If walls could talk, the walls of the Rankin House in Dunlap, Tenn., would tell a lot of history. Some good, some not.
A.J. "Andy" Jones has spent the last two years redoing Dunlap's oldest home, built in 1852.
In the process, he's found a photo he thinks could be a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant in a drawer made in a beam, old medicine bottles in the hollowed trunk of a mulberry tree, a rusted gun and a bayonet in the spring once known as Coop's Creek, and a rubbed stone used in an Indian game.
"A lot of people call it junk. I call it a gift," Jones said.
William Rankin, a wealthy farmer in the Sequatchie Valley, built the house and the slave quarters then adjoining it.
Dunlap historian Carson Camp said the house has not been added to the National Register of Historic Places because owners and prospective owners before never thought it could be restored for a reasonable amount of money.
A musician and builder, Mr. Jones, however, thought differently, and he has spent much of his own time and money redoing the home with an eye perhaps toward making it a bed and breakfast.
"But I'm not trying to make it original," Jones said. "Sometimes original is just not practical."
Rankin built the house five years before Sequatchie County was formed by an act of the General Assembly of Tennessee. In 1958, Coop's Creek, as the town was called, was renamed Dunlap for William Dunlap, one of the legislators who supported the formation of the county.
Rankin, who sold the new county court 40 acres for the town, was appointed the county's first sheriff. He also was a banker and owned a sawmill.
Camp has a portrait of Rankins' slaves in a group shot, regal and well-dressed, shortly before the war.
When the Civil War came, Rankin, a Confederate, left the house, Camp said. But the Union army took possession of the home and, he believes, used it as a headquarters and, later, as a hospital.
"I know it was used as a headquarters in the Civil War, but we've never been able to document it," Camp said. "The soldiers who wrote reports never once said 'Rankin House,' probably because the Rankins had left during the war. In their reports, the soldiers just called it the house or headquarters."
Camp said he hasn't seen the photo that Jones thinks may be Grant, though he would like to.
Jones said the photo is being studied by experts now for authentication.
Town and valley lore long has noted the house was used as a war hospital.
That seems plausible to Jones, who found dozens of morphine and medicine bottles in a tree that had a hollow in it and was blown over by a storm.
Additional town and family lore from a descendant of Rankin tells of a Union soldier who, perhaps after a bout of drinking, tried to ride his horse into the house and up the stairs.
He was shot and killed on the stairway.
Camp said the last Rankin descendant who owned the house asked him to take pictures of what she told him was a recurring blood stain.
Jones, a Floridian, said he thinks the house has ghosts. New lights in the house have a way of turning off all by themselves, he said. And there are plenty of strange noises.
But Jones says he can live with the home's spiritual occupants. He loves the home's history, and he's fallen in love with Dunlap.
"I think maybe I've stirred them up making changes," he said with a grin.
Contact Pam Sohn at psohn@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6346.