Dennis Jackson says he isn’t quite sure why he embarked on a two-year building project to duplicate in miniature the home in which his mother spent part of her youth and his father proposed.

“The only thing we got to remember our grandparents by was a vase, and once when we were moving I broke the vase,” said Jackson. “So I made this house to remember them by. Anyone around Elkmont would recognize this house. It was there for so long.”

The home Dennis built, complete with tin roof and smokehouse, has become a three-dimensional memory book for his parents, Josephine and Charles Jackson, and extended family and was the center of attention at a recent family reunion where his parents and cousins shared their remembrances of the house on Upper Fort Hampton Road.

The original structure, which no longer stands, was owned by spinster school teacher sisters Alma and Lucy Lovelace when Ira “Pete” Hogan and Elizabeth Hogan moved into the house a mile east of Lock’s Crossroads with four of their five children in 1948. The elder daughter, Margie Satterfield, had already married.

The household consisted of the elder Hogans and their children Edward, James, Josephine and A.D.

Although Dennis, a computer specialist with Comcast, had never built anything before and he knew nothing of scale, he used a photo to judge proportions of the clapboard house. The result is an amazingly detailed structure built roughly on a scale of a half-inch to one foot.

The little house has unleashed a flood of memories for Josephine, who lived in the house just two years before Charles proposed in the parlor in front of the big fireplace.

“This is where I slept,” said Josephine pointing through a window of a back wing. “My sister called that room ‘Old Haunty.’ In the winter it would get so cold that I’d have to sleep with four quilts. They were so heavy, I couldn’t even roll over.”

The house was heated by the big stone fireplace in the front parlor and by a wood heater in the opposite end of the house.

“Daddy would chop wood and stack it on the front porch,” said Josephine pointing behind the white porch columns and to the opposite end where a miniature swing hangs. “They’d throw in the wood and they the house would get so hot they’d have to open all the doors and windows to cool it off,” said Charles.

Charles said when he and Josephine began courting in the late 40’s dates consisted of talking on the couch in front of the fireplace with chaperoning parents never out of earshot.

“Or else we’d go to church,” said Josephine. “That was the only place to go in those days.”

Charles proposed to Josephine as the two sat on the couch one evening and they were married in 1950.

“We were rich,” said Charles. “She had a bale of cotton and I had a bale of cotton, each worth $100. We bought some used furniture and still lived on the rest for a year.”

Josephine said some of her most joyous memories were of Christmas in the old house.