The Land Nobody Would Sell: 100 Years, Two Families, and 56 Acres Just Minutes from Downtown Franklin

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  May 24, 2026

Some properties have a history. This one has a story.

At 1817 Lakeside Drive in Franklin, North Carolina, 56 acres of rolling hardwood timber, mountain views, and a branch-fed hollow sit just a short drive from Main Street. The land fronts a paved state road, carries no deed restrictions, and overlooks one of the most quietly beautiful corners of Macon County. It is the kind of property that developers would have circled for decades.

None of them ever got it.

In more than 80 years of recorded ownership, this land has passed through just two family lines. It has never been listed. Never marketed publicly. Never sold on the open market. Until now.

Franklin's First Fire Chief

The story begins with an immigrant.

Joseph Nissar Ashear arrived in Franklin around 1904, at age 18, traveling from Syria with little more than goods to sell in the mountain communities of Western North Carolina. It was a path taken by many Syrian and Lebanese immigrants of that era, moving through the rural South as peddlers and merchants, building relationships in towns where they would eventually settle.

Franklin is where Joseph Ashear stayed.

He opened a department store on Main Street that ran for decades. He joined the Rotary Club. He became a member of the Woodmen of the World. And according to local records, he became Franklin's first organized fire chief, helping build the town's earliest fire protection from the ground up. By 1938, county tax records show him holding over 150 acres across two townships in Macon County, one of the larger private land portfolios on the published rolls that year.

One of those holdings was the tract that would become 1817 Lakeside Drive.

When Joseph Ashear sold that parcel to Lambert Leopard in June of 1944, he was 57 years old and winding down a remarkable American life. He died in Franklin in 1967, having never left the town he arrived in as a teenage traveler six decades before.

The Angel Name

The adjacent parcel had its own deep roots.

Mollie Angel, a widow, held nearly 50 acres in Franklin Township through at least 1938. The Angel family is one of the oldest and most prominent in Macon County history. Dr. Furman Angel, a Franklin native, opened the county's first hospital in 1923. His brother Dr. Edgar Angel joined him in 1932. What they built became Angel Medical Center, still serving the community today, more than a century after that first four-bed facility opened on Palmer Street.

Whether Mollie Angel was a direct relation to the founding medical family is not confirmed in available records. What is confirmed is that she held this ground for years as a widow, and in July of 1953 she conveyed it to Lambert Leopard, completing the assembly of what became the Leopard family homestead.

Nine Years in the Making

Lambert Leopard was a patient man.

He acquired the Ashear tract in 1944. He waited nine more years before the Angel parcel became available. When it did, he bought it and combined the two into a single holding along Lake Emory Road, outside of Franklin's growing downtown but close enough to stay connected to it. He and his wife Allie, born Allie Bryson, raised eight children in Franklin while holding onto the land through the postwar years and into the next decade.

In 1965, Lambert and Allie transferred both tracts to their son Harrison. No money changed hands. It was a family conveyance, land passed down the way families in mountain communities have always passed land down.

The Man Who Served on a Carrier and Worked on the Bomb

Harrison W. Leopard was born in 1934 in Walnut Creek, North Carolina, in Madison County, just north of the county line. He joined the United States Navy and served aboard the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of the first aircraft carriers commissioned in the postwar American fleet.

After his service, Harrison moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He went to work at the Y-12 National Security Complex, the facility that had processed uranium-235 for the Manhattan Project's Little Boy device in 1945. Y-12 drew workers from across Appalachia, and Harrison was among the mountain men who spent careers inside one of the most historically significant industrial sites in American history. He later retired from Delta Airlines after 28 years as a quality assurance inspector.

Throughout all of it, Harrison kept coming back to Franklin.

His family described him as happiest at the Lakeside Drive homestead. He and his family held annual reunions on the land, a tradition that continued for decades. He never sold it. He never listed it. He held it until his death in January 2018 at age 83.

The property remained in his name, managed by his stepfamily in Oak Ridge, until the heirs made the decision to let it go.

What It Is Today

Fifty-six acres off Lake Emory Road, less than ten minutes from downtown Franklin's Main Street, from Lazy Hiker Brewing, from the Little Tennessee River Greenway, from the Franklin Gem and Mineral Museum. Rolling hardwood timber. A branch running through the property. Partial clearings with year-round mountain views. Paved state road frontage with overhead electric in place. Fiber optic internet available. No deed restrictions. No HOA. A house on the property conveys as-is.

The county assesses the land at just over $949,000. It is listed at $1,800,000.

For the right buyer, the numbers matter. But so does what they are buying. This is not a parcel that went through three developers and two bankruptcy proceedings before landing on a search portal. This is land that a Syrian immigrant held as part of a civic life in a mountain town. Land that a widow from one of Macon County's oldest families quietly held for years. Land that a Navy veteran and nuclear-era defense worker returned to every summer for decades because it was where he felt most at home.

Eighty-two years. Two families. One decision.

For the first time in its recorded history, 1817 Lakeside Drive is available.

*Interested in learning more? Contact the Jon Tharp Team at Keller Williams Realty of Franklin: (828) 200-7004 or tharp.broker@gmail.com.*