The Mabee Homeplace

The first home on this property was the residence of Dr. Oliver D. Mabee, who died in 1896. After the 1925 death of Oliver's daughter-in-law Marie and a subsequent and protracted estate dispute with her siblings, Mrs. Irene Mabee Dickinson of Chicago, the daughter of Oliver's son Charles, gained legal control of the property for a payment of $6,000. Shortly afterward, Mrs. Dickinson demolished the original Mabee home and began construction on the present two story, ten room, fieldstone Tudor Revival cottage, which she first called Castlewood and later RyMabee. The cottage is an exemplary representation of the early twentieth century Tudor Revival, or English Cottage Revival, style. Roads first crossed this narrowest portion of the Cumberland Plateau in the 1840s, and the home stands on what was the earliest east-west post road and later the first turnpike between Nashville and Chattanooga. Interviews with people living in Monteagle in the late 1920s indicate that Alphonse, also known as Scar Face Al, Capone frequented the original 1875 Mabee home while traveling regularly between Chicago and his Florida estate in Miami; pictures reportedly from the late 1920s show Capone in his car being towed up Highway 41 from Pelham after mechanical problems. In the 1950s, the home became a restaurant operated by Clara and Tom Shoemate, and during that time RyMabee was renamed Claramont. In the early 1960s, after Clara Shoemate opened an event facility overlooking Lost Cove in Sewanee, the building reverted to a private residence before reopening in the late 1990s as High Point, again a restaurant in an elegant and historic setting. The home was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.

Monteagle, Tennessee · United States