Once the buffalo roamed free across the eastern seaboard. The Woodland Indians, and later the Native North American Cherokee Indians followed the heard. They set up camp at what is now the Tipton-Haynes State Historic Site. Colonel John Tipton (1730 – 1813) moved his family to the site in 1783, and served as the opposition to dividing the state of North Carolina to the State of Franklin, whose one and only governor was the infamous John Sevier. The farmland passed from generation to generation over the years, even though the family was Confederate sympathizers in a mostly Union town during the Civil War.
But, there is a dark side to the history of the Tipton-Haynes Farm. One legend says that when the farm opened as a museum and was listed on the Historical Registry in 1970, men opened a cave on the property and, to their surprise, found a mass grave of Native North American Indian bones. A story was later related that during the Revolutionary War, British troops found the group of Indian men hiding in the cave and trapped them in it. The young Indians dug for days with what tools they had on them, and with rocks from the cave itself, but tragically died after being able to open a tiny hole; enough for sunlight to come through. Perhaps this accounts for the literal phantasmagoria of Native North American Indians who sometimes appear near the cave.
The house, also, is assumed to be haunted. The farm is located on South Roan Street in Johnson City and is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places as #70000620.
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