Dave Whaley & Tomica Miller Review Their Restoration Project in Sharps Chapel, TN
Knox Heritage presents the next installment of the monthly series Preservation Network on Saturday, August 8, at 10:00 a.m. Preservation Network is held at the Time Warp Tea Room, 1209 N. Central, in Historic Old North Knoxville. It is free and open to the public.
Preservation Network’s August session features Dave Whaley and Tomica Miller and their labor of love restoring a spectacular historic home in Sharps Chapel, located in Union County. They’ll bring photos of the five-bay Federal Style house, and review the restoration project in detail.
Dave and Tomica first stumbled upon the house when they were lost on the back roads of Union County. The five-bay Federal style house was built in 1835 by Jacob Sharp on 700 acres of land originally granted to his father, Revolutionary War veteran Henry Sharp. Jacob was a Methodist minister and successful merchant at the time. In 1874 the house was sold to Jacob Ousley and remained in his family for 132 years. The house was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 due to community efforts to protect it, but it languished, unoccupied, for almost 30 years. It was known as the area’s old haunted house and few thought it would survive. Through a serendipitous acquaintance with architectural salvager Scott Brady, who had planned to move the building to another location, Dave and Tomica purchased the house and the surrounding land from the Ousley family in 2006.
If you want to learn more and see pictures of the Sharps Chapel restoration, read Kim Trent's blog, Saving Places, via Metropulse.
Preservation Network is a series of free workshops held once every month on the second Saturday. Many people have dubbed this the “support group for owners of old homes,” and in many ways this is true. In a relaxed round-table setting with coffee, smoothies, and other goodies, the workshops have presented guest speakers who are specialists in windows, flooring, roofing, stained glass, tile, plumbing, electrical, and more. Other guest speakers have included those in real estate sales or appraisals, or city codes and zoning officials discussing historic overlays and building requirements.