Today, we don’t think much about traveling 10 or 20 miles, but back in the day of literal horsepower, that was about the limit for any leg of a trip, depending on the weather, the route and what was being pulled and hauled.

A wagon laden with produce? A stagecoach full of people? A buggy with a passenger or two? Any conveyance on a muddy road with ruts and potholes could be challenging, so just like in any other section of the territory, “stations” could be found about every 10 or 20 miles along the major roads in the Fork, the Knox County lands between the French Broad and Holston Rivers.

Located along the present Kodak Road, Manifold Station was a trading post that was important to travelers and community members alike. In 1797, Benjamin and Mary (Payne) Manifold and their nine children headed out from Hopewell Township of Yorktown, Pennsylvania, where Benjamin had served in the militia during the American Revolution, and settled in the neighborhood called Stony Point near the French Broad. They built a home that became a haven of rest and place of refuge for others as well, but they also built a mill.

There along what is still called Manifold Branch, community member Rick Breeden points to a deep and narrow “shoot” in the creek at a rise that appears to have been the perfect site for powering a mill with an undershot waterwheel. According to descendant J.B. Manifold back in 1951, a ledger that was passed down in the family showed how the Manifolds ground wheat and corn and sold supplies to those who stopped to rest and refuel on their journeys. A letter written by Benjamin Manifold in 1799 stated, “It is good for spring crop, and fall crop hath done well with me as yet.”

Stations also served much like forts in times of threat, and Manifold was no exception. One day after Captain Thomas Gillespie had conducted a controlled burn to clear some land on an island near his home just one mile above Gilliam Station, which was at the point of the Fork, he traveled to Henry’s Station, about 10 miles above Manifold. While he was gone, warriors came to his cabin, where his wife was alone with their infant child.

Believing, based on one native’s actions of drawing a knife, that they were about to be scalped, she yelled for help toward the smoldering island as if her husband and others were there. The warriors ran off, and she took the baby and quickly headed out on foot. Along the way, she met her returning husband, who took her and the child upon his horse and fled to safety at Manifold Station. Thomas immediately gathered three other men to follow him home, only to find it being ransacked and set afire. Dropping their plunder, the intruders ran off, and the house was saved.

In September 1820, Benjamin caught the cape of his coat in the mill machinery and “was whirled to his death.” Mary lived another six years. While most of their surviving children eventually moved to Illinois or Indiana, a couple of their daughters Hannah and Elizabeth married, respectively, into the local McCarty and Underwood families. Although a memorial stone was erected in 1951 at the corner of Kodak and Deaton Hollow roads, most of the Manifolds’ story has been forgotten in the Fork.

Jan Loveday Dickens is an educator, historian, and author of Forgotten in the Fork, a book about the Knox County lands between the French Broad and Holston Rivers, obtainable by emailing ForgottenInTheFork@gmail.com.