It all began with a mysterious door.
Now archaeologists are trying to help solve the mystery of why this door was installed in a local historic home and what it could have been used for.
As crews were working to restore the historic home on Sabine Hill, they found a door where a window used to be, Sycamore Shoals State Park manager Jennifer Bauer said.
Brigadier General Nathaniel Taylor and his wife, Mary, built the house sometime between 1818 and 1820. During that period, homeowners who had the financial means would hire painters sometime in the first few years after home construction was completed.
As crews worked recently on restoring the home on Sabine Hill, they found evidence that one of the doors structure’s doors originally was a window. The discovery was not out of the ordinary, but what happened next was, Bauer said. An internationally known specialist in historic paints, Matthew Mosca, came to examine the house and, in a sense, chip away at years of renovations to discover what the original paint in the home looked like and then re-create it. When he examined the room containing the mystery door, Bauer said Mosca discovered the room had been painted after the doorway had been installed.
What this told those working on restoring the house, Bauer said, is that the door was installed after the construction was completed but in those first few years before the painters were called in.
“We don’t know what this door might have been used for or why it was put in so close to another door out of the house,” Bauer said.
When the house was first built, Bauer said, it included a detached kitchen, which was common in the early 19th century. Over the years, remodeling of the home created what Bauer called “a hyphen room” which connected the main house to the detached kitchen.
To help return the home to its original state, Bauer said crews removed the hyphen room, which uncovered a portion of the grounds that had not been searched previously for archaeological finds.
The newly uncovered ground is near the mysterious door, and Bauer hopes it will hold clues to unlocking the mystery.
On Saturday, a team of archaeologists was on site at the home on Sabine Hill to conduct an investigation.
“Once they took the breezeway out, we were hoping the soil underneath would be undisturbed, but that doesn’t seem to be the case,” said Paul Avery, an archaeological investigator with Cultural Resource Analysts.
Avery and fellow archaeologist Dan Marcel worked on a five foot by five foot test dig section between the main house and the kitchen.
“We’ve actually found a pretty good amount of pre-historic stuff — chert flakes and Native American pottery and that sort of thing,” Marcel said. “Not much of what we were hoping for though, either much later or much earlier.”
The two men have conducted digs at the site before after being contracted through the Tennessee Historical Commission. On Saturday the two men donated their own time and expertise to solving the mystery of the door.
“We are here today on a voluntary basis because we want to help them out and give them this information,” Avery said.
However, with the ground yielding little in the way of information, the mystery of the door may forever remain unsolved.