tennessee.'' (Knox County Historical Committee; East Tennessee Historical Society, 1946). * ''Knoxville: Fifty Landmarks.'' (Knoxville: The Knoxville Heritage Committee of the Junior League of Knoxville, 1976), p. 9.

External links

{{Commons category, Ramsey House (Knoxville, Tennessee)
Ramsey House Plantation
— official site
Library of Congress - Historic American Buildings Survey: Ramsey House

Houses in Knox County, Tennessee Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Tennessee Historic American Buildings Survey in Tennessee Historic house museums in Tennessee Museums in Knox County, Tennessee Scotch-Irish American culture in Tennessee National Register of Historic Places in Knox County, Tennessee Dogtrot architecture in Tennessee