Lizzy Donker, Editor-in-Chief
With the University’s Sept. 18 announcement that recovered remains of Rebel’s Rest would be auctioned online, The Sewanee Purple asked University historian and emeritus professor of religion Gerald Smith to discuss the history of the 1866 building, the 2014 fire that burned it beyond repair, and the recent decision to sell the structure’s logs, bricks and other salvaged materials.
Smith, the University’s Fire Marshal and Director of Emergency Services at the time of the fire, helped lead an interdisciplinary recovery and research project at Rebel’s Rest from 2014 to 2016.
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of The Purple’s conversation.
Can you start by talking about why the building is significant and talking a little bit about its history and its link to Sewanee’s founding?
After the Civil War, they wanted to restart the University, and there was nothing left. In 1863, Confederate troops and then Federal troops had moved through Sewanee. The summer of 1863 was infamous for the amount of rainfall that occurred. And so, the troops were exposed to torrential rains week after week after week. We don’t have much evidence around campus of either the stories or that things were burned. [Former Sewanee archeology Professor] Sarah Sherwood, who was my partner on doing the historical analysis of that site — she did the subsurface work; I did the historical archaeology. And over the years, every time there was a waterline trench that was cut or excavations around the building, we always examined soil to see if there are traces of ash or something from previous occupation or anything like that. And we just don’t find much ash in Sewanee. And so, the old buildings that were there probably were not burned. I expect the troops used the wood in framed buildings. and I think that several thousand troops just pulled that wood out to use for flooring in their tents and so on, because of the muddy conditions all through Middle Tennessee in that time.
So, there was nothing left in 1865 or 1866. So those buildings, Rebel’s Rest and the building next door, which was the first Fulford [Hall], not the present Fulford — those were the two anchor buildings of the re-founding of Sewanee. And so, they were important for that reason. They were the first buildings constructed after the Civil War — a house for [one of Sewanee’s founders, George] Fairbanks and a house for [another founder] Bishop [Charles Todd] Quintard. Then across the street, they would eventually build the first chapel, and then they built a small boarding house, and those became the core buildings right there around the quad in the years 1866 and following. So, Rebel’s Rest was significant in being one of those original postwar buildings.
You were on the fire department at the time the building burned in July 2014. Were you among the volunteers who responded to the blaze?
I was on vacation in Destin, [Florida], and a police dispatcher called me that evening as soon as the police discovered the fire. I was up the rest of the night on the phone coordinating the collateral response. I knew that this building was important to the core of the campus… David Green was fire chief. …Although I talked to him off and on through the night, I didn’t want to interfere with his actual fire command operations. So, I began to coordinate the auxiliary response. I particularly notified the police department and worked with the police chief to secure the site, because I knew that, at a minimum, there would be an insurance investigation, and probably also, just as a routine thing, an arson investigation. So, we needed to secure the site.
Any building where there’s been a fire becomes a dangerous site. You just don’t want people walking through it. So, the next day, we contracted immediately with a fencing company, and we put a fence around the entire site, locked it, and the police controlled access to the site from that point on until we suspended archaeology [work] and things in 2016.
It was pretty intense. The fire was discovered by police going down the street and just noticing a lot of smoke. And they immediately called the fire department. And the fire department made a very good response.
The worst of the damage was in the upper floor and in the attic extending across the entire upper floor. And they had to do some pretty serious interior firefighting to knock that fire down and to stop it. And they did. So, the next day, the roof had caved down, the lower floors were trashed with water damage that was unavoidable. We had to put lots of water into that building to knock the fire down. But the exterior walls were still standing. As it turned out, those walls were pretty heavily charred, so almost all of the material that we salvaged showed some signs of fire damage. We disposed of a lot of that material just because it was burned too badly to preserve for any useful purpose. But the fire department made an excellent response. …The fire response was A-plus. It was no question about that.
Talk about the community’s reaction.
Rebel’s Rest had been a popular building with people –so many people, in not only the Sewanee community and the immediate on-campus Sewanee community, but in the larger alumni community. Faculty members remembered being put up there when they came for their faculty interview when they were hired. So many people remembered having wedding receptions in that building. So, it was caught up in a lot of sentimental and emotional Sewanee history and connections. And so, there was great dismay expressed online and in comments people made, and understandably so.
Now, there were a few people who had the same reaction to that building as some had to the mace [a no-longer-used ceremonial object decorated with a Confederate flag and dedicated to Confederate General and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forest, which was donated to Sewanee in 1964 during the height of the Civil Rights movement]. They didn’t want any emblem or insignia of the Confederacy anywhere on campus. And so, we heard a few of those good riddance comments about the burning of the building. But for the most part, it was, I would say, it was simply dismay that a historic site on campus had burned.
We did find a very aggressive movement among some people in Sewanee to immediately restore the building. And we resisted that, and our resistance did not make for a happy time with those people. They went outside of the University. They hired their own consultants who could never go into the site because we didn’t allow the public into the site. But they tried to contact historical architects who said, oh, yes, the building can be restored. Well, parts of the building could have been restored. But the people who are arguing this, some of them said to me afterwards when I showed slides of what we had found in the building — one of those who had been one of the most vigorous opponents of dismantling the building said, we never saw those pictures. We had no idea that the damage was so extensive.
This is a place where there were timbers that were falling and parts of the roof were no longer supported and were in danger of collapse, so we couldn’t just let the general public in to walk around and see what we were seeing as field researchers. But there was this group of people, and they were very insistent, and I think they continued to be disgruntled over that 2014-to-2016 period when we were dismantling the building.
Some people in the community say that the cause of the fire was never made public. Could you share what might have caused the fire?
…In this case, I was with the state fire marshal when we made a preliminary survey. That was when we used bucket trucks to lift us up above the building and swing the bucket trucks back and forth over the top of the building a few days after the fire without actually going inside. I had taken some earlier pictures that I turned over to the University legal counsel before the fire happened. I had taken those pictures because we were in the process of repairing a lot of the roof structure that had been damaged just from age; this was before the fire happened.
[After the fire] as we took the building apart, we found that there were wires that ran in crazy patterns through that building. Almost everything, when they added a room, when they changed the function of the room, they would go underneath the building and run a course of wires to supply a dryer in this apartment at the back, or to supply something in the kitchen. I do not know what caused the fire. Could it have been something related to renovation and construction? Yes. Could it have been faulty wiring? We’ve had fires in Rebel’s Rest prior to the 2014 fire that were caused by faulty wiring under the building. When we took the building apart, we found — not related to the 2014 fire, but we found in the back portions of Rebel’s Rest, we found evidence where apparently a stove in a room had caught the room on fire. We didn’t know that because the walls had been plastered over, but as we took down the plaster to get to the logs, we found that the old logs were charred.
Rebel’s Rest had a history of small fires. A room here, a room there, an electrical fire underneath. So, the honest answer is there are different possibilities. It could have been wiring. It could have been something related to construction.
Can you speak about how badly the building was damaged?
I was surprised at the intensity of the fire. But I think that was because the fire burned so long without being spotted. I’ll give you a different example. We had a fire once over at what is now the University archives…. It was in one of the fraternities that eventually was disbanded. And they had a fire in that house. You go over, there past the library, and look at the archives. That building was internally almost destroyed. With people in a fraternity party, in the house and the fire was burning inside the walls. It was a fire that started down in the basement, and no one was aware of it. And it continued to burn until it broke out in the attic. And then after the party was over, later in the night, this fire exploded up in the attic. It had been burning for hours. Fires do that. And I think the same thing had probably taken place at Rebel’s Rest. The fire, once it had started and was burning through the attic, it was building up heat. And eventually, when it got enough oxygen, then it really began to roll through the building.
So, when we went in, we had to lift off the collapsed roof using heavy equipment — what we call a track hoe and a scoop on the end of the track hoe. We grabbed these pieces of roof and lifted them up and put them in a dumpster or in dump trucks to haul away. And then, as we kind of do that process, remember that this was a building that was two stories across the front, and then there were two separate wings that went out the back. And that fire had burned in both of those wings through the attic. It turned out that the burn patterns, the charring of the wood down to ash — there were places where we were knee-deep cinder ash up on the upper floor as we worked through it. So there was much more damage than anyone could see from the outside. And we would work with shovels to shovel out the cinders that were left behind on all those upper floors. So, a lot of damage.
And the thing that surprised us was as we pulled off the wall boarding and pulled out the plaster — we found that behind the plaster, the interior walls in Rebel’s Rest were extensively rotting. Overhead, what you would see from the first floor is the ceiling, and then above that, what you would see is the floor. The gutter system in Rebel’s Rest was not good, and water had leaked in between floors and had come down inside the walls and had run into the floors. So we were encountering rot all across the building, much more than we expected to find.
We salvaged some good timbers. …If you were using what we salvaged, you could probably rebuild kind of in an ad-hoc fashion. You could rebuild in a kind of ad-hoc fashion; you could rebuild what people would remember as the front three rooms of Rebel’s Rest–the dining room and conference room on the front and the foyer between. There was enough timber left to do that. With the remaining timbers on the two back wings, the damage either from water rot or from fire was extensive enough that not enough materials could be saved from that to build. And you couldn’t come back and build 14 rooms of Rebel’s Rest again. You could build three good rooms, perhaps. But you could not build the original 14 to 16 rooms.
I’m sure it was quite the process to try and recover these materials. Talk a little bit more about how that happened, how long it took, and who was involved.
Okay. The project director was Sarah Sherwood from anthropology-archeology and me. So, we were co-directors of the dismantling and salvaging process. We hired an external company from Chattanooga that specialized in barn renovations and log structures, just because of their familiarity with log structures. We wanted to make Rebel’s Rest as much of a learning or educational opportunity as we could. And we wanted to extract stuff from Rebel’s Rest that we could continue to use with classes. And both Dr. Sherwood and I did that with subsequent classes, Dr. Torreano from the Forestry Department. We had people from biology involved because of trying to establish the plant list. So, we broke it down into academic disciplines and then we proceeded very slowly and deliberately to identify the materials. One of the great things that we all participated in was some of the logs under the floor at Rebel’s Rest still had bark on them. That meant the interior rings of some of those logs were still intact, which enabled us to date those logs very precisely. So we had probably 1,500 log samples that we took. And this research was published in [the peer-reviewed forestry journal Dendrologia and] scientific papers at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Rebels Rest became probably the best example of dendrochronology in 19th-century Middle Tennessee. The Andrew Jackson Place in Nashville was a good source of dendrochronology. But the range of materials that we found in Rebel’s Rest, the species range and the age range in Rebel’s Rest make Rebel’s Rest the baseline dendrochronology study for Middle Tennessee, far and away. It’s the best site sample that there is in Middle Tennessee on 19th-century log construction.
Wow!
That was really impressive. One other thing I didn’t mention in terms of things that we found: The Rebel’s Rest that everyone remembers had the front structure, and then there were two wings that went out the back. And between those two wings, there was a patio. Sarah Sherwood conducted what we call the subsurface archaeology. She did the dig. We took up flagstone covering for the patio in the back. And the patio was big. It was 30 by 40 or larger even—a really big patio at the back of Rebel’s Rest. We had the machines lift up the flagstones and remove all of that. And there was gravel filler that had been put in. We had to excavate that. We got all of that stuff out until we got down to the original soil in the backyard of Rebel’s Rest. Then we discovered something really interesting. As we got below the patio level, we discovered that there was a large brick cistern–made out of brick and it continued to hold water, collected the roof runoff water to fill the cistern. And then the entire area, the surface area of Rebel’s Rest back patio — really, the yard — was lined with brick conduits for conducting water across that backyard. What we discovered was that Fairbanks, who owned the house and whose permanent home was in Florida, he wanted to have Florida-style plants in his backyard at Rebel’s Rest. And so, he constructed a system, a system of irrigation, to allow his Florida plants to be planted there at Rebel’s Rest.
We found a few old photographs, and then we found descriptions, letter and diary descriptions of these plants. So, if you’d seen Rebel’s Rest, say, in 1900 or in 1890, you’d found a kind of semi -tropical garden in the backyard. And we were expecting to find that. And so, Dr. Sherwood went layer by layer by layer by layer down to original soil. And in that process, we discovered this irrigation system, the cistern. And then with collateral historical information, we were able to reconstruct the contents of this elaborate semi-tropical garden that the Fairbanks had in that back yard.
That’s really interesting.
It really was. Now, for me, I’ve always had an interest in forestry, and I have been particularly attracted to American chestnut trees. You may know that the American chestnut was gone because of blight that destroyed that great American tree. It was estimated that one in four trees in the Southern Appalachians were American chestnuts. And those trees are entirely gone today. But they were alive when Rebel’s Rest was built. And about a third of the wood that we recovered from Rebel’s Rest, 25 to 30 percent, was American chestnut logs.
Most of the wood in Rebel’s Rest was quarter-sawn. This is something also that we did not expect to find. For quarter-sawn wood, you take a log, and basically you cut out the one third that’s in the middle. You let the side pieces just fall away. And what that produces is wood boards that have very tight grain structure. The advantage of cutting wood that way is that that wood will not twist or warp a bit. It stays straight, and it keeps its dimensions.
Virtually all, and I mean by that I mean nearly 95 percent of the original wood used in Rebel’s Rest, the exterior logs, then the interior framing, the common invisible framing that building, was made from quarter-sawn wood. What that means is that you have wood structure that doesn’t twist or warp or develop cracks in the plaster that you put over it. It’s a very stable way. It’s an expensive way to harvest wood. But we found that sawing technique used throughout the building–full boards for interior walls, studding, in ceiling rafters, as well as in surface wood. It was used an internal window frame, the same sawmilling technique, and that produced windows that were put up in 1866 and the windows would still slide up and down because the windows didn’t warp or distort. You don’t see that kind of wood used anymore, just because it is so expensive to cut wood that way. But that’s the way it was done at Rebel’s Rest, and it was very impressive as just a kind of esoteric observation.
Given the building’s history, was anything particularly moving for any of you during the recovery process?
Oh yeah, I think discovering that tropical garden, that was really interesting. Discovering the care that went into the selection and use of that wood, that was interesting. For me, we were opening a windowsill and pulling off the plaster. At some point, and this would have been early on, because they moved into the house before it was finished. They needed some shelter and so they put up the walls and put up the roof. And the workmen were still working in the house from the Fairbanks family moved into it. Well, we were pulling this plaster down, and behind the plaster, on a little space in the windowsill, where you slant the wood toward the outside so that the windowsill trains, that leaves a little gap on the inside. And I was in that room working with a crowbar. The crew had been pulling stuff down and carrying it off to the dumpster. And I discovered needle and thread. And apparently, someone in the Fairbanks family had been in that room before the construction was completed, and they were mending a garment. They were sewing or something. And so, there’s some needles and threads which had just been laid on that windowsill, and I guess, forgotten. And then workmen came in and sealed up the wall. And so, a hundred-plus years later, we find this little evidence of domestic life in that house.
In one of the fireplaces — If you were facing the building, there was a left conference room, a dining room. There was a fireplace in that room. And the fireplace projected out into the room, and then a wall had been built to make it to finish it so it looked nice. So, when we took the wall down, we found that apparently there had been a shelf by the fireplace, and the Fairbanks children had put up a coloring book. And this coloring book had fallen over into the back void behind the fireplace and was lost. But in our taking the wall apart, we found that. And then we found a few simple toys.
We did not only the archeology of the house, but Sarah Sherwood’s archeological teams also did the peripheral archeology on the site, which was where all the refuse from the house was dumped. So, we discovered hundreds of bottles, many of them broken. But we were able to extract a wide sample of 19th-century liquid containers. We were able to recover glassware — fragments of glassware. So, we discovered that there were glasses that looked like they would have been used in a dining room. But we discovered through analysis at the University of Tennessee that that glass had been created in the 1830s–not the 1860s. And so, we had some small evidence that that site in the middle of the campus may have been occupied all the way back to the 1830s–a pre-University population living in Sewanee.
You were speaking about just how remarkable the age and the provenance of the wood that was used in the building’s walls was. Can you talk about how you all determined how old these materials were and where they came from?
We had retail records. There were business records that still exist. We have receipts. There were journal records that still exist. Not only from 1866-68, but from 1860 before the University was built. We had foreman’s daybooks. They were journal ledgers where the building supervisor keeps track of materials are bought, what people are working and how much they’re paid. So, we had materials of that sort to tell us when a shipment of logs came in, when a shipment of bricks came up from Chattanooga. We had records of a load of logs being cut. There was a sawmill out in Midway owned by a man named Smith, and [records showed] a log shipment from Smith sawmill, wagon freight $4. The logs were cut and sawed and put on wagons from local hauling, people who were doing hauling. The logs were taken out to the sawmill and cut into timbers, and then brought back into Sewanee and used to build Rebel’s Rest.
So we have historical records, paper records like that, that tell us things about the sawmilling process. So we can develop collateral dates and so on. For the timbers themselves, we either sawed across the end so that we could count the ring, or we used an auger and drilled a hole into the log and extracted a core so that we could count the rings. And then what you do–this is tedious beyond belief. You photograph these ring sequences, and then you print the photographs, and then you slide the photographs back and forth, back and forth, until the ring patterns match up. And you do that across a thousand samples.
Oh wow.
You have to be a special kind, and I am not that kind. We had a student who–we would say he was kind of nerdy. He was a genuine nerd. He lived with a microscope and images of these logs, and he shifted them back and forth and back and forth, so that we could establish what we knew when these logs were cut.
That’s when we discovered that we had some logs that were cut in 1865, which made us wonder if these people like Fairbanks and Quintard had already made plans to open the university in 1865 at the end of the war, rather than waiting until 1866. Because why would they have cut the logs? But there were logs cut in 1865, as if they were getting ready to use them the next year when they started formal building there. It’s just a little thing that came out of this pure scientific analysis of the ring patterns on these logs.
The ring patterns also told us that there were trees there that probably began growing, in one case, maybe in the late 1500s and certainly in the early 1600s. Up to [the time of building] Rebel’s Rest, a tree that was growing in the 1600s would have been 250 years old. But a lot of trees around Sewanee still are over 300 years old. So that’s not all that startling. It’s just that in 1866, there were logs that were being cut that had started growing in the 1590s or early 1600s.
That was just kind of interesting, but it required this very, very careful ring-pattern comparisons, from log to log to log to log, back and forth, to establish what we call the dendrochronology. And Scott Torreano in forestry and his students were the ones that were primarily responsible for the recovering of those samples and then processing those at UT-Knoxville to determine that…
That’s really interesting. It definitely sounds like a very tedious process.
The other thing that we did, and again, this is tedious beyond belief: we opened up a wall and there was dust in the wall. We knew that that wall had been sealed for 150 years. That dust included pollen. And there are people who can put that dust under a microscope, and they can read the pollen grain. Each plant has a distinctive pollen grain shape. Now, it’s microscopic. It takes high-resolution microscopes even to be able to see these things. But we filtered the dust from windowsills and analyzed it in order to determine the plants that were growing around the house.
Wow. That’s crazy.
Again, that’s not the kind of thing that you take people on tours to be pointing this out to them. It is on our part evidence of the systematic thoroughness from the scientific disciplines, the historical disciplines that we used in approaching the site. We saw it as a fantastic opportunity right in the middle of campus to conduct primary scientific and historical research, and we tried to maximize that within our disciplines and with the students that were in our majors.
Absolutely. So where have the materials been kept since they were recovered?
You know where the post office is down in the village, the U.S. post office? The backside of that post office is a warehouse, and all of those materials are stored there.
And why were they kept for so long?
Well, I think it was mixed. I think there were people who were still thinking well, maybe we’ll use these and rebuild something. And I went on to other things and then I retired in 2016. And Sarah Sherwood, who was a University archaeologist–she is a fantastic archaeologist and works professionally all over the world. She’s in demand. She’s worked on Easter Island. She’s worked in Romania. She’s a world-class archaeologist. She had a dozen career things that were pulling her, so she and I weren’t working together, and we weren’t promoting any agenda of let’s restore Rebel’s Rest, or anything like that.
After we did our work of dismantling and documentation, the materials were stored. And in a sense, the ball was in the University’s court, and I think there wasn’t any real urgency at the time. But then they began to notice that the rental on a large warehouse space was adding up, and no decisions had been made. And so, a year ago, they suggested that with these materials, that they needed to empty out the warehouse. And materials that the University was going to use, that we needed to clean those materials or we needed to go on and distribute them to other people that could use them. And they made they made that decision. I was not involved in that.
I could tell them what some of the materials were and help them understand the significance of the materials that they had in front of them. But the decision of what to do with those materials, I was not involved in. I didn’t particularly want to be involved in it. I really enjoy the wood. I had saved a lot of burnt scraps out of the building so I could display samples in my classes of what chestnut wood looked like or what quarter-sawn wood looked like.
But for the bulk of those materials, I just didn’t have any personal or professional interest in pursuing them. And there wasn’t anybody else either. We all recognized that there was valuable wood. …That is not a very satisfying answer, but I think that enough time has passed, and there’s no urgency. You know, if we’d had a fire in All Saints’ [Chapel] that had collapsed the roof, we would rebuild All Saints’, because All Saints’ is a critical symbol, not just to the past but to current life in the University.
To give you another example, across the street from All Saints’, what was once called Thompson Union and now Biehl Commons, that building was a medical school. It was a three-story building–two full floors and then an attic floor. In 1950, that building burned just like Rebel’s Rest all the way across the top. The roof collapsed, the upper floor burned, and the building was gutted. It was right in the center of campus. It was a stone building–not a log building. And it was salvageable, so the University came back in. They couldn’t build it back to the two and a half stories that it had been built before, but they decided to rebuild that one — partly because the stone was in such good shape, and basically what it meant was they had to gut the burn material out of the building and then rebuild the rooms, and that was a fairly simple operation. …
If Rebel’s Rest had been in better shape, I could see an argument that someone might have made for rebuilding it, but because it was a log structure, and because so much of it had burned, it just didn’t make sense for the University to rebuild it, as it might have made sense for the University to rebuild All Saints’ or any other stone building on campus.
Some folks would say that we’re losing a significant part of Sewanee’s earliest history by letting these materials go. So, as one of the University’s official historians, how would you respond?
I’m a great student of material culture. But material culture holds part of the story of our history. It’s important to look at material culture, Sewanee history, not only from objects like what we took out of Rebel’s Rest, but from the trash in our stream beds. … For instance, I never knew that the University School of Pharmacology had a pharmacy in 1905, and that the pharmacy had glass bottles marked University Pharmacy. I found one of those in a stream. It’s the little things like that.
The material culture is really important in reminding you of parts of your history that may have been forgotten or you never knew about. But more important than the material culture history is the social history. And the books that I referred to, the ledger books of the foreman–one of the things that I was able to do in reading [those documents], and this was in reference to Rebel’s Rest – because we had the construction books of the foremen who were putting the building together. From the 1860 construction books and the 1866 construction books, I was able to reconstruct by line-by-line analysis of the names of the workers, I was able to generate an estimate of a much larger population of black people in Sewanee than we’d ever known, based upon this kind of distinction: when white workmen were paid, they used two names or they used the preface Mr. When black workmen were paid, they only used the first name, like Joe or Bobby or something like that. So, using that sorting criteria and then counting those names, listing them, counting them, and then estimating what the family structure would have been, we probably had a population of 300 to 400 persons of color living in Sewanee, and we had no idea of that before.
So, the documentary history is a story yet to be told. And so, I’m not worried about losing Rebel’s Rest. I would be grieved to my heart if we had lost those documents–if those documents, for instance, had been in that building along with everything else, and when the building burned, those documents burned, that would have been the greatest loss of all. And we did not have that kind of loss. We have those documents. They’re in archives. And they will be there they will be there for generations to come to sort out what women did in Sewanee at that time, the black workers and what they did, the contributions of these people. And that’s a story that’s yet to be told.
We’ve told some of that in the volumes of history that we’ve written. And the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and and Reconciliation…In about two weeks they’re going to be examining a gravestone in the University cemetery of an enslaved person. There’s a stone there that’s on the ground that says, Our Mammy. We’ve discovered this woman’s biography. And we’re going to raise the gravestone. Well, these are elements of Sewanee history that are ongoing. And I would far rather have recognized that these documentary records and cemetery records are recovering the identity of these people, identities that so far have been lost. To me, that’s much more that’s much closer to the core of Sewanee than the physical structure of Rebel’s Rest.
Okay, I have one last question, and you might have just kind of touched on it, but your [2025 Advent Semester] convocation talk included some interesting things about Sewanee’s history, memory, and nostalgia. How might those parts of your talk be relevant as we think about Rebels Rest, its place in Sewanee’s story, and how we should consider letting go of these materials? Does trying to cling to them take us backwards?
I think we don’t want to go backwards. …There’s a richness that’s associated with the construction of Rebel’s Rest and the life that went on around us. I don’t want get caught up in a controversy about taking those remaining timbers and building a visitor’s center on campus or something like that. No. Not that. But the stories of the people involved – the stories of the people of who built it, the stories of the people of Sewanee. Not just Rebel’s Rest.
Let me give you a different example. One of the documents that we have in the library, up in the archives, is what we call the lease book. And George Fairbanks, who built Rebel’s Rest, kept the lease book because he was the commissioner of leases. Most of the leases on University Avenue are long and narrow. They reach from University Avenue all the way back through sometimes across Abbo’s Alley. The original lease for Rebel’s Rest went out the back door, across that parking lot, down into Abbo’s Alley, across the stream, and up the slope going toward Florida Avenue. I discovered a corner yellow poplar that’s about three, four feet in diameter in Abbo’s Alley. It’s probably the back-corner marker of Rebel’s Rest.
Why is that important? It’s important because Sewanee used the shape of the land to embody its patterns of discrimination. So, when telling the story of Rebel’s Rest, it’s not only about this log building; it’s the fact that this log building sat up on the front of University Avenue, and behind Rebels Rest, there were nearly 20 structures. With Rebel’s Rest and Fulford, there were nearly 20 structures that were utilized by domestic servants, as they were called in those days, that reached all the way back down into Abbo’s Alley.
In other words, Rebel’s Rest and Fulford are part of a much larger complex of buildings that reflect patterns of life in Sewanee. It’s important for us to know about that. We don’t want to return to those patterns of life. But we need to understand that history as we come forward, to see patterns of discrimination that were embodied in the landscape and the buildings, to see the way our own social attitudes have evolved from that time 150 years ago down to the present.
So we look back and we understand, but we’re not trying to go back. And you know, that nostalgia says, oh, that was a sweet and wonderful time and we’ve got to preserve it. And, you know, it’s moonlight and magnolias in the old South. That’s not the world that Rebel’s Rest occurred in, and I think it’s that’s not a world we want to get back in. We want to learn from it, but we want to learn from it so we can understand how we can move ahead in the sense of knowing the roles, knowing the stories of people that were never told and we still need to tell.
I’m haunted by a picture, not of Rebel’s Rest, but from 1906, when we started building All Saints Chapel. I found a black-and-white photograph in the University Archives. We went to the edge of the bluff. We quarried rock. We brought that rock up to the quad and stacked it in a kind of u-shape or horseshoe shape around the foundation of All Saints’. Every rock in All Saints’ was hand-chiseled.
There’s a picture of that horseshoe pattern of rock. And there’s a man standing there with stonemason’s tools and a leather stonemason’s apron on. He’s a black man. And with that picture, I discovered that very high skilled group is not represented just by white stonemasons, but Sewanee had black stonemasons. Their story has never been told. So, I want to look back, yes, but coming forward, I don’t want to rebuild an old structure from the 19th century. I want to recover the stories of these people who were part of the life of Sewanee and tell their stories.
I sound like I’m preaching. I better stop.
This was really interesting and it definitely gave me a lot more of the history that I didn’t know. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me.
Honored to be asked. Thank you for doing that. For more about the history of Rebel’s Rest, click here for the Sewanee alumni magazine’s Winter 2015 article, beginning at page 10.
Faculty Advisor Lee Hancock (C ’81) contributed to this story.
