Brigadier General Nathaniel Taylor, a War of 1812 commander and prominent early Elizabethton settler, began building this two-story Federal-style mansion between 1814 and 1816; after his death in 1816 his widow, Mary “Polly” Patton Taylor, completed construction around 1818 to 1820 and presided over the property until her own death in 1853. The home served as both a family residence and the headquarters of a substantial agricultural estate worked by enslaved laborers, roughly twenty of whom Taylor owned at the time of his death, making the site a center of plantation-style operations on the Tennessee frontier rather than a purely defensive or commercial structure. The Taylor family remained politically prominent for generations; descendants included U.S. Representative Nathaniel Green Taylor and his sons Robert Love Taylor and Alfred A. Taylor, both of whom later served as Tennessee governors. The family retained ownership of Sabine Hill until 1947, though the house passed out of direct family residence earlier in its history and later saw a succession of private owners, coming close to demolition by 2007. That year the Tennessee Historical Commission purchased the property, undertook restoration, and opened it to the public on November 1, 2017, as a unit of Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park, where it now interprets early-19th-century plantation life, including the labor of the enslaved people who sustained the household and estate.