The Ramsey Plantation reflects the experience of a Confederate family in Unionist East Tennessee. The family supported secession and owned two thousand acres and four to eight slaves. Born here in 1797, James Gettys McGready Ramsey became one of Tennessee's foremost early historians and wrote Annals of Tennessee. At his nearby house, Mecklenburg, he kept many important artifacts and documents until Federal troops burned it, destroying his library and a large quantity of Tennessee historical papers. During the war, Ramsey accompanied Confederate armies as a surgeon and also served as tax collector and disbursing officer for Tennessee's Confederate government, disbursing approximately $43 million from the state treasury. When the war ended, he had just $42 in personal funds. Ramsey and his wife, Margaret, fled to South Carolina in 1863. Their daughter Charlotte died of typhus while gathering hospital supplies for the Confederacy. Their teenage daughter, Sue, was exiled from Knoxville for “disloyal” acts, including making Confederate flags and insulting Union soldiers. All five sons fought for the Confederacy. The youngest, Arthur, was wounded at the Battle of Piedmont, Virginia, in 1864 and died in captivity. Alex and Robert were captured at Piedmont, and Alex was imprisoned at Camp Morton, Indiana. Ramsey's half-brothers, John Ramsey and Frank A. Ramsey, served respectively as a soldier and a surgeon, and almost forty of his area relations appeared on Confederate rosters. James G.M. Ramsey died in 1884 and was buried at nearby Lebanon in the Fork Presbyterian Church Cemetery. Constructed about 1797 for Francis A. Ramsey, the late-Georgian house has a central-passage plan on both floors. Ramsey's eldest son, William B.A. Ramsey, inherited it in 1820 after his father's death, sold it in 1840 to his brother James G.A. Ramsey, and James later gave it to his son Francis A. Ramsey as a wedding present in 1857. In 1952, the Knoxville Chapter of the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities purchased the house from a subsequent owner and began restoring it. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1969.