Colonel Tipton Cabin

Colonel Tipton Cabin. . , Shortly after the Revolutionary War, Colonel John Tipton moved to then Washington County, North Carolina. He purchased over two thousand acres of land in 1784 in what is now Johnson City and nearby Elizabethton, Tennessee. He constructed a simple frontier cabin of white oak logs with a large limestone chimney and a basement kitchen. In an interview with nineteenth century Historian Lyman C. Draper, Thomas Love, a participant of the 1788 Battle of the State of Franklin, described Colonel Tipton's cabin as "a large size house, some 25 by 30 feet, hewn logs , a story and a half , no windows below , two or 3 window holes, round, in each gable and above , a door in front.", Located behind the simple plank door is the basement kitchen of Colonel Tipton. According to oral history, the enslaved people of John Sevier were kept in this kitchen for "safe keeping" in February of 1788. This action led Sevier to march the Franklin militia to Tipton's property and cause the February 29, 1788 Battle of the State of Franklin., In 2008, the University of Tennessee Laboratory of Tree-Ring Science collected several core samples from multiple logs of the cabin. The tree-ring dating or dendrochronology results dated the logs to between 1795 to 1799. These dates suggest that a possible secondary construction with similar dimensions of the Colonel Tipton cabin occurred prior to the turn of the century., [Captions:] , A dendrology core sample is being taken from one of the logs beneath the Tipton-Haynes House. , A 1936 survey photograph of the Tipton-Haynes home still owned by the Simerly brothers., The exposed logs of the Colonel Tipton cabin can be seen as siding near the limestone chimney which was replaced in 2014.