Exploring the Abandoned Tellico Round House

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About 1956, Doc turned the old Tennessee Rock Products silo structure, an abandoned slate quarry that operated from 1920-1928, into a seven-story house. There was one floor and thus he added six more. He put a staircase around the outside and on the inside. The building became known as the "Roundhouse." Kenneth Saunders operated a restaurant in the building for a few months in 1958. Fire regulations blocked further use of the facility. He and Arminda moved from Coker Creek to the house he built beside the roundhouse about 1957. When he died at age 84 in 1967, he was still practicing medicine in an office which he maintained in the home of his daughter, Helen Rogers Hamilton. The Charles Hall Museum houses the medicine bag he was using when he died. Doc is buried in his native Violet, North Carolina, alongside Arminda.