I’m way overdue for a farmhouse update. Where did June and July even go? We bought this 100-year-old farmhouse back in March of this year with our friends the Perkins family and eventually it will be a historic vacation rental in downtown Bryson City, NC.  We are restoring it one tiny intricate step at a time and discovering the local railroad history as we go.  Things are really coming along and it’s finally starting to look less like a construction site. Back in May the house looked like this…and it still looks very much the same from the outside…but the grounds have changed significantly:

Over a hundred years ago the house was built very close to a hill. Previous owners had added new layers of sidewalk and concrete walls to try and hold it back but most of those fixes ended up causing a lot of water damage to the house over time. We decided we just needed to start fresh by digging the hill out. (More photos here of the initial work we did.) 

We hired our friend Shannon of Taylor Earth Products and Excavation to put in a rock retaining wall. He has done work for us before at the House on Hospital Hill. Shannon has a great eye when it comes to stuff like this. Here’s the start of the wall. These are massive stones…some are as big as a cow! The backfill of gravel and mesh fabric will help with drainage and keep dirt from coming back through:

The wall from the other side. I love the subtle curve he put into the wall here that opens up to the driveway:

Below is the finished wall. This used to be a narrow concrete walkway but now it can be a huge outdoor living space off the farmhouse porch. As soon as all the construction is done we’ll fill this area with pea gravel:

While we were excavating the property we went ahead and added new sewer and water lines at the same time:

The lot next to the farmhouse is wide open after being graded…there’s so much potential for another project down the road:

For now we really just wanted to get grass seed down as soon as possible to start establishing some landscaping:

The yard after we spread the straw:

A little over a month later and the yard already looks great:

There’s so much else going on but it’s too much to write about all at once so I’ll keep sharing in small bits. Click here to read all the posts on the farmhouse and it’s interesting history!

The old Whittier Hotel is a railroad boarding house a few miles away. We spent the morning salvaging some old antique doors for the Sixty-One Park Farmhouse out of it:

The old hotel was a boarding house for passengers who came into Whittier, NC by train. It’s only five miles from Bryson City and is well over 100 years old. It’s also one of the few original Whittier businesses still standing:

Gloria Nolan, who owns a small thrift store in downtown Whittier, is my go-to for history and old photos. She built an enormous model of the old town in her store.  Here’s downtown Whittier back in the old days…the hotel stands right in the center of the photo:

Another view of the hotel (on the left):

The book My Mountain Granny (by Matthew Link Baker) has some more info on the hotel’s history:  

Alexander Hamilton Hayes and his wife Margaret built the Whittier hotel around the turn of the century. It became known as the McHan Hotel. The McHan Hotel was ran by Eva Summerow McHan and Robert McHan.

McHan Hotel catered to large numbers of people including the drummers coming through. They would come into town, rent a room at one of the hotels, and a horse and buggy from the livery stable. They would travel around peddling apple trees, grapevines, sewing machines or anything they could sell. They would take the orders, then send the merchandise back on the train. Colonel Raymond Robbins also stayed at the McHan Hotel while on escape from Washington in 1932. 

The Hotel had fourteen rooms and cost one dollar a night, including meals. The mass exodus that occurred in the 30’s and 40’s took away much of the hotel’s business. After the hotel closed, the front portion of it was used as a barber shop by Ike Parris until the mid 1980’s.

Here’s what the hotel looked like around 1900:

This is what that same porch looks like today…I took the photo as the doors were coming out:

The years haven’t treated the old hotel well:

If these walls could talk they’d have plenty of stories to tell:

A staircase to nowhere:

Layers of old wall paper:

An old sink:

The town of Whittier was founded in 1895 by Dr. Clark Whittier, a relative of Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier. I found this interesting tidbit in an 1885 copy of the Friends’ Review: A Religious, Literary and Miscellanieous Review:

Dr. Clark Whittier, of California, the founder, has recently purchased 60,000 acres of land in Swain and Jackson counties, and he has options of about 30,000 acres more. This land he proposes to cut up into small farms. 

The unique features of the town, are the provisions made against the sale of liquor. Arrangements have ben made to prevent the manufacture and sale of spirituous and malt liquors, not only in the town, but within ten miles of it in every direction. There is a clause in every deed to land sold which provides that if at any time spirituous or malt liquor shall be manufactured, sold or given away on the land, the sale land revert back to Dr. Whittier or his heirs, upon the payment of the original purchase money.

I wonder if anyone ever got caught selling liquor?

Whittier was just a whistle-stop on the Southern Railway. The completion of the railroad in the western-most part of North Carolina brought new types of business including boarding houses and hotels.

These days the small town of Whittier is also the “North Pole” for the Great Smoky Mountain Railroad’s Polar Express that leaves out of the Bryson City depot in November and December. 

I hope the hotel gets a new life one day but if it doesn’t at least a few of the doors will still stay around this area. I love that the doors we found today will add even more railroad history to the farmhouse we are renovating. I’ll have to label them somehow so people who stay at the farmhouse will know which doors were once hotel doors. 

You can read more about the history of the farmhouse we are renovating here. 

Because of the state of the foundation at the Sixty-One Park farmhouse we’ve had to do a lot of excavation, and that’s bound to bring up things from the past. A back hoe is way more efficient than a shovel:

A neighbor told me that a Civil War sword and belt buckle were found on the property next door years ago.  I haven’t found anything like that but I have found so many remnants of early 20th century life. Here are some pieces of pottery I’ve found:

More pottery and glass. I love all the varieties:

One day after it rained I filled up an entire two gallon bucket of glass remnants. Look at the variety of all of this glass! I would love to learn to solder better…maybe this could be a stained glass window one day:

Here’s another collection of found objects:

A detailed list:

1. A few pieces of “fringed” glass
2. The bottom piece of an old lightbulb
3. An intact bottle (any idea what used to be in this kind of bottle?)
4. A metal piece that looks like it might have been on a piece of furniture
5. Three arrowheads
6. A piece of obsidian
7. A cardboard milk top
8. A zinc mason jar top
9. A rusty hinge
10. 2 pieces of pottery
11. An old slice of bone
12. A small turquoise resin piece that was probably part of a piece of jewelry
13. A gold ring
14. The tops of 2 vintage bottles and part of an old blue mason jar
15. The front of a combination lock
16. Half of a porcelain mason jar lid
17. A piece of a salt jar

You can follow Sixty-One Park on Instagram where I post more recent updates as we go along!