Les Jones

USA Today video of Millennium Manor

Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

Link here. The video is undated, but appears fairly recent based on the renovations I saw last year. The open house is Monday, Memorial Day.

Tags: Millennium Manor

Millinneum Manor open house on Memorial Day

Friday, May 22nd, 2009 | East Tennessee | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Millennium Manor, the quirky stone castle in Alcoa near the duck pond, has its annual open house on Memorial Day. For background, read the News-Sentinel story from last year with photographs by the late, great Clay Owen.

Google Map to Millennium Manor - corner of Wright Rd. and Harding St.

P.S. I’ve gone back and tagged older Millennium Manor posts for easy browsing.

Tags: Millennium Manor

Clay Owen, RIP

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 | East Tennessee, Photos | Permalink | No Comments |

A Knoxville News Sentinel photographer has died suddenly. “Clay Owen, a veteran News Sentinel photojournalist and beloved member of the newsroom staff, died unexpectedly Tuesday evening at his home of a heart attack. He was 47.”

I never met him, but I recognized his name immediately. I enjoyed his photography and praised his Millennium Manor photos for being so much better than my own. Condolences for his family and friends.

Tags: Millennium Manor

News-Sentinel Story on Millennium Manor

Friday, June 6th, 2008 | East Tennessee | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Knoxville New-Sentinel - Rescue operation: Fireman’s commitment puts Alcoa’s stone fortress back in shape:

Some weeks, Wells says, she and Fontaine work 20 to 30 hours on building projects. Other weeks they’re lucky to squeeze in two or three.

Their work is often tedious and dirty. Pressure-washing ceilings and walls sprays bits of sand, grit and cement. While each of the 14 rooms is about the same size, they’re different enough that materials must be customized. “You can’t get something from one room and use it to fix another,” Fontaine says.

Before he could renovate, he had to hack out a jungle. “The first summer I spent hauling off five dump truck loads of trash and brush.”

And sometimes I think I have home maintenance problems.

Be sure to watch the slideshow of Clay Owen’s photos, which put my humble efforts to shame. Compare, for instance, his photo of that blue downstairs hallway to mine. The picture I took is pedestrian (and not even well-exposed). His composition is brillant. Granted, I was chasing a 1 and 3 year old and he obviously has a lens wider than any of mine, but he also has a great eye. The gargoyle picture, the stairwell picture, and the landscape with the gazebo on the left are standouts.

Tags: Millennium Manor

Note on the Stone in Millennium Manor

Thursday, June 5th, 2008 | East Tennessee | Permalink | 4 Comments |

When I was looking over the Millennium Manor pictures I noticed that some of the stone didn’t match. Some was gray and some was pink. Looking at the photo above you see light pink stone on the upper story, then a band of gray stone below that, then a band of pink stone above the windows, and gray stone again from the windows down to the ground. You can also see pink stone on the eyebrow above the stairwell on the left.

I had read that the marble was from Friendsville, which has the light pink stone typical of Blount County quarries. I imagined that the different colors of stone represented different patterns of discoloration due to rain and sunlight. I could almost envision an arbor above the lower story windows causing the difference in weathering.

I emailed the current owner, Dean Fontaine, and he disabused me of my theory. According to his research the difference in color reflects a difference in the origin of the stone rather than weathering:

When they were building the Rock Gardens subdivision they ran into a lot of the gray marble. It was close by, and needed disposed of, so it was handy. Later he had to drive to the nearest place to get more rock, and that was the Friendsville site.

So that clears up that mystery. The Rock Gardens community is on Lincoln Road in Alcoa.

Tags: Millennium Manor

Millennium Manor Open House 2008 Pictures

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 | East Tennessee | Permalink | 3 Comments |

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.

Continue reading the rest of this post right here ›››

Tags: d40, Millennium Manor

Millennium Manor Open House on Memorial Day

Friday, May 23rd, 2008 | East Tennessee | Permalink | No Comments |

Millennium Manor, Alcoa’s apocalyptic stone castle, will have an open house on Memorial Day, Monday May 26. Admission is free. Donations are welcome. Millennium Manor is located at 500 N. Wright Road.

Here’s a restoration progress report from the current owner, Dean Fontaine. In other news, Millennium Manor now has a Wikipedia entry.

Tags: Millennium Manor

Millennium Manor Progress Report

Thursday, April 17th, 2008 | East Tennessee | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Millennium Manor is a quirky stone castle in Alcoa, TN, designed in the 1930s to house its owner for what he envisioned as his eternal life. There’s an open house every Memorial Day weekend. The current owner, Dean Fontaine, posted a progress report on the renovation work in comments to this post.

Tags: Millennium Manor

Misc. Blount County History

Friday, June 1st, 2007 | East Tennessee | Permalink | No Comments |

Found today while reading at the Blount County Public Library.

Notes from The History of Blount County, Tennessee and its People, 1795-1995 by the Blount County History Book Committee.

• Painting of Alleghany Springs Hotel.

• Photo of Chilhowee Inn.
• Photo of Parkins-Frazier House, Blount County’s oldest house, built on plans suggested by William Penn, America’s best-known Quaker and founder of Pennsylvania.
• There’s an entry on Millennium Manor - the curious stone mansion built by an Alcoa man for religious reasons - which it calls Stone Heaven. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it called that.

Notes from Blount County, Tennessee 1795-1995, edited by Jane Kizer Thomas and published by the Blount County Bicentennial Task Force.

• Painting of the county’s third courthouse, built in 1838-40. It was shelled by Confederate forces when the Union Army occupied it. The courthouse survived the shelling, but later burned in 1879.

• Photo of the more commonly seen fourth courthouse. (The source at that link refers to it as the third courthouse. I’m not sure which is correct. I’m aware that the first courthouse was near Hall Road and Alcoa Hwy. I don’t know of any others besides the current courthouse.) The brick courthouse was located in downtown Maryville at the current site of the First Tennessee bank building. An historical marker at the bank notes that Sam Houston joined the army at that location. A 1906 fire at the Badgett Store (currently the site of National School Products) jumped the street and destroyed the courthouse.
• Photo of the Fort Craig Hotel in its final, dilapidated state. I was unclear on its location before, but the description made it clear that the hotel was located on Washington at the current site of the Blount County Chamber of Commerce, which means it was inside the area originally enclosed by James Craig’s pioneer fort. Pistol Creek runs behind there, and a marble monument marks the spring where the settlers drew water. In Blount County Remembered there’s a photo by W.O. Garner from the turn of the century showing James Craig’s son’s clapboard house at the top of the hill and a horse and rider stopped at the spring at the bottom of the hill.
• I’m friends with some Gregories and knew that Gregory’s Bald in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was named for their family, which grazed their sheep there before the creation of the park. I didn’t realize that another park bald called Russell Field was named for Russell Gregory.
• Many good photos of downtown Maryville. The earliest photo from 1900 shows unpaved streets and horse-drawn carriages.
• Photo of the “Mule Barn” which once stood at the intersection of Hall and Lincoln roads in Alcoa, at the current site of the post office and First Tennessee bank. Originally used for livestock, it was renovated for use as a school for North Maryville, which later became the city of Alcoa.
• Fascinating photo of the recently-completed Alcoa company houses on Lincoln Road - all identical in appearance - looking from the Calderwood Road end.
• Photo of Montvale Springs hotel that I’ve never seen anywhere else. It was taken as the road enters the property and turns left towards the current Camp Montvale swimming pool, so it looks down slightly on the inn. In the picture you can see that the building is L-shaped. The main inn with its two story, wrap-around porches forms the long stem of the L, while the plain, rear projection forms the short foot. I’d guess the rear section contained the kitchen and other housekeeping functions.
• Photo of West Side Elementary School, “razed in 1956 to make way for Maryville Municipal Building. West Side students were transferred to Sam Houston Elementary School when it opened in 1953, then West Side housed Fort Craig students while their school was rebuilt. Pride Mansion at same site was also private Quaker school, Maryville Normal Institute, and later a Maryville school when city purchased property.” I’ve mentioned before that Pride Mansion became a teacher’s academy with funding from the Baltimore and Philadelphia Friends (Quakers), and that the current site of the McAmmon-Ammons-Click funeral home in downtown Maryville was originally the East Tennessee Masonic Institute for Women.
• Scenic photo of Walland in 1909. Like Alcoa, Walland was a company town, created by the WALton-EngLAND tannery.
• Photos of Porter Academy on Wildwood Road.
• Painting of Dr. Isaac Anderson, who founded Maryville College in 1819 as Southern and Western Theological Seminary.
• Photo of Ewing-Jefferson College in Louisville. “Built in 1852 by Concord Cumberland Presbyterian Churce, Knox County, this brick building was used for both a church and a college. It continued in use as Holston College Presbyterian Church and later a community center long after the college closed in 1899. The building was torn down in 1950.”
• The Maryville Friends (Quakers) Cemetery is located on Lamar Alexander Parkway near North Houston Street.
• Numerous photos of area schools and churches.

Tags: Millennium Manor

Millennium Manor Open Memorial Day

Thursday, May 25th, 2006 | East Tennessee | Permalink | No Comments |

As always, Millennium Manor in Alcoa is open Memorial Day.

Tags: Millennium Manor

Millennium Manor Open House on Memorial Day

Thursday, May 27th, 2004 | Best Of, East Tennessee | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Millennium Manor - the odd stone castle in Alcoa - has its annual open house on Memorial Day.

The stone and cement house was constructed using Roman techniques, and was meant to last 1000 years. The rooms have arched roofs. When we visited the Castillo San Marcos fort in St. Augustine we saw the same type of rooms and roofs.

This BlountWeb link is down at the moment, but it has the best information I’ve found. Here’s a cached copy. This 1957 Maryville-Alcoa Daily Times story interviews builder and original owner W.A. Nicholson, and is the best source for his religious motivations for building the structure. Nicholson was 61 when he began construction, and worked on it in his spare time while working a full-time job at the aluminum plant.

This Oak Ridger story interviews the current owner, Knoxville firefighter and paramedic Dean Fontaine.

The manor is also known as Darby’s Castle, after a Kris Kristofferson song. The Knoxville Grass re-recorded the song on their album of the same name, and used a picture of the manor for the album cover.

I went to the castle as a kid when the JayCees used it as a haunted house. Melissa and I toured it Memorial Day a couple of years ago and met the current owners. Admission was free, with donations encouraged. The manor is at 500 North Wright Road, not far from the duck pond.

Tags: Millennium Manor