Hayslope

Russellville was the older town and at one time the larger one. The Boone Trace and the Buffalo Trail of the Indians, running from Kentucky through Tennessee to North Carolina, both passed through it. Colonel James Roddye built its first home soon after Kings Mountain. By the late 1850s the town had a drugstore, a railroad station, a theater and an academy. Longstreet's corps wintered in the area in 1863 and 1864, and the trails were older than any of its buildings.

What the plaque says

Hayslope 0.4 mi. Built 1785 by Col. James Roddye, from North Carolina. He was subsequently delegate to the North Carolina Constitutional Convention, magistrate and register of Jefferson County under territorial government and member of Tennessee's first Constitutional Convention. The house was also a tavern on the Kentucky Road.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rogersville Historic District — 15 mi
  Tennessee's first newspaper was printed in this Hawkins County seat in 1791, and Swift Memorial College, founded in 1883, educated Black students after the state's 1901 law forced Maryville College to expel them.
• Andrew Johnson National Historic Site — 22 mi
  The tailor shop, homestead and grave of the seventeenth president in Greeneville, where the people he enslaved are named and where the Eighth of August emancipation celebration took root.
• Vardy Community Museum — 22 mi
  A 1899 Presbyterian church in Hancock County, now a museum, beside the Mahala Mullins cabin and the ruins of the Vardy school that educated the Melungeon children of Newman's Ridge.

More markers nearby

• Longstreet's Billet — 0.2 mi
• Morristown College — 5.9 mi
• Morris Cemetery — 6.0 mi
• Mulberry Grove — 6.1 mi