Ramsey House (Knox County, Tennessee)

Ramsey House
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
The Ramsey House
Location	SE of Knoxville on Thorngrove Pike
Nearest city	Knoxville, Tennessee
Coordinates	35°58′00″N 83°49′24″W / 35.9667°N 83.8232°W / 35.9667; -83.8232
Built	1797
Architect	Thomas Hope
NRHP reference No.	69000180
Added to NRHP	December 23, 1969

The Ramsey House is a two-story stone house in Knox County, Tennessee, United States. Also known as Swan Pond, the house was constructed in 1797 by English architect Thomas Hope for Colonel Francis Alexander Ramsey (1764–1820), whose family operated a plantation at the site until the U.S. Civil War.^[1] In 1969, the house was added to the National Register of Historic Places for its architecture and its role in the region's early 19th-century history.

Francis Alexander Ramsey arrived in what is now Greene County in 1783, and shortly thereafter made a surveying trip down the Holston River, where he first identified the future site of the Ramsey House. Throughout the 1780s, he served as an official of the fledgling State of Franklin, and later served in various capacities in the governments of the Southwest Territory and the State of Tennessee.^[2] Ramsey's children included early Knoxville mayor, W. B. A. Ramsey, and early Tennessee historian and businessman, J. G. M. Ramsey, both of whom occupied the Ramsey House at various times. Due to their Confederate sympathies, the Ramseys fled Knoxville when the Union Army occupied the city during the Civil War,^[3] and the family sold the house in 1866.

The Knoxville Chapter of the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities (APTA) purchased the Ramsey House in 1952,^[2] and currently maintains the house and grounds as a museum.