Tipton Place

Tipton Place is a 2.2-acre Cades Cove homestead with a two-story cabin, a cantilever barn and farm outbuildings. It sits between Dan Lawson Place and Carter Shields Cabin, on the exit side of the 11-mile, one-way Cades Cove Loop Road. Stop for a close look at the buildings and the family lives they represent. Plan it as part of the loop drive; you reach it late in the one-way circuit.

Colonel Hamp Tipton built the two-story house in the 1870s. Its two front doors served separate rooms: one opened to a living room with a fireplace and stairs to the sleeping loft, the other to the main bedroom. The rear room was the kitchen. Two close-set holes in its wall mark where a telephone once connected the house with the blacksmith shop and a store across the road.

The cantilever barn now standing here was reconstructed in 1968. Its overhanging upper level stored hay, while the space below sheltered livestock and equipment from the weather. A double-pen corn crib, blacksmith shop, smokehouse, woodshed and bee apiary show how much work was packed into this homestead. The bee gums were hollowed trunks of blackgum trees, used as beehives.

William “Fighting Billy” Tipton received a 640-acre land grant in the 1820s, but never lived in Cades Cove. He became the valley’s first recorded legal landowner and sold parts of the land to relatives, including his grandson Hamp. Hamp’s daughters Lucy and Lizzie lived here into adulthood and taught school in the cove. After Hamp died in 1895, Reverend William H. Oliver bought the estate; the Oliver family stayed until the land was acquired for the park in 1931. That is the story behind the Tipton-Oliver name.

The buildings are a selected slice of cove life, not every structure that ever stood here. Later additions and several buildings, including a springhouse, an apple-drying house and a post-1900 barn, were removed to preserve a particular historical period. For a photo that explains the place, include the cabin’s low addition or another farm building in the frame instead of isolating one log wall.