The House of Isham Thompson by Lonnie Jones

 Seen here is the home of Isham Thompson, Ashe County's last Civil War veteran.

There was a house in Grassy Creek that recently went the way of so many homes in the United States. Built originally as a log cabin around 1810, then enlarged around 1890 into a large two-story family home built as an I-house, this was the home of Isham Thompson, Ashe County’s last living Civil War veteran, who died in 1940. The home has been taken down to take the original log cabin and chimney out to build a more modern cabin home. I am sure a very nice home has been built using this material and that the original materials were carefully preserved, making something beautiful and useful. But something old and beautiful went, likely something hard to preserve, but still gone. Mr. Thompson owned and farmed about 400 acres of land and was a successful farmer and merchant. He was a director of the First National Bank for many years. He was married twice, first to Lucretia Simmons and second to Alice Eller. The home is included in the Ashe County Architectural Survey Book, and there is a complete description of the home in that book. It is described architecturally in detail. My parents lived in this house as renters in the late 1960s. I was away at Berea College during this time and was here only for some summer months. The home has an immense front porch and a small side porch. There was a springhouse with a large stone hollowed out to catch water in. The upstairs rooms had lower ceilings than the rooms downstairs. My good friend Jack Young did a video and a series of photos of this home and gave me copies of those, which are on file at the Museum of Ashe County History, and they tell the story of the home by interviewing some members of the family of Mr. Thompson. We Americans could do a better job of preserving some of our older homes and buildings by taking a lesson from Europeans. They do a better job of preservation than we do. The Town of Jefferson is another perfect example, as only a handful of original homes and buildings actually still exist. This has information taken from the Ashe County Architectural Survey Book published by the Ashe County Historical Society and available at the Museum of Ashe County History Gift Shop.