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The People Who Lived on the Land that is Now Redstone Arsenal, page 356
In reviewing all the records and articles written about the Lee House, it became apparent that authors' main source of historical information about the land, the structures, and the people who had lived there prior to 1920 was the article written and published in 1931 by Pat Jones. Pat Jones researched and wrote about historic homes in Madison County. His articles were published in The Huntsville Times. The Heritage Room in the Madison County Public Library in Huntsville has photocopied each of the articles and put the collection in notebooks, which are presented as two volumes. The article Pat Jones wrote about the Lee house is provided verbatim: PT _____________________________________________________________"? “The Lee Home,” The Huntsville Times, March 5, 1933, p. 4. Written by Pat Jones The Lee Home A Z-shaped dwelling in two sections, of different ages, wrapped around an Irish woman with a business tendency, and distinguished by the most beautiful circular stairway in Madison County??"all of this comes to light in a review of the Col. H. H. Lee home, for the last 15 years the residence of Joseph B. Harris, situated near the Tennessee river four miles west of Whitesburg. Tall cedars and two of the largest pecan trees in the South, which have borne for more than 60 years, shade the home, forming a gradual contour from the hundreds of fertile acres of river bottomland surrounding. Two rooms of the mansion, both of brick and forming the lower part of the Z, were built soon after 1818, and were followed nearly 25 years later by the others, built of substantial frame material. Land Entered by Cooper The quarter section of land, on which this home was erected was entered in 1818 by James Cooper. This was choice acreage, and included some of the best farming soil in the county, all in the center of what is now known as Pond Beat, a name gained from the number of tiny ponds formed by floods when the river is high. His neighbors were scarce, but he was not many minutes' ride from Ditto's landing, the import and export center for this section during the early years of the century. With bricks hauled from the landing, where they had been brought by boat from Chattanooga or some other point, Cooper erected a small two-story building, the beginning of the present mansion. This was to be his home and that of his bride, Charity Cooper, born in 1801, the daughter of 356 - (4389)