We bought the original Leahaven in 2007 from a local farmer named Tony. Tony had owned the farm for two years, having bought it from the heirs of the former owners, the Izells. He rented out the house while using the rest of the farm to graze cattle and make hay. He continued to lease the "hay rights" from us for the eight years we owned the farm.
Some of the Izell family history is a matter of public record. Jurl Izell was born Nov. 11, 1925 to Leroy and Pearly Pauline Izell. Olene Izell née Croft was born on Aug. 29, 1925.
Jurl and Olene had three sons, Gary, Jimmy, and Nelson. About 1959, Jurl and Olene Izell bought the farm that would become Leahaven, moving there with their sons from nearby Sylvania. Jurl worked a local job as well as farming with the help of his sons. He died on May 20, 1994 and was buried in the Unity Missionary Church Cemetery in Sylvania. Olene lived on the farm from 1959 until she had to go to a nursing home, at which time her sons sold the farm to Tony. Olene died about a year later on Apr. 27, 2006.
The rest of this history was handed down orally from the Izell sons. There used to be a large tumble-down barn on the property. Jurl had his sons tear it down and use the timbers to build another barn--which was falling down in its turn when we bought the farm! We salvaged one of the barn doors to make a twin bed in the boys' room.
The front hay field was wooded until Jurl sold off the lumber. The back hill leading down to the lake, as well as the lake area, used to be a cornfield. The boys would plow the front field with a mule team, then ride one of the mules across the creek to the back field to plow it. Once one of the mules laid down and rolled in the creek with his rider still on his back. Apparently the mules were good for something, though, as we found stashed in the barn a tarnished "Mixed Team" cup they won, probably at the local Ider Mule Pull on Labor Day. You can find it on the mantel of the new Leahaven house.
Cleaning out the barn yielded a few more pleasant surprises. One was the antique wooden blacksmith's tool kit--rusty pliers and nails included. To this day it holds a place of honor at Leahaven.
One of Jurl's quirks was that he never threw anything away. In 1965 he built the house we called Leahaven behind the original farmhouse they were living in. He left the old house standing smack in front of the new one for several years, despite his family begging him to tear it down. Finally, he paid a man to move the entire house over by the barn because he couldn't bear to "waste" it. There it fell to pieces, and we eventually shoveled the house into a dumpster and recovered the foundation stones for a fireplace. Several of those stones have made the trip to Leahaven at Cloudland to find new life as stepping stones.
Jurl was also a mechanic and had a business repairing cars. Regularly he would buy an old car that he planned to repair "some day." He towed those cars to the farm where they sat and rusted away. Before the "boys" sold the farm to Tony, they sold off 13 cars for scrap metal, which explains a few of the 120-odd tires we hauled away! Apparently, when Jurl died, his family threw away piles of junk he had saved to repair "some day," like the 7 vintage women's electric razors in aqua cases we found together in the garbage pile or the half dozen old TV tubes!
Outside front door of the house was a nice view to the left where once an old smokehouse/shed sat. The laundry room closets were built of wood we salvaged from the shed, and the door hung on the dining room wall. Like Jurl, I couldn't throw out such "treasures." An old bench on the front porch used to sit under the big sycamore tree out front. Jurl would sit on the bench repairing guns, and when he had a gun fixed, he would aim it up at the shed and fire. Because of the angle from his low bench, the shots went in above the door and out through the shed roof. We found the holes to prove it, and they provided unique accents for the kitchen backsplash, which was made from the old shed roof.
In the early 1970's, TVA strip-mined the back portion of the farm for coal. To this day there are pieces of coal laying around the gazebo. That was back before TVA was required to restore the land, so they simply left the hole--and thirty years later the result was a beautiful lake. Pine trees and grass eventually grew up to cover the bare land, although it took many years, we are told. The Izells apparently got enough money from the coal that they never had to farm again, and their tools were left to rust. The farm had a stock pond that was always full of snakes. Run-off from neighboring strip mines fouled that pond, so TVA filled it in and dug a new one, the present stock pond. We never heard where the snakes went, but we sure didn't miss them!
The sons didn't tell us much about Olene, and we couldn't find her family history on the internet. But we do know that she loved to can vegetables from her garden. We don't know if she ever ate them, though! When we bought the house in 2007, the laundry room shelves held 128 quarts of spoiled canned goods which the renters had left on the shelves since 2005. Who knows when Olene had canned them? Sadly, the fruits of her labor went on the compost pile while the empty jars went in a dumpster.
Olene also liked to paint plaster decorations, churn homemade ice cream (see the kids' bathroom room trash can), and do needlework, according to the evidence of the garbage pile. We owe our front door stop to a mistake the funeral home made, leaving us a "MOM" stone the sons rejected in favor of another.
We don't know the name of the farmer before Jurl, but he must have been quite a character. The "boys" remember that he used to go out to plow his fields in the heat of the day with nothing to drink but a quart of moonshine! He kept a jug in a rainwater-filled hole in the sycamore tree, to keep the 'shine cool. A ladder was propped permanently against the tree so he could climb up and get the jug whenever he wanted (like when he was heading out to the field to plow).
The original Leahaven house held many reminders of the family that lived there for 50 years--of their hard work, their play, their talents and their quirks. We felt privileged to carry on where they left off, and we still honor their memory, having brought many souvenirs of their lives to Leahaven at Cloudland Station. If you look around, you're sure to recognize many of them.
© 2017 Copyright Susan Lea
