March 24, 2010

Belle Meade Plantation was built in 1807 to breed racing horses. At that time it was 5400 acres way out in the country. Now it has been assimilated into the city of Nashville. The house is a 2 story Grecian style with stucco covering the original brick to produce the effect of limestone rock. Inside, it is decorated with 30% of its original furnishings and the rest originals of its time period. Nothing is reproductions. This horse farm has the bloodlines for Secretariat, Seabiscuit, Funny Cide, Smarty Jones, Giacomo and Barbarro!

The plantation was fully supporting growing its own corn, hunting and the horse trade bringing in the wealth. It housed 136 slaves that were given their own gun to hunt and a carriage to borrow when they turned 25. On the present day land is the original cabin, the mansion, dairy, one of the slave cabins, the mausoleum(that originally had 23 Harding-Jacksons buried),the gardeners house, smokehouse, carriage house and stables, the dollhouse that was a playhouse for the young children and a winery.

The mansion is huge with a fireplace in every room, all antiques throughout, bathrooms with hot and cold running water in the 1880's , which is definitely the top upper class. The chandeliers which are electric now were lit with methane gas made from manure-which they had lots of. It is 3 full floors with a basement and the kitchen is housed in a building next to it connected by a breezeway.

Belle Meade Plantation provided each horse with its own 20 acre paddock and when it died, it was buried in its paddock. Since Belle Meade Plantation is only 30 acres now, most of these paddocks are under housing developments. Therefore, some people have horses buried in their yards. There were a couple favorite horses that were given honors-Bonny Scotland- their first horse which died in 1880, Iroquois, the first American-born and bred to ever win the English Derby, who died in 1896, and Enquirer, who has a monument(larger than our cemetery gravestones) erected to him outside the stables. When Iroquois died General Billy Jackson was so devastated he cut off his hooves, sent them to Tiffany's in New York to be mounted in silver and placed them on his desk where they remained until he died. They are now in the bookcase in his library for all to see. No pictures were allowed inside the house but you can see all of the others I took.

Tonight we go to Nashville Nightlife Theatre dinner show presenting songs from Hank Williams Sr, Patsy Cline, Conway Twitty, Shania Twain and Garth Brooks.