Les Jones

East Tennessee > Millennium Manor Open House 2008 Pictures

Millennium Manor's open house was Memorial Day. I got to talk to the current owner, Dean Fontaine, a bit. He's working on a Web site. He has more source material than I ever imagined - hundreds of pages of documents and photos.

Renovations are going well and he and his girlfriend Karen have one room completely renovated and it's very livable and attractive, with nice moulding, new surfaces, hidden electrics and recessed lighting. Too bad I forgot to take a picture of that room. Oh, well. That's what you get for reading a free blog instead of buying a newspaper! Speaking of which, the Knoxville News-Sentinel will have a feature story about Millennium Manor shortly.

I was standing there and someone said "We heard about this on LesJones.com." My wife said "That's my husband" and pointed to me. Turns out he was from Madisonville and has commented here a few times. What's funny is that he wondered if he might run into me, but didn't know what I'd look like except I'd probably have a Nikon D40 camera hanging around my neck, which I did, and so did he. He bought his after reading about mine and seeing some of the pictures it produced. So that was fun.

When this 1957 story says that the builder and original owner, W.A. Nicholson, worked across the street at the Alcoa aluminum plant, they're not kidding about the across the street part. You can see the plant in the background behind the gazebo.

More pictures after the jump.

Couple of notes:

• The electrical system has improved immensely. It was downright scary when I visited a few years ago.
  
• It's hard to photograph the exterior without getting phone lines and such in the picture.
  
• One oddity about the house is that going between the upstairs and downstairs requires going outside the house. There are exterior steps on each side of the house. There is also a set of interior steps going from the downstairs to the upstairs, but the top of the stairwell opens to the outside of the house.
  
• Those interior steps are treacherous: I wouldn't want to attempt them before my first cup of coffee or after my last beer.
  
• Local language note: I've lived here my entire life and I've rarely ever heard anyone refer to Alcoa as a factory. It's always "the plant."