Are you looking for a pre-World War II home in Sequoyah Hills with quality features of old, but are not quite ready for dealing with owning a showcase property there?
Or maybe you are having trouble finding an ideal home to purchase.
Well, a European-style stucco home at 4039 Kingston Pike, or at least part of it, was for lease as of April 13 instead of being for sale as is often the case with such classic Sequoyah Hills area properties. Two floors of the home − featuring three bedrooms and 1.5 baths and totaling 2,111 square feet − are being leased by Wallace Property Management for $2,700 a month.
A lower-level area there has been used for storage, but Wallace official Tammy Mills said the other main apartment on the west end of the home will in the near future be available, too. It is two stories with a full finished basement and sunroom. Featuring four bedrooms and two baths, it will lease for $3,200 a month.
Photographs online show an updated home with hardwood floors in numerous rooms, vintage arched interior passageways, a nice side portico, a sunroom, and checkerboard tile flooring in the kitchen.
More:See inside Fountain City’s Dempster mansion, rescued from the ‘Fragile 15’ and for sale
“And it backs up to the Forest Glen area behind Kingston Pike and Western Plaza,” said Joyce Z. Tapscott of Wallace Real Estate. “You can park in the back or (near) the street.”
Tapscott said the structure was lived in for decades beginning in the 1950s by John Rebori, a TVA executive, and his family. It is still owned by a Rebori family-connected LLC firm, according to records.
While people generally think of Sequoyah Hills and Bearden residences as being owned instead of rented, she said the 37919 ZIP code actually has 19 residential properties available for renting as of the second week in April. She said that ranges from a Sequoyah Square condominium of two bedrooms and two baths for $1,860 a month to a home in the Forest Brook area for $2,950 a month. So the Kingston Pike home is considered competitively priced for the market.
And part of the reason for a few showcase properties being leased is that the market in some areas of this part of Knoxville for homes for purchase is still not very plentiful. Tapscott said in the immediate Fort Sanders area, only one condominium is for sale, and downtown, only two are available. And in the 37919 zone, only 33 total properties are for sale. “There’s nothing to buy,” she said.
A burgeoning University of Tennessee student population looking for more off-campus housing in the nearby area is also affecting the market, with Core Spaces of Chicago building numerous student apartments along Cumberland Avenue. As another example, an early 20th century bungalow home on Kingston Pike on the east side of Second Presbyterian Church was bought by a private family a year ago with plans to lease to students, Tapscott said.
History of the Kingston Pike home
While slightly hidden to those zooming down busy Kingston Pike, the home at 4039 Kingston Pike is a historical showplace. A glance at some of the old city directories at the McClung Historical Collection downtown shows that it dates to at least the 1930s, and early on apparently already had an apartment available, with two families often listed as living there.
An early continuous owner when the home was listed as being at 3457 Kingston Pike was the H.A. Mosby family, with the husband a representative for Strong-Robinette Bag Co. and wife Rubye a manager of Appalachian Loan Co. Among those who lived in an adjoining apartment during the 1930s and ‘40s were freight agent A.E. Mann, stove maker sales manager W.P. Simmons, TVA designer George Morgan, and clothier John H. Daniel.
H.H. Knies, the vice president and cashier with Hamilton National Bank, had become the main resident by the late 1940s. In the mid-1950s, Liberty National Insurance Co. manager C.A. Holbrook and J.C. Bradford representative H.S. Lipscomb and their families lived there.
At the time the Rebori family moved into it in the mid-to-late 1950s, John Rebori was listed as an administrative analyst with TVA. He died in 2003 at the age of 90, but the 2014 obituary of his wife, Maria, age 89, details the family’s deep Italian roots.
She was born in the Genoa, Italy, area and had survived the World War II fighting in her country, it said. She had met John Rebori, a first-generation American and World War II veteran, in 1947 while he was visiting Italy. They were married in 1950 and had four children.
It also said they had traveled and served in the Dominican Republic and Zimbabwe as part of his volunteer work with the International Executive Service Corps in retirement.
Beginning about 1970, the apartment must have gone into use again, as fellow dwellers included lawyer E.P. Bailey, early cable television official J.C. Norcutt, Nancy Estes, Elizabeth Greeley, Barbara Schmidt, James and Jo Mason, and John Holmes III, the directories say.
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