LIVING HISTORY
GREGORY ENNS
37
The farmhouse at Tellico was built in 1870. When TL and Jo Ann Sloan purchased the house in 1970, it had no electricity or running water.
ROBERTSON FAMILY ARCHIVES
TL Sloan and Leighton Longstreet, granddaughter of Diane Robertson, try
the fishing at Tellico Trout Farm in 1987.
ROBERTSON FAMILY ARCHIVES
TL Sloan looks over the raceways he designed for his trout farm outside
Franklin, North Carolina. The farm opened in 1987.
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At first, Debra is brought in to manage the farm and she is
eventually hired to manage the business. She tries to work
with TL to develop a budget for the farm. “He said, ‘You know,
I’ve never learned how to live on one of those,’’ she remembers
her father telling her. “I thought, ‘Boy, I’m in trouble.’ ”
TL and Jo Ann build a house on the property for Debra,
which she later purchases from their corporation, Macon
County Investments, the technical owner of the farm.
TL would make occasional visits from Fort Pierce to check
on the farm. Sometimes he would bring Diane and her children
and grandchildren, with Jo Ann always a gracious hostess.
Sally Richeson, a friend of Jo Ann’s from Fort Pierce, says Jo
Ann would handle her personal issues such as her husband
taking up with another woman and her financial setbacks in
the same way.
“She was stoic,’’ says Sally, who also has a home in North
Carolina and would visit Jo Ann at Tellico. “It was like you
can just keep on kicking me, but I’m not going to give in. She
wouldn’t cry. I never saw her show any emotion. She would
just smile and carry on. She just bore up. Maybe losing your
parents at an early age and being raised by elderly grandparents
gave her some different backbone, I don’t know.’’
Besides Debra joining her mother at Tellico, Kathy’s four
daughters also begin living there, after Jo Ann gets custody