Horace Burgess's 97-Foot Treehouse -- 80 Rooms, 14 Years, Half a Million Nails

Crossville, Tennessee landscaper Horace Burgess started building a treehouse in 1993 after he says God told him to in a vision. He did not stop for 14 years. The result was a 97-foot-tall, 10-story wooden structure supported by a living 80-foot white oak tree and six additional oaks, covering roughly 10,000 square feet across 80 rooms. Burgess drove 258,000 nails with a nail gun and another 500 pounds of penny nails by hand, using mostly reclaimed lumber scavenged from construction sites, old barns, and donations. The structure included a church sanctuary on the third floor that doubled as a basketball court, where Burgess personally officiated 23 weddings over the years. Spiral staircases wound through the floors, and the view from the top looked out over the Cumberland Plateau. The treehouse became a regional landmark and tourist attraction, drawing thousands of visitors who could not believe what one man with a hammer and a vision had built among the trees. The state fire marshal closed it to the public in 2012 due to safety concerns, and on October 22, 2019, the entire structure burned to the ground in just 15 minutes -- a devastating end to what was almost certainly the largest treehouse ever built by a single person in the history of the world.