An 1856 home notable for a rare brick chimney — the bricks handmade right on the property.
Back on the loop, watch on your right for the Dan Lawson Place — and this one rewards a close look at, of all things, the chimney.
Around 1856, a man named Dan Lawson built his home on this land, which had belonged to his father-in-law, Peter Cable. Now, cabins all over these mountains had chimneys — but they were almost always stacked stone, because stone was free and lay all around you for the gathering. Lawson's chimney is different. It's brick. And in Cades Cove in the 1850s, you couldn't drive to a store and buy brick. So the bricks in this chimney were made right here — clay dug on the property, shaped in molds, and fired on site, by hand.
That brick chimney was a quiet flex. It said this was a prosperous, established family, people with the labor and the ambition to do things the harder, finer way. Dan Lawson became one of the more successful farmers in the cove, and at one point his holdings stretched clear across the valley floor.
It's easy to drive past a place like this thinking one log cabin looks much like the next. But the people who lived here read these buildings the way we read a nice car in a driveway — a stone chimney was ordinary, a brick one meant somebody was doing well. Look for the small tells, all around the cove, and the valley starts telling you who was who.
Photo: Acroterion · CC BY-SA 4.0
