Architecture

Cragfont is a beautiful Georgian-style mansion located on a craggy eminence above Bledsoe's Creek seven miles east of Gallatin. James and Susan Black Winchester had the house designed and built between 1798-1802. The masons built the two-story house of gray,…

In 1854 Robert Cravens, a leading industrialist in Chattanooga, purchased a thousand acres of land on the side of Lookout Mountain, where he maintained an orchard and built several cabins as a summer retreat for his family. Two years later…

A rural resettlement community established during the Great Depression, Cumberland Homesteads is located in Cumberland County. This homestead community currently encompasses approximately 10,250 acres, less than half of the original total of 27,802 acres held by the cooperative association in…

Located at Brunswick, Davies Manor is recognized as the oldest extant dwelling in Shelby County and perhaps West Tennessee. The west section of the two-story, white oak log, central hall plan house dates to circa 1807 and has been attributed…

There are many historic examples of decoratively painted interiors across the state of Tennessee. While some of the paintings have been lost, many works from the late eighteenth century to the New Deal era have survived, indicating the wide variety…

Isaac Dockery, an African American brickmason and builder, was born a freeman in the Jones Cove community of Sevier County. Dockery moved to Sevierville before the Civil War, where he worked as a merchant clerk in the home of Henry…

This Egyptian Revival landmark in Nashville is one of only two buildings in Tennessee designed by notable Philadelphia architect William F. Strickland. Constructed in 1849-51, the church is listed as a National Historic Landmark as the outstanding example of the…

For early houses in Tennessee, three house plans were common: the central passage plan, the hall-parlor plan, and the Penn-plan. The central passage plan, also called an I-house by cultural geographers, is a house with two rooms on either side…

Fairvue was the home of Isaac Franklin and his young bride, Adelicia Hayes Franklin. Built in 1832, the property was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1977, but lost the designation in 2005. Historically, the house had identical facades…

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts opened in April 2001 in the former U.S. Post Office building in downtown Nashville. Constructed in 1933-34, the building, an example of Depression-era “Stripped Classicism,” was designed by the local architectural firm Marr…

A vision of grandeur for the developing river metropolis at Memphis, the Gayoso House was built by Robertson Topp, a wealthy young planter. Topp was involved in the development of South Memphis, an area of houses, commercial buildings, and a…

Shelbyville's historic Gilliland House is a unique vernacular stone building completed by locally renowned African American stone mason James S. "Jim" Gilliland in the late nineteenth century. Born near Shelbyville on November 15, 1858, Gilliland began as a builder of…

This twenty-seven-room, five-story Victorian house of handmade brick was built in 1868-69 in Mossy Creek (now Jefferson City). Considered one of the state's most nearly perfect examples of Second Empire style, Glenmore is now an Association for the Preservation of…

Located near Adams in Robertson County, Glenraven Plantation is the last large-scale, consciously designed tobacco plantation landscape in Tennessee. Its founders were Felix Ewing, a wealthy Nashville businessman and Arkansas Delta plantation owner, and his wife Jane Washington Ewing, who…

The antebellum plantation estate of Hamilton Place at Ashwood, Maury County, is a rare and exquisitely crafted example of the Palladian style of architecture. It was built from 1829 to 1831 by Lucius Junius Polk (1802-1870), one of the five…

Adolphus Heiman, engineer, stonecutter, and architect, was born in Potsdam, Prussia. Trained as a stonecutter, Heiman came to the United States in 1834. He was in Nashville perhaps as early as 1837. Heiman worked in Nashville from his arrival until…

The last grand turn-of-the-century hotel in Nashville, the Hermitage Hotel was built between 1908 and 1910. It is the city's best extant example of a Beaux Arts-style commercial building. Its original architect was Tennessee native Edwin Carpenter, who received his…

Henry C. Hibbs, designer of academic and medical architecture, influenced the institutional landscape of Tennessee in the twentieth century. Born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1882, Hibbs received his education at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked in Philadelphia and…

From the Stone Castle (Bristol Municipal Stadium) and its Medieval Gothic architecture to the symmetry and sleek lines of the Liberty Bowl in Memphis, from personalities like General Robert R. Neyland of the University of Tennessee to E. H. Crump,…

Thomas Hope, one of Tennessee's earliest and finest master carpenters and cabinetmakers, was born in England circa 1757. By 1788 Hope was in Charleston, South Carolina, where his reputation spread to the part of the western North Carolina frontier that…