Thomas Hope

Thomas Hope (December 25, 1757 – October 4, 1820) was an English-born American architect and house joiner, active primarily in Knoxville, Tennessee, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Trained in London, Hope moved to Knoxville in 1795, where he designed and built several of the city's earliest houses. At least two houses built by Hope— the Ramsey House (1797) in East Knoxville and Statesview (ca. 1806) in West Knoxville— are still standing, and have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Biography Hope was born in Kent, England, in 1757, and learned the house construction trade in London. During the 1780s, he moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where he had been hired to build a house for South Carolina planter Ralph Izard. This house stood on Broad Street in Charleston for several decades. During the early 1790s, Hope lived in Cheraw, South Carolina, where he married his wife, Elizabeth Large, in 1793. Hope then moved to Knoxville, which at the time was the capital of the Southwest Territory, in 1795. Hope's first project in Knoxville was the Ramsey House, or Swan Pond, a two-story Georgian-style house completed in 1797. Hope found ample work in Knoxville, a burgeoning frontier town in need of professional builders. In the decade after completing the Ramsey House, Hope built a residence known as "Trafalgar" for planter John Kain, overlooking the Holston River in Knox County. Around 1806, Hope completed the Federal-style Statesview for surveyor Charles McClung in what is now West Knoxville. In 1812, Hope built a house, later known as "Maison de Sante," for Knoxville physician Joseph C. Strong, which stood at the corner of State Street and Cumberland Avenue. In addition to house construction, Hope co-founded a carpenters' guild in Knoxville in 1801. The original design of the James Park House in Knoxville, built in approximately 1812, is sometimes attributed to Hope. In 1816, Hope received several payments from Thomas Humes (1767–1816), builder of the Lamar House Hotel, suggesting that Hope may have played a role in the hotel's original design (although there is little else to support this). Hope's last project was the original Rotherwood Mansion, built for Presbyterian clergyman Frederick Augustus Ross in what is now Kingsport, Tennessee. After Hope's death in 1820, his son oversaw Rotherwood's completion.