This house was built by "Willy" Tomlinson, Mr. Tomlinson's son, in 1867. The lease was first in the name of a Mr. Leffler, but like so many, he apparently never built here.
The information in the write up of this house in Purple Sewanee, page 137, by Marstan Chapman was gathered mainly from Miss May DuBose.
Bishop Boone, the first Missionary bishop from America who had worked in China, took the lease in 1890. He planted a row of trees in front of it "to protect it from the noise and dust of traffic" of the road. It was he who named it Wyndcliff Hall as he said it was on the highest point in Sewanee and very windy.
Bishop Schereschevky who had been forced to retire from the mission field in China because of his health, was a guest here and it is supposed that he did at least a part of his translation of the bible in to Chinese while he was in Sewanee.
However, Miss Harrison took the house in 1891 so this couldn't have been a very long visit.
Miss Harrison took boarders as did Miss Douglas who succeeded her in a few years. Miss Douglas also had a small school as Mrs. Bratton says she went to school there with 12 little girls. While Miss Douglas had the house there were various young people, relatives of hers, who lived there too, or visited her.
The house had been empty several years and was in a sad state as Mary Chapman describes. She and her husband took it in 1926.
She was a writer, Mary Isley Chapman, her father was a clergyman who had lived here once. She took her husband's name, Stanton, and combined it with hers to get Maristan for a pen name as he helped her with her books. She wrote "Home Place", a book about mountaineers which was taken by the Book of the Month Club. After she'd been quite hard up on the Mountain her neighbors rejoiced when she invested in a lot of clothes and went to New York for a party given by her publishers. She has written many children's books since then and has now moved to California.
Mr. and Mrs. R.L. Bratton bought the house in 1933. Cindy and Bran Potter eventually bought the house in 1987 and undertook extensive renovations to it.
Gailor, C. (1970). Old Sewanee Houses; The First Fifty-Years, 1860-1910. Unpublished manuscript, Sewanee: The University of the South, Sewanee.
