Knapp School of Country Life – Nashville Historical Newsletter

The Historic Mud Tavern Community

by Richard R. Neil.

The Mud Tavern community grew out of two events in the early settlement of Middle Tennessee. First, sometime before 1784, Major John Buchanan built a “station,” or fortified home, on the east bank of Mill Creek just downstream from where Elm Hill Pike today crosses the creek. This is thought to be the first permanent dwelling in the Mud Tavern area. Buchanan lived in his “station” house until his death in 1832.

Buchanan’s Station became famous in early Middle Tennessee history when, during the Chickamauga Wars, it was attacked on the evening of September 30, 1792, by a large party of Cherokee, Shawnee, and Muskogee warriors. The attack was successfully repelled by the small band of men and women who had gathered for safety at the station amid signs that the Chickamauga group was in the area. More important for this article is that the station’s defenders included James Mulherrin and Sampson Williams – two men who had migrated with Buchanan in 1780 from South Carolina to Tennessee – as well as James Todd, Samuel McMurray, and others who had received land grants in the immediate vicinity. The presence of so many neighboring settlers suggests that Buchanan station was already the civic center for a developing community of people that would come to be known as Mud Tavern.

The second founding event is as legendary as it is historic. Sometime near the beginning of the 19^th century a tavern opened on Elm Hill Pike near what is today the intersection of the Elm Hill and McGavock Pikes. It was said to have been built of mud and cedar, hence the name “Mud Tavern.” There are no records to show who first owned the inn, but Richard Smith purchased property at this site in 1810, and court decisions in 1816 in 1832 seem to suggest that it was indeed Smith who operated a tavern there. Although there are no ruins to mark its location or documents to prove its existence, stories of the old tavern persist. It is said that Andrew Jackson often stopped there on his way to and from Nashville and that he stayed there for two nights as he prepared for his fateful 1806 duel with Charles Dickinson. In the end, however, the best proof of the inn’s existence and its significance is that the surrounding community chose to call itself Mud Tavern, and so it appears on Davidson County maps into the 21^st century.

In 1821 the Rev. Richard Dabbs came from Charlotte County, Virginia, to become founding pastor of the First Baptist Church of Nashville. He purchased 347 acres in the Mud Tavern community and built his home on hills overlooking the Mill Creek Valley. Rev. Dabbs died just two years after assuming leadership of First Baptist Church, but by that time his family had become well established in the area. In the years just before the Civil War, his grandsons expanded the original purchase to more than six hundred acres. The war and its aftermath reduced the fortunes of the Dabbs family, but they continued to play a role in the Mud Tavern community and beyond. John W. T. Dabbs, M.D., was a beloved physician in the Nashville area during the early part of the 20th century. His son, John W.T. Dabbs Jr., Ph. D, gained an international reputation for his work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on the nuclear ramifications of extremely low temperatures. Descendants of the Rev. Richard Dabbs were still living on his Mud Tavern farm in 1955, when the airport authority purchased the land in order to extend runways to accommodate jet air traffic.

The expansion of southern railroads after the Civil War played a major role in the area’s recovery. The community appeared on the map in 1869 when the Tennessee and Pacific Railroad established a route called the Lebanon Junction and showed Mud Tavern as one of several flag-stop stations along the way. An 1871 Davidson County map – “from actual surveys made by order of the county court” – clearly marks Mud Tavern as a separate and distinct community with the railroad running through it.

The railroad station had a two-fold and somewhat ironic effect on Mud Tavern residents. It provided their community with a geographic center of activity: within a fairly short time the area around the station had acquired a post office, a school, and a general store run for many years by Wallace Gleaves. The railroad also gave local citizens access to jobs, schools, and services beyond the immediate community. In 1877 the T&P was purchased by the Nashville, Chattanooga, and Saint Louis Railway, to open up travel an even larger world. Sometime in the 1920s, however, the general store acquired gasoline pumps to service the automobiles and trucks that were beginning to displace the railroads. By 1934 passenger traffic on the Lebanon Junction had declined precipitously, and the NC&SL petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to abandon it. The last train stopped at Mud Tavern in 1935. Among those who boarded was longtime resident Will Page, who later told an interviewer, “I took the last trip on the train about two years ago on the thirteenth of July.” It was the end of an era.

From the earliest days, Mud Tavern was primarily a rural, farming community within six or seven miles of downtown Nashville. Farmers took their produce to market by wagon, train, and truck until well into the 1950s. Some of the community’s most enduring institutions supported and influenced its agricultural way of life. Early in the 20^th century, Peabody College established Knapp School of Country Life on acreage that included the old Buchanan Station. Along with other practices, the school introduced alfalfa as a hay crop among local farmers. The present-day Purity Dairies had its origins in Mud Tavern on the Miles Ezell farm. For many years Oscar L. Farris, agent for the University of Tennessee Agricultural Extension Service, lived on a hill overlooking the site of the old Mud Tavern inn. Farris and his wife Mary helped farm families of the community adapt as agricultural technology began to change rapidly during the 20^th century.

In 1911 the community acquired an institution that would become emblematic of its way of life. The Davidson County Board of Education deeded to Jacob Young the old Mud Tavern school, which sat a few yards west of the crossroads where the Mud Tavern inn had been located. Young in turn gave the clapboarded building and one acre of land to the Mud Tavern community to be used for “the good of the community,” and it was received by H. S. Allen, D. W. Thompson, James Hite, Leopold Strasser, Thomas Whitworth, and Thomas Page, who were elected trustees. That one-room school became the meeting place of the Elm Hill Community Club. Over the years it was the site of many ice cream socials, community fairs, a free circulation library, worship services, baseball games, 4-H club and Home Demonstration meetings . . . in short, all of the activities associated with a lively rural society.

After 1935 the urban ethos of Nashville, which was never far away, slowly but inevitably encroached upon Mud Tavern’s bucolic existence with its siren call of more lucrative jobs and public demands for new roads, commercial development, and residential subdivisions. The airport expanded in 1955, and by the early 1960s Briley Parkway and Interstate 40 had been built through the area, obliterating many of the old farms. Still, as late as 1990 the Elm Hill Community Club building could still be seen hidden in a bramble patch and surrounded by taller commercial buildings, a symbol of an earlier way of life that was gone but not forgotten. Today a group of former Mud Tavern residents meets twice a year to share stories and memories of the area.

In one of Wendell Berry’s short stories, an old man reminisces about his life on his family’s farm: “He is thinking of the membership of the fields that he has belonged to all his life, and will belong to while he breathes, and afterward. He is thinking of the living ones of that membership – at work today in the fields that the dead were at work in before them. ‘I am blessed,’ he thinks. ‘I am blessed.’” Those whose families lived in the Mud Tavern community count themselves blessed to belong to its membership.

This article was originally published in the January 2010 edition of The Nashville Retrospect. We thank publisher Allen Forkum for his permission to republish it here. Photograph of Mud Tavern historical marker from NHN collection.

Plowing for the Future: Peabody’s Knapp Farm Adventure

by Mike Slate.

George Peabody College’s Knapp Farm and its sister institution, the Seaman A. Knapp School of Country Life, began operations on Elm Hill Pike in 1915. Financed by a $250,000 philanthropic endowment and other funds raised throughout the South, the farm and its associated agricultural school was a memorial to Seaman Knapp, an agronomist and leader in farm demonstration work. Eventually the farm grew to 315 acres and became nationally known for putting modern agricultural theory into practice. Many of its pioneering practices were at first ridiculed as “college ideas” but later became accepted as standard techniques. One source of pride was the farm’s outstanding herd of registered Holstein cattle, perhaps the first to graze in the pastures of the South.

The farm was situated in a bend in the Mill Creek along the old Chicken Pike/Mud Tavern pioneer route. The farmland included the site of historic Buchanan’s Station, one of the original Cumberland settlements where a handful of settlers withstood one of the last great Indian onslaughts in Nashville’s history. Today, the Buchanan’s Station historical marker and the cemetery where Major Buchanan and his wife are buried have survived the industrialization of the area.

*Buchanan’s Station Cemetery prior to its renovation. (NHN photo)*

In 1923 Peabody established its Knapp Farm Club House on the exact site of the old Buchanan stockade. This stately colonial mansion was a social center for the college for about forty years, and its bucolic setting along with the hypnotic sounds of the rushing Mill Creek enchanted thousands of students, faculty, and other visitors over the years.

Despite the disapproval and counter proposals of some alumni and faculty, the Peabody Board of Trustees sold the farm and its club house for one million dollars in 1965. Today, many important commercial facilities—including those of Standard Candy Company and Gibson Guitar—are located along Massman Drive, which cuts through the heart of the once-great farm.

Since no vestige of Knapp Farm remains today, Nashvillians are generally unaware of its existence. One way to ensure the future recognition of the Knapp Farm adventure would be to erect a suitable historical marker along Elm Hill Pike or Massman Drive. (1997)

Touring Elm Hill Pike

by Susan Douglas Wilson.

Elm Hill Pike is one of the most historic roads in Nashville. Few thoroughfares in our city contain so much history packed into so few miles. The road, which probably began as a buffalo or Indian trail, has been mentioned in several accounts of early Nashville history. Andrew Jackson was reported to be a frequent traveler on Elm Hill Pike on his journeys from downtown Nashville to the Hermitage. Mapmakers and old-timers have also referred to this road as “the chicken pike” and the Stones River Road.

As you turn off of Murfreesboro Pike onto Elm Hill Pike, the first historic site encountered is Mt. Ararat Cemetery on the north. Mount Ararat was founded in 1869 by local black leaders and became a burial ground for many of Nashville’s black pioneers. Over the years, the cemetery became a dumping ground and a target for vandals. In 1982 the management of Mt. Ararat was taken over by the Greenwood Cemetery’s board of directors, which voted to change the name from Mt. Ararat to Greenwood Cemetery West and to begin a comprehensive restoration project.

About a mile east of Mt. Ararat Cemetery is Greenwood Cemetery, established on thirty-seven acres in 1888 by Preston Taylor. Taylor, born a slave in Louisiana in 1849, was an influential black preacher, undertaker, and business leader. In addition to Taylor, illustrious Nashville citizens buried at Greenwood Cemetery include Z. Alexander Looby, the Rev. Kelly Miller Smith, Sr., DeFord Bailey, John Merritt, and J. C. Napier.

*The gates of Mt. Ararat Cemetery (photograph from NHN Collection)*

In 1906 Preston Taylor opened Greenwood Park on approximately forty acres adjoining Greenwood Cemetery. The park was established to serve the black community and included a baseball stadium, skating rink, swimming pool, theater, merry-go-round, bandstand, zoo, and many other attractions. A state-wide fair and a Boy Scout summer camp were also held at Greenwood Park. The admission to the park was ten cents on regular days and twenty-five cents on holidays. The Fairfield-Green streetcar stop was nearby and horse-drawn wagons would pick up patrons and deliver them to the park’s entrance at Lebanon Road and Spence Lane. Preston Taylor died in 1931 and his wife managed the park until its closing in 1949.

Buchanan’s Station was located about another mile east where Mill Creek crosses Elm Hill Pike. The station was established by John Buchanan in 1780. Twelve years later, an oft-recounted Indian battle ensued. On a moonlit night in 1792, a band of three hundred Creek and Cherokee, under the leadership of Chiachattalla, raided the station. The twenty-one settlers fought bravely and defeated their attackers, killing Chiachattalla. Major Buchanan lived at the station until his death in 1832. He is buried, along with his wife and other settlers, in the station’s cemetery.

John and Sally Buchanan’s gravestones in Buchanan Station Cemetery. (from NHN Collection)

Peabody College established the Seaman A. Knapp School of Rural Life in 1915 on one hundred fifty acres on Elm Hill Pike. More acreage, including the site of Buchanan’s Station, was acquired in 1922. The farm was the first institution in the United States devoted to the study of the problems of rural life. Peabody College officials believed that teachers should become acquainted with agricultural life since so many of them would be teaching in rural areas. The experimental farm became a showplace with award-winning dairy and beef cattle herds. Innovative techniques in irrigation, pasturage and field equipment were tested at the farm; and many crops were raised including a certified corn station and a contoured, 25-acre orchard. Knapp Farm provided Peabody College with all its meat, vegetables, and fruit until World War II. The importance of the farm declined after the 1920s because of state-supported agricultural research. Expensive to maintain, Knapp Farm was sold in 1965 to a contractor who developed it into an industrial park.

Though the exact location of Mud Tavern is disputed, most old-timers agree that it was near the intersection of Elm Hill Pike and McGavock Pike. The tavern, built during Nashville’s youth, was made of cedar logs with a mud and stick chimney. Andrew Jackson was a frequent patron and it is reported that he spent two days there planning strategy in his duel with the ill-fated Charles Dickinson. Years later a community named Mud Tavern grew up in the area and contained a railroad station, school, post office, and grocery store. The Mud Tavern school building was used for many years as a clubhouse by the Elm Hill Community Club.

On the far side of Donelson Pike, at the corner of Elm Hill Pike and Hurt Drive, is the James Buchanan house. This two-story log house was built circa 1809. James Buchanan and his wife are buried in the family graveyard near the house, which is now under the care of the Association for Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities.

At the present time, Elm Hill Pike ends at Bell Road. The eastern-most part of the road has been re-engineered several times. The course of the road itself may change, but the history of Elm Hill Pike will always remain as a significant part of Nashville’s heritage. (2000)