By Christine Kreyling
As recently as ten years ago, the road passing in front of the Fisketjon home was Parker Branch Creek. “I’ve been told that people just drove up the creek bed to their houses,” says Diana Fisketjon. “Then Williamson County filled in the stream and paved it.”
A paved road is about as urbane as it gets in the fields and hills surrounding the tiny community of Leiper’s Fork. And the rural ambience is what art dealer Diana and her husband Gary, a publisher and editor-at-large with Knopf in New York, love about their vacation home—a welcome respite from the sidewalks of Manhattan.
“You have to understand that Gary grew up on a mink ranch in Salem, Oregon,” Diana explains, “and he hates New York. So now he calls Tennessee home.”
Gary bought the 10-acre spread—with its log house, barn, smokehouse, and caretaker’s cottage—four years ago. He’d come to Nashville for a visit with friend Jay McInerney, whose work he edits along with such authors as Julian Barnes, Richard Ford, and Tom McGuane. Gary liked the open spaces of southwest Williamson County and began to scout property for sale. He found what he was looking for on Parker Branch Road.
Nashville not only provided Gary with a home, but a wife as well. Diana was raised on a farm near Columbus, Mississippi, but she relocated to Nashville in 1993. “We met on the front porch of Jay and Helen [Bransford]’s house,” Diana recalls. “When Gary returned to New York, he sent me a box of books, and that was it.”
Even before moving in, Diana and Gary began researching the history of their homestead, sifting through Williamson County archives and the facts and yarns of the area’s oral tradition. Sometimes the couple discovered physical evidence of the past. “We found the rusty blades from a sawmill lying in the woods,” Diana says. “That tied into what we knew of Mr. Bingham, a cobbler and coffin-maker who lived here in the 19th century. The house original to the site was burned after the Battle of Franklin, and the Binghams lived in the barn while they rebuilt—what’s now the front section of our house—in 1865.”
The site also yielded more basic information. “You can go into the woods and see where the builders got their materials,” Diana says, pointing by way of example to the smoothly worked yellow limestone blocks of the foundation. “It’s a soft stone—when it’s wet you can cut it with a saw. That’s why the stones are squares rather than rough and irregular.”
The chestnut logs of the main house weren’t visible when Gary purchased the farm. “They were covered with yellow siding on the exterior,” Diana says, “and inside with sheet rock—the whole interior was in tacky shape.”
Diana and Gary exposed and re-chinked the logs, carefully treating them with a special resin to refresh the antique patina, which now glows like burnished leather. “Our goal has been to restore the house as much as possible,” Diana says, “while being realistic about modern conveniences. We’re taking it one step at a time. And Gary does lots of the work himself—second-generation-Norwegian work ethic.”
Steps taken include cleaning and refinishing the simple tongue-and-groove board ceilings and exposed beams, hanging paintings by the artists Diana represents on the walls, and installing yards of bookshelves. The furniture is primarily antiques—gleaming mahogany and walnut pieces with claw feet and intricate detailing. “All this furniture I already had—I’d collected 19th-century American decorative arts even before I met Gary,” Diana explains. “The Federal style tends to be more formal than this house, but because it’s from roughly the same period, I think it works.”
Upstairs the couple pushed dormers out from the roof to bring in light, converted a closet into an office for Diana, and installed a large desk in one bedroom for Gary, who still line-edits manuscripts the old-fashioned way—pen on paper—at the rate of five pages an hour.
The section that was added on to the Binghams’ log house—a wing which includes a dining and sitting area and the kitchen—is a project for the future. “In the summer, when we have guests, we eat on the side lawn,” Diana says. Resting on saw horses is a massive 12-foot slab of chestnut that the couple found lying in the barn. They plan on making it into a table.
“Writers love visiting us, especially Europeans,” Diana says. “They feel when they’re here that they’re seeing the real America.”
“Writers love visiting us, especially Europeans,” Diana says. “They feel when they’re here that they’re seeing the real America.”
