©2009 NPT PHOTO BY DUAY O'NEIL

Ray Ellis, 77, recalls his childhood at the Fork Farm.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is the first in a two-part series on the Fork Farm. The second part will be published in the Sunday, Nov. 15 edition.

NEWPORT-"During the 1930s, it was the premier farm of East Tennessee," says Ray Ellis, in describing what locals know as The Fork Farm.

Ellis, 77, and his sister Maxine Rinehart, 81, were joined by Emma Jean Welch Hammer, 83, recently for a visit to the acreage now leased by Jim Graham.

Located where the French Broad and Big Pigeon Rivers converge, the fertile bottomland has been tilled since pre-Tennessee days.

Ray and Maxine's father, Lee, managed the farm from the 1920s until 1942. They lived in the "big house," a ten-room, three-story structure which stood on a knoll overlooking fields stretching to the river.

"It had two hallways, an attic, and little grates in each room," according to Maxine. "The ceilings were twelve feet high and were tongue and grooved. The roof was covered with tin. Mom used to dry apples up on the roof."

Lee Ellis, a Jefferson County native, was married twice, first to Paralee Reneau and second to Chloe Proffitt. He and Paralee had two sons Ed, who married Eldora Knight, and Clarence, who married Pauline Shrader. Following Paralee's death and his remarriage to Chloe, Lee had five more children: Ruth, who married Ed Hixson; Opal; a son who died as an infant, Maxine, who married C. B. Rinehart, and Ray, who married Dorothy Lethco.

At one point, Lee and his family lived in Loudon County, where he managed a farm. Ruth, Opal, and the baby boy were born there. Following the family's move to the Fork Farm in the 1920s, Maxine and Ray were born.

"We always heard that originally there were 5,000 acres of the farm," says Ray. "When we lived there, about 500-600 acres were cultivated."

Standing on the Blue Grass Hill, which marks the division of the Fork Farm from the old Dave Robinson place, Ellis points toward the river. "They said that the first people in here traded a hog rifle and a calf to the Indians for all this."

Like most large tracts, the various fields and hills of the Fork Farm carry names bestowed on them decades ago.

In addition to the Blue Grass Hill, there's the "Prison Field." Supposedly Native Americans once erected some sort of rock structure there for prisoners. Today broken rocks litter the area.

The presence of Native Americans is obvious. Each spring, when the acres are plowed, numerous arrowheads and other Indian relics turn up.

About 1940, during the construction of a levee, workers unearthed two skeletons while getting dirt from behind one of the barns. Accompanying Indian artifacts indicated the remains were probably those of long-dead Native Americans.

"Dad ordered the work stopped immediately," says Ray. "He called Mr. Susong who said to put everything back and cover it up." And no one was allowed to plow this area again.

An even murkier legend connects the area with Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, thought by some to have meandered this far east from the Mississippi River.

The Fork Farm's earliest connection to white settlers can be traced to old John Gilliland, a Revolutionary War veteran credited with planting the first crop of corn in what would later become Cocke County. The year was 1783.

Later records show that Gilliland's daughter, Priscilla Gilliland Welch received at least part of this tract as part of her father's estate. In 1799, she sold approximately 100 acres of this land to Alexander Outlaw.

Cocke County's courthouse fire in 1876 destroyed nearly all of the earliest land records, so tracing the property's ownership through its first century is difficult.

By the late 1800s, Stokely Susong was in possession of the property. According to Cocke County Historian E. R. Walker III, Jehu Stokely Susong and his wife, the former Lucinda Murray, are shown living there in the 1880 census. They were still living there in 1910, but by 1920 had moved to Green Lawn, the former Alexander Smith plantation.

Known as Stokely Susong, he was a first cousin of Gregg Susong.

"Stokely Susong's father David Susong and Gregg Susong's father Alexander Susong were brothers," says Walker.

It was "Mr. Gregg" Susong whose ownership the Ellises and Welches remember.

"He furnished each family who lived there one hog, flour, meal, and one cow to milk," says Maxine. "If a family moved away, the cow stayed."

Approximately 15 hogs were butchered each year, the meat cured and hung for the families' use.

When the Ellis family moved to the Fork Farm, Gregg Susong was the owner.

"Mr. Gregg didn't come around very often," recall Maxine and Ray. "When he did, he was chauffeured by a fellow named Jack Dempsey."