MOSHEIM — Lyle Carrigan, 71, retired from driving a feed truck, bought a hymnal for a dollar at an estate sale in Greeneville in August, and in the flyleaf was a tax receipt from the State of Franklin dated 1788. It is stamped “received, pending” against forty-one deerskins.
Carrigan took it to the Greene County trustee’s office last week. He said he only wanted to know where he’d stand, because his brother has their father’s place and is about to sell the bottom down by the creek, and a title company is going to ask.
“I told the lady I don’t have the deerskins and I wouldn’t know what they run,” Carrigan said. “I just didn’t want it coming up at the closing. My brother’s already nervous about where the creek line is.”
The clerk, Donna Ricker, moved her purse off the chair so he could sit, then looked up the name on her screen and in a ledger from the lower shelf. The county had nothing under Carrigan or under Franklin, and its codes for “pending” stop at ninety days.
“That’s a good stamp,” Ricker said. “Hang onto it. I wrote your name down in case somebody calls.”
Carrigan put the receipt back in the hymnal, at “Come Thou Fount,” and the trustee’s office kept a photocopy.