I recently gave a presentation at Marble Springs, the home of John Sevier, where I spoke about the many connections between the early communities on both sides of the Fork, the Knox County lands between the French Broad and Holston rivers. Seven Islands was one of the communities that spanned the French Broad.

As I wrote in the April 22 article, Manifold’s Station was a stage coach stop and inn built in 1797 in Tuckahoe, near the corner of Deaton Hollow Road and the North Carolina Road, now called Kodak Road, along the French Broad. Families soon living nearby were the Newmans, Thomases, Kellys, Keeners, Cunninghams, Johnsons, Underwoods, Fraziers and Huffakers. Henry Huffaker ran a ferry two miles west of the station, connecting the stage coach road and the Seven Islands community, which, along with Frazier Bend, had developed through river commerce and social interaction among the families on both sides of the French Broad.

In 1809, the state of Tennessee gave a land grant to Peter Keener, who built a two-story log home overlooking the French Broad River at Seven Islands, an extension of the Boyd’s Creek settlement in what is now Sevier County. The first settler there, William Hines, had built a home in the currently called Porterfield’s Gap at Bays Mountain, between what eventually became Knox and Sevier counties. He operated a sawmill and a gristmill for the earliest land owners (Justus, Johnson, Frazier, Cunningham, Wrinkle, Newman and Underwood families), but Keener soon built a sawmill on the French Broad to serve the Seven Islands community, which included families on both sides of the river. In 1871, Keener’s son Joseph sold the house to William “Billy Buck” Widner, whose son J. H. later sold the lands to newcomer J. K. Gibson.

Family oral history states that Peter and Nancy (Huffaker) Keener’s daughter Fannie married a Methodist minister, Rev. Lee, and went with him on a wagon train through Indian Territory to Montana. When her husband and two children died from “the plague” around 1890, Fannie and her remaining daughter Floyd (yes, that’s right!) and son Harry returned to this area by train with the bodies for burial in the Seven Island cemetery. She later married Rufus Kelly, who was a widower with sons Carroll and John. Rufus and Fannie then had sons Francis and Joe, and the family lived in the large, two-story house on the Seclusion Bend lands that are now the Seven Islands State Birding Park. Joe and his wife, Ruth, reared their family there and had chickens, pigs, beef and dairy cows, and raised wheat, corn, tobacco, etc., as well as peas for the Stokely cannery in Sevier County.

A barn still stands at Seven Islands State Park.

In a memoir written by Charlotte (Greene) Semeyn in 1997, she described the daily and seasonal farm activities, such as how fresh cut peas and vines were taken by trucks and wagons to be transferred respectively by pitch fork and conveyor into the sheller and silos adjacent to the cow barn. As the drawers of the sheller were filled, they were emptied into trucks that hauled them to the cannery. The process went on for days, and people came from all around to watch. In late summer, Charlotte carried water to the field workers who were harvesting and threshing wheat. She also described the tobacco crop processes, including deworming the big, fat, long, green worms from the plants and how the plants were cut, stacked, speared and hung in the tobacco barn, where they would dry until a damp, foggy fall day, when the leaves would be hand stripped and rolled into a bundle for market.

The bird park is an excellent place to ride a bike or take a walk on the many trails and contemplate early life at Seclusion Bend. Because of the native grasses and other vegetation, it’s full of birds and other wildlife, and the rangers regularly offer educational programs. The newly named “bluebird barn” itself, provides lots of information.

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.

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