The Dempsey Massengale Jr. family lived on this ridgetop just south of present-day Rugby from the 1860s to the early 1900s. Deed records indicate that Dempsey bought a 50-acre tract in north Morgan County from his father on December 17, 1858, likely this property, and his name first appears in the Morgan County census in 1860 after moving from Smoky Junction in nearby Scott County at an unknown date. The family cabin faced an early 19th century trace later named Allerton Road, and the site appears to have been a terrace farmstead with the cabin on the ridge top and fields, pastures, orchards, and woodlands descending toward Cox and Whaley Branches. Family research and Appalachian practice suggest associated buildings such as a smokehouse, chicken house, corn crib, stock pens, and equipment sheds. Stone chimney remains are the only visible evidence of the cabin today. Students from the University of Tennessee and Rugby community volunteers, directed by Dr. Charles Faulkner and Kim Pyszka, conducted archaeological testing to locate the cabin, determine its dimensions, map the site, and recover material culture left by the family, and sandstone now marks the cabin's corners. Research indicates that in the mid-1880s, during Rugby's early years, Elizabeth Massengale and her husband Dempsey Massengale Jr. were living here with grandchildren Henry and George Massengale and Elizabeth's widowed sister Mary Lowe. Their cabin and snake or zibzag fencing were based on a historic watercolor painted in 1887 by Mrs. Tom Taylor while she and her daughter Lucy were visiting Rugby and the Hughes family. Like many Appalachian mountain men, Uncle Dempsey was known for telling tall tales, some later documented by Edith Walton. The Massengales were part of an earlier wave of primarily Scots-Irish-English families who had settled the remote Cumberland Plateau by the early 1800s and lived largely off the land through farming, livestock raising, making what they needed, hunting game, and gathering natural foods and herbs. Much of what is known about the family came from Uncle Dempsey's great-grandson, Lummy Massengale, who served as the model for a depiction of him because no photographs of Dempsey have been found.