DUNLAP, Tenn. - An entire community of historic homes, businesses, churches and schools from across Southeast Tennessee's Sequatchie Valley is tucked away in a small shed near Dunlap.
There's the old bank building on Cherry Street, the Rankin House, Fred Wilson's Store in the Daus community, Center Point School, Ketner's Mill, the original Chapel Hill Methodist Church and the old Kell home place - all in miniature, all from historic photos and memories.
It's all the work of the late Thaxton Kell, a man who loved the world of his childhood and youth so much he wanted to preserve it with his own hands.
The shelves inside a shed on the 200-year-old Kell farm are lined with dozens of scale-model homes that Kell knew from his childhood on the farm and his years working as a state dairy inspector with the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, according to his wife, Nadean, who still lives on the land where her husband was born.
Thaxton Kell died July 4, 2004, at age 80, but his family hopes the legacy of his handiwork will live on for generations.
Thaxton and Nadean Kell stuck to their original careers through the decades before they reached retirement age; Thaxton as the dairy inspector and Nadean with her beauty shop in Dunlap.
Finally, when he and Nadean "retired," he built her a small beauty shop beneath the boughs of a massive white oak, bragged as the oldest tree in Sequatchie County and one that could be in the running for largest living example of the species in the state.
Nadean said the man she married in 1946 stayed busy using his hands in his retirement years. He ran the farm and built a full-size log cabin, blacksmith shed, tool barn, privy and other structures, including a small wooden bridge next to the big oak tree.
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the cabin was set for incoming family and appeared as a cabin might have 150 years ago or more. Tools decorated the walls in the cabin and all the sheds and outbuildings that populate the Kell property.
Thaxton Kell got some help on some of the full-size projects from other woodworkers who appreciated his efforts, Nadean said. Most of the wood he used came from the Kell farm.
The same was true once he started crafting his miniature buildings.
"My oldest granddaughter wanted him to build her a dollhouse," Nadean said. "That's what got him started."
His appetite was whetted, "then he started building replicas of all the old houses and the schoolhouses and such like around here," she said.
The first one after his granddaughter's playhouse was the Chapel Hill Methodist Church, just a little ways south of the Kell farm.
Then he got the fever and could turn out a replica house, depending on the detail needed, with a couple of weeks' work, she said.
It was important to Kell that the replicas be true to their history. Some were still around for him to look out.
"Several of the old buildings he remembered, and he'd build them from memory. He'd talk to the old-timers," she said.
Kell, a member of the local historical society who loved local lore, sometimes tracked down family members and old photos to use in his recreations, she said.
"Some of his friends or some of the kids' friends would bring a picture of their old home place and get him to build a copy of it," Kell said. These he would usually build and give away, she said.
A trip around the little storage building is like a historical tour of the county and Dunlap. In the center of the room, an unpainted scene sprawls across two plywood bases ringed by tiny wooden fences and scattered tiny trees.
The scene recalls what Thaxton Kell remembered of the family farm when he was growing up. Robert Kell bought the original farm property in 1814, and it stretched from the Sequatchie Valley floor eastward up the side of Walden's Ridge. Generations of the Kell family worked the land and lived their lives over the decades that followed.
Brothers John and Donald Kell, both of whom were aboard tractors last week working the farm, said they hope their father's collection of tiny buildings can find a home in a museum somewhere.
"Me and my brother had thought about possibly giving it to the state of Tennessee," John Kell said as he and his mother tinkered with an old Victrola phonograph crackling with the strains of "Angelina" by Dick Robertson and Jerry Lay and his Orchestra.
Donald Kell's favorite replica is the old Kell home place, while John's is the Center Point School replica - the same school the boys and their father attended, he said.
The school replica is finished in detail, inside and out, including blackboards, desks and a tiny wood stove.
As Nadean and her sons prowled through the community of replicas and collection of old farm tools and implements in the storage sheds and outbuildings, they frequently referred to handwritten tags that described what each one was and any other information Thaxton Kell knew about the structure or its history.
It seems Kell wanted to make sure everyone who saw his work knew what it was he was preserving: his love of place and whispers of history.
Contact staff writer Ben Benton at bbenton @timesfreepress.com or twitter.com/BenBenton or www.facebook.com/ben.benton1 or 423-757-6569.