The Daily Dispatch: October 7, 1863., [Electronic resource]

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East Tennessee Items.

--Rev. Mr. Verner, of Blount county, East Tennessee, arrived in Atlanta, Ga., on Saturday. He states that the whole Federal force in East Tennessee does not exceed 10,000 men. They are fortifying Knoxville, are buying all the wheat at one dollar per bushel, and are contracting for all the pork. They only leave wheat to sow and meat enough to subsist each family, they being judges. No depredations have been committed, except that the negroes have all gone to work on the fortifications. The Rev. Messrs. Martin and Harrison are not now in jail. Athens is again in the hands of the Federals. He saw a few Yankee soldiers there. They are organizing home guards, and where a man will enlist they pay him $402 bounty.

The Federal invaders have burned the famed residence of Dr. J. G. M. Ramsey, near Knoxville. The greater portion of the house was built during the last decade of the last century. Much of its furniture was made in Europe, and the library destroyed was invaluable. Books, and papers, and manuscripts, of the colonial days of North Carolina, had been carefully collected through a long life of patient research and industry by Dr. Ramsey. The manuscript copy of the second volume of the Annals of Tennessee has been destroyed, and with it a large collection of autograph letters from all the leading men of the South.