Swaggerty Blockhouse: A Frontier Mystery in Timber

The old log structure that stands in Cocke County near Parrotsville has been called the Swaggerty Blockhouse for well over a century, and for most of that time it was celebrated as a rare survivor of the frontier era, supposedly built around seventeen eighty-seven by a pioneer named James Swaggerty to protect local settlers from attack. The building is unusual: a three-story cantilevered log structure resting on a limestone foundation above a spring, the upper stories projecting outward beyond the walls below. The design was consistent with what you might expect from a military blockhouse, where the overhang allowed defenders to fire down at attackers beneath the walls.

There was one problem with this story. The tree rings did not support it.

In a study published in the journal Tree-Ring Research, dendroarchaeologists, scientists who date structures by analyzing the growth rings in their timbers, found that the logs in the Swaggerty building were felled not in the seventeen eighties but around eighteen sixty. Rather than a Revolutionary-era blockhouse, the evidence pointed to a small cantilever barn built by a man named Jacob Stephens in eighteen sixty and used for housing hogs.

The building lacks certain features typical of genuine frontier blockhouses: no gun portals, and its cantilever extends nearly four feet, which is more than twice the overhang found on actual military blockhouses. The mortise-and-tenon joinery and the frame design are consistent with mid-nineteenth-century agricultural construction.

This makes the Swaggerty structure fascinating in a different way. It still stands on its original site, but what it actually represents may be the persistence of a folk building tradition rather than a military one. The cantilever barn design was common in this part of Appalachia, and farmers used the projecting upper stories to shelter livestock and store equipment below. The frontier story was better legend than history, but the building itself, whatever it is, remains genuinely old, genuinely unusual, and genuinely worth stopping for.