The High Street was laid out with long, narrow burgage plots running off it. Over time, access lanes developed between and through these plots—the ancestors of the closes we recognize today. The closes grew organically as medieval property behind the High Street was divided, occupied, and increasingly built upon.

But the stone buildings and stairs are much later. The west-side excavation uncovered a tenement built in the late 1500s, complete with cellar floors, a corbelled cellar roof, and a turnpike stairwell—a spiral stair contained within the building. Archaeologists date that stair as part of the late-16th-century tenement complex. It wasn’t originally the big open flight of steps we experience today; it was part of the house itself.

Among the children of Robert Carruthers Sr. and Margaret Gillespie, none leaves a clearer documentary trail than Robert Carruthers Jr. (1763-1828).

Follow his life from Revolutionary North Carolina through early Tennessee using military records, federal censuses, migration evidence, and probate proceedings that preserve one of the family's best-documented frontier stories.