The Hermitage, photo by Mike Rutherford for Nashville CVB
Far from the honky tonks, set on sylvan hills bisected by winding roads, are the stately homes of Nashville, the sprawling and splendid residences of the privileged few who didn’t worry how much it would cost to heat the place when they committed to 14-foot ceilings.
These genteel reminders of the power, prestige and prosperity of Nashville’s movers and shakers of yesteryear include The Hermitage, the antebellum mansion Andrew Jackson called home; Cheekwood, a 30,000-square-foot Georgian estate home featuring botanical gardens watered with Maxwell House coffee money; and Belmont Mansion, the wildly Victorian vision of a cotton heiress who was one of the richest women in America. (Picture knickknacks and taxidermied birds of prey against densely patterned wallpaper.)
Were I a fabulously wealthy gal in 1853, I’d point my parasol toward Belle Meade, the Greek Revival manse that was the centerpiece of a plantation and stud farm. (Or maybe I’d wait until 1883, when the first two bathrooms were installed on the spacious rear porches.)
Belle Meade resonates with me because I come from horse folks. My father was a railbird with empty pockets before he figured out he could make more money racing thoroughbreds than betting on them.
Belle Meade Plantation, photo by Robin Hood for Nashville CVB
When Dad was picking up horses in claiming races, he focused on bloodlines, the mounts descended from champions. Belle Meade is the home of Bonnie Scotland, sire of sires, which counts among its descendants Sir Barton, which in 1913 won the first Triple Crown, Secretariat, 1973 Triple Crown winner, and every horse entered in the 2003 Kentucky Derby.
In the grand foyer, there’s a portrait of the big bay stallion and his groom Bob Green, painted in 1875. Green, a former slave, was the highest paid worker on the farm due to his widely admired horse sense and led Grover Cleveland on a tour when the president visited in 1887. (Years later, William Howard Taft during his presidency visited Belle Meade, where he famously got stuck in the bath tub.)
With a wide veranda and six massive limestone columns made from stone quarried on the property, Belle Meade is an impressive house. (There are bullet holes in the columns, souvenirs from the Battle of Nashville in the Civil War, waged, in part on the expansive front lawn.)
The mansion is decorated in period style, changed to reflect upcoming holidays or events, such as a Victorian wedding. A few pieces of furniture are from the Harding family, who lived in the mansion until 1903. Guides wear costumes ranging from the requisite hoop skirts to an undertaker’s coal dark suit and stove top hat.
But it isn’t too precious. There aren’t velvet ropes cordoning off rooms. Visitors can literally walk through history, peering at such mementos as inkwells made from the hooves of Iroquois, the Belle Meade great which was the first American-born horse to win the English Derby. No photography is permitted inside the house, but guests can snap away outdoors.
The grounds include simple gardens, a log cabin, reconstructed slave quarters and a small cemetery. Belle Meade is open seven days a week; entry costs $15 for adults and $7 for kids 18 and younger.
Nashville’s portfolio of intriguing architecture isn’t limited to mansions. Two fine examples of adaptive reuse are the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, a fine arts museum housed in a meticulously restored Art Deco post office, and Watermark, a hip, high-end restaurant in a repurposed paper warehouse in the city’s emerging Gulch district.
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