A few weeks ago, we got a call from Brooke Bradley, whose family used to live in the cabin that we "saved from Wal-Mart." She and her siblings were going to be in town and wanted to visit the farm and see the "finished product." Four years ago, when the restoration was in its infancy and the cabin was still a pile of logs in our back field, they had visited us and shared the story of their great-grandparents who came to east Tennessee with a railroad company and eventually settled near Kingsport after the railroad went bankrupt. In 1892, the couple bought the cabin from the Birdwell family who built it, and it remained in the Bradley family until it was sold to a developer just before we rescued it. The Bradley siblings are intelligent and gracious people: Brooke helps run Adirondack camp in New York; her sister Carol and brother Jeff are free-lance writers, living in Montana and Colorado respectively. (Their parents still live in Kingsport.) Though they never lived in the house, they remember visiting their grandparents who lived there. A favorite activity was to dare each other to run past the "spooky" old pictures of their great-grandparents that hung near the staircase. It was a bit like spending the night in a haunted house, they recalled. Though no doubt still filled with spirits, gladly the house doesn't seem as sinister now!
No comments:
Post a Comment