Warner Parks – Nashville Historical Newsletter

Luke Lea: A Biographical Sketch

by Doris Boyce.

Luke Lea was born in Nashville in 1879. His grandmother was a descendant of Judge John Overton, law partner of Andrew Jackson. His grandfather, John McCormack Lea, was mayor of Nashville in 1849. His father, Overton Lea, was an attorney. At the time of his birth his parents owned 1,000 acres of land between Granny White and Franklin Pikes known as Lealand, part of the original acreage of Travellers Rest.

*Judge John Overton, 1766-1833* (*Tennessee Portrait Project*)

Lea enrolled at the University of the South at Sewanee in 1896 and was awarded his master’s degree in 1900. Later that year he travelled briefly in Europe and then entered law school at Columbia University, becoming editor of the Columbia Law Review in 1903. After graduation he opened a law office in the Cole Building in downtown Nashville. In 1906 he married Mary Louise Warner, daughter of Percy Warner, and their sons were born in 1908 and 1909.

Lea organized The Tennessean Company in 1907, and by 1908 the paper was up and running efficiently enough that he was able to return to his law practice. In 1910 he chartered the Belle Meade Company for future real estate development of the 5,000-acre farm of that name, and the company presently donated 144 acres to the golf club which later became the Belle Meade Country Club.

Luke Lea was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1911, at 32 years of age, in office until 1917, at which time he took on the task of recruiting volunteers for the 114th Field Artillery. He served as their colonel until the end of the First World War.

When Lea came home from World War I, he shifted his focus toward managing his newspapers, the Nashville Tennessean and the Evening Tennessean. Late in the 1920s he also became publisher of the Memphis Commercial Appeal and the Knoxville Journal, which he jointly owned with Rogers Caldwell.

During that same decade Lea acquired a number of properties, and he built Nashville’s first ramp-style parking garage on Seventh Avenue between Church and Commerce Streets. In 1927 he donated 868 acres for a public park that would be named for his father-in-law, Percy Warner.

In 1929 Tennessee Governor Henry H. Horton appointed Lea to the U.S. Senate to fill an unexpired term, but Lea declined, saying he could “do the greatest good and be of more service to Tennessee as a private citizen.”

*Depression-era bank run on the American Union Bank, New York City. April 26, 1932.*

The Great Depression brought ruin to Lea’s business affairs because of devalued assets, cash flow problems, and political maneuvering by his enemies. He was convicted of banking law violations in 1931, and his newspapers were silenced. He served two years in the North Carolina State Prison.

Less than a month after Lea was paroled, backers approached him about running for governor of Tennessee. Still hoping to re-enter the publishing field, he turned them down.

Although Lea eventually regained his health, which had deteriorated while he was imprisoned, he never regained his wealth. When he died in 1945 at age 66, a congressional investigation was underway that might have restored the Nashville Tennessean to him once again. (1997)

1930: Caldwell & Company Fails

by Carter G. Baker.

In the 1920s Nashville’s Union Street was called the “Wall Street of the South” because of the many banks and brokerage houses had located there. The most famous of these was Caldwell & Company, founded by Rogers Clark Caldwell in 1917 to help Southern municipalities sell bonds. By the time of the Great Crash in 1929, Caldwell & Company was a regional investment banking powerhouse doing $100,000,000 a year in securities sales alone.

Soon Caldwell was involved in investment banking, hotel and newspaper ownership, and the sale of municipal bonds. With the end of World War I the Federal government ceased monopolizing the bond market and the states were able to move in to the market. The South, meanwhile, enjoyed a boom not seen since before the Civil War. Agricultural prices increased every year from 1920 to 1927 and infrastructure that had been untouched for sixty years could now be improved. In short, for most of the “Roaring Twenties” Caldwell & Company enjoyed ideal conditions for profitable expansion. By 1925 most buyers of Southern bonds knew the House of Caldwell and its slogan, “We Bank on the South.”

The next expansion of Caldwell was into bank and industrial ownership. Two Nashville banks, the American National and the First and Fourth National, came under his control. Other banks in Knoxville, Little Rock, Memphis, and various small towns in Tennessee also came under the aegis of Caldwell.

Soon the House of Caldwell controlled department stores, manufacturing and mining companies, and a Nashville baseball team, among many other businesses. Two newspapers, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis and the Knoxville Journal, were under his ownership and an unsuccessful attempt was underway to gain control of the Atlanta Constitution.

The Nashville Tennessean was owned by Colonel Luke Lea, Caldwell’s partner in many of these deals. Lea was a colorful character who had been a U.S. Senator and a World War I colonel who had led an unauthorized attempt to capture Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, who was in exile in The Netherlands. He was instrumental in donating the land for Percy Warner Park, which is named for his father-in-law. In the 1930s Lea and his son were both jailed for fraud in connection with the failure of Caldwell & Co.

Long before the company’s collapse, there were many signs that all was not well. In 1925 the loosely managed accounting department was in trouble. Customers were complaining of not receiving bonds and payments, and a trial balance hadn’t been made in years. Timothy Donovan was hired to sort out the mess and by the time of its bankruptcy the Caldwell & Co. books were straight, but the business wasn’t.

In a short article, it is impossible to describe all the interlocking directorates and movement of money that went on. Thanks to Luke Lea and the demand for bond sales, the company had excellent political connections. In fact, when the failure came, the State of Tennessee lost about 50% of the money it had deposited in various Caldwell banks. Municipalities all over the South lost deposits and individual depositors faced serious losses in those days before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

A good example of the chicanery that went on was the series of road contracts given to the Kentucky Rock Asphalt Company, known as Kyrock. Pressure was put on the state road commissioner to award the company contracts outside of the bidding process. When the commissioner refused, Lea was able to influence the governor to replace him with someone more amenable to seeing things Lea and Caldwell’s way. After that, Kyrock received many contracts for road construction without having to go through the inconvenience of bidding.

After the failure, reported in two Time magazine articles in November 1930, there were many cries for the impeachment of Governor Henry Horton (which did not happen) and jail time for Lea and Caldwell. As mentioned, Luke Lea did go to jail in North Carolina, but he was fully pardoned in 1937.

Caldwell had built a house called Brentwood Stables in 1928. Designed to look like The Hermitage, the building was owned by one of his companies. The State of Tennessee went to court to gain title to the house in partial payment for money Rogers Caldwell owed the state. The process took years of litigation, and it was not until 1945 that Caldwell finally relinquished his home. The State had intended to sell it, but, since the title was not clear, chose to keep it. The property is now the 207-acre Ellington Agricultural Center on Edmondson Pike.

Sorting out the various body parts of Caldwell & Co. and its related company, The Bank of Tennessee, was a long process not completed for nearly 20 years. Many of the related firms were salvaged and continue to exist today, though often as subsidiaries of other corporations. Caldwell & Co. was Tennessee’s first major financial bankruptcy, but it was certainly not to be its last.

Bibliography

McFerrin, John Berry. Caldwell and Company: A Southern Financial Empire. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press), 1969.

Time magazine: “More Aftermath,” November 17, 1930, and “Caldwell Crash,” November 24, 1930. From www.time.com

“Luke Lea (1879-1945). Wikipedia.

My personal recollections of conversations with John Donovan, Vice-President of First American National Bank in the 1970s. John, the son of Timothy Donovan, mentioned in the article, was also my boss at First American.

Two novels also touch on the Caldwell story. These are At Heaven’s Gate by Robert Penn Warren and A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor. I read both for background on this article. Peter Taylor’s father was Hillsman Taylor, an executive at Caldwell & Co.

The Hodge House in Percy Warner Park

by Gale Wilkes Ford.

Hundreds of motorists rush past the intersection of Old Hickory Boulevard and Chickering Road every day without realizing they have just glimpsed a bit of early Tennessee history. Nearby, on the property of Percy Warner Park, stands an old two-story log house with white siding, its three limestone chimneys now cold.

The Hodge House early in its period of renovation (photo from NHN collection)

This is the Hodge House, built circa 1795 by Francis Hodge, an early pioneer settler who signed the 1780 Cumberland Compact and later received a land preemption of 640 acres. As Indian attacks diminished, many of the settlers ventured out from Fort Nashborough to settle on their own land. In the area of today’s Carden Road, Francis Hodge and his family built a log house which they called Hodge’s Station. It became a gathering place where many early Tennesseans, including James and Charlotte Robertson, came to study Methodism. Hodge later sold that tract of land to Joseph Ewing and built a cabin three or four miles south, on the plot where it now stands — land that had previously belonged to James Robertson.

This second Hodge house, originally a single pen log cabin (as has been determined by Metropolitan Historical Commission staff), stands today in the southeastern corner of Percy Warner Park. Francis Hodge and his two oldest sons, James and George, constructed the two-story dwelling of white ash logs. Over the years, the family added several more rooms, white clapboard siding, and a tin roof. To accommodate the family slaves, they built additional cabins, one of which survived into the late 1950s.

Within a few years the property was purchased by Mary and Samuel Northern, James Hodge’s daughter and son-in-law. The Northerns, whose descendants would live on this land for nearly one hundred years, dedicated an acre northeast of the house for use as a family cemetery. When James Hodge died in 1817, he was the first of the family to be buried in this graveyard, near what is now the Harpeth Hills Golf Course.

Pioneer Francis Hodge died in 1828. His will, written in his own hand, shows the excellent penmanship characteristic of an educated man. The will identifies his sons as John, James, Robert, and George; and his daughters as Elizabeth (Betsy) Armstrong, Sarah Slaughter, and Priscilla Carruthers. No surviving record indicates where Francis is buried. His son George died in 1833, willing the land, the house, and fourteen slaves to his wife Elizabeth. George’s 1829 will also stipulated that after Elizabeth’s death several nieces and nephews should inherit the property. One of the nephews named was Francis Hodge Asbury Slaughter, who, with Sterling Clack Robertson, was part of the first Texas colony.

Members of the Hodge family married into other local families whose names are still well known in the area: Betts, Becton, Harding, Northern, Osborne, Page, Reams, Sawyer, Slaughter, and Wilkes. The old house saw the Civil War come and go, with both Union and Confederate soldiers marching past on the historic Indian trail in front of the property. Hodge descendants occupied the home until its sale in 1895. In 1927 the property became part of the Warner Parks and is now listed on and protected by the National Register of Historic Places. According to the Warner Parks website, it is the “only early rural farmhouse of its type under public ownership in the county.”

The house served for many years as a residence for Parks Department employees and their families. In the early 1990s it was boarded up because of its deteriorated condition and was left vacant until a group of Hodge descendants began lobbying for protection and restoration of the property. Renewed interest in the site led to a survey of the old Hodge-Northern cemetery, during which sixteen unmarked graves, including several burial sites of children, were discovered. Moreover, as part of this year’s [2002] celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Warner Parks, the Hodge House has been designated for renovation, in order to make it a more valuable, hands-on local history resource. The Friends of the Warner Parks (FWP) has been working side-by-side with the Nashville Metropolitan Board of Parks and Recreation to acquire funding for the project. Their first objective is to restore the original white ash log cabin. FWP Director Eleanor Willis, who has spearheaded the project, describes the logs now visible in the attic area as “beautifully preserved.” Work on the foundation and the limestone chimneys is already underway. Visitors will soon be able to view the historic Hodge House as it appeared two centuries ago to the early settlers of Middle Tennessee. (2002)