Sunnyside was the name of the huge white frame house of Pleasant Miller, located on Cumberland Avenue and razed to allow construction of the Jessie Harris Building. The house is thought to have been an expansion of an earlier log house built by Governor William Blount’s half-brother, Willie, who served as governor of Tennessee. Pleasant Miller, who served in Congress from 1809 to 1811 and represented Knox County in the Tennessee legislature from 1920 to 1922, purchased the property in 1810. Following her mother’s death in 1802, Barbara Blount became the ward of Pleasant Miller, who had married her sister Mary Louisa, and lived at Sunnyside after his purchase of it. Blount was married at Sunnyside in 1815.
When the Millers moved to Jackson in 1824, Solomon Jacobs, mayor of Knoxville in 1834–35 and a member of the East Tennessee College Board of Trustees, purchased the house and surrounding property. In 1840 the house and property were purchased by Hugh A. M. White, son of Moses White, an early historian of UT. One of his 11 children, Margaret Christie White, inherited the house and grounds following White’s death in 1860. She continued to live in the house, taking care of her younger sisters. One of her sisters, Lucie Graham White, married Thomas Rodgers in 1872, and the Rodgers acquired the property in 1902.
The Rodgers sold a considerable amount of the property but retained the house and its immediate grounds—the entire block occupied by the Jessie Harris Building. When Thomas Rodgers died in 1916, he left the house and its grounds to his wife, who died in 1920. UT acquired the house and land, which covered an entire square on Cumberland Avenue (300 feet on Cumberland, 300 feet on White Avenue, and 325 feet on Fourth and Fifth Streets) in March 1920 for $40,000 from Mr. C. M. Rodgers, representing the Rodgers estate. The property was acquired to obtain land to build women’s dormitories.