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.