The Williams House

This old house on Manville Road intrigued us the first time we saw it. Don Lane, well-known Kingsport area genalogist, was taking us on a tour of some family cemeteries when we passed it on a sharp curve in the road. He casually mentioned that it was the Thomas Whitt Woolsey Williams home. I recognized the name and asked, "Thomas Whitt Woolsey who was married to Sarah Sally Buckner?" Don said, yes it was Whitt and Sally's home, and I craned my neck to look backwards.

I sat down later and counted the generations: Whitt and Sally were my great-great-great-great grandparents. He was born in 1808 and Sally in 1811, and they both died in 1885. They are buried in the Adams Cemetery which is right up on the ridge where Grandma and Grandpa Peters lived. The picture below is courtesy of Don Lane, as are many of the pictures you'll see here of our Scott County ancestors. What tremendous work he's done for us! Whitt and Sally had eight children and this is my line of descent: Whitt and Sally; Mary "Polly" Williams; Margaret Templeton; Mary "Polly" Pendleton; Margaret Dell Lane; Zella Mae Peters, and me.
The house is still owned by descendants of Whitt and Sally. We met their ggg-granddaughter, Bobbie Pendleton Tignor, there some weeks ago. She told us that the middle 2-story section of the house was the originial part, with the two side wings added on later.

Bobbie and her husband, incidentially, are the folks who bought Grandma Peters' house up on the ridge, and they still live there. This might seem like quite a coincidence, but when you start talking to people down here, connections like this come to light all the time. It's one of the really wonderful things about living here - unraveling the intertwined threads of our common history.

A shot of the porch.
This is one of the center rooms in the original part of the house.

The steps going upstairs are in the red room above. They were in pretty bad shape, but we decided to climb up anyway. As I said before, nothing stops Tom!
Upstairs there is one big room. The floor is still pretty solid, but we decided not to do any jumping. I expect this is where the children all slept.

This fireplace is located in the addition on the upper side of the house.
And this one in the lower addition. It has one of the old cast iron surrounds that are so common in the part of Virginia, where coal was burnt. There's one in the fireplace in Aunt Monnie's house, too.

There's log under this wooden siding, and you can see the decorative woodwork that covered the end of the logs to protect them from the elements.
Hostas still bloom and curtains still hang, reminding us that it wasn't so long ago that this old place was home to generations of Williams families.