Two Rivers Mansion

Two Rivers Mansion. . , The Land in the Bend , Construction began on Two Rivers Mansion, the home of David and Willie McGavock, in 1859. When completed almost twenty years later, the house was one of the most prominent structures in Nashville and overlooked the McGavocks' 1,100-acre farm., For more than a hundred years following Euro-American expansion into the Cumberland River Valley in the mid-to-late 18th century, the land enclosed by this ox-bow curve in the Cumberland River, six miles northeast of downtown Nashville, was called McSpadden's Bend. During this period, the property that became known as Two Rivers changed hands numerous times. The first owner, Nicholas Coonrod, was awarded a land grant in 1784 for a 640-acre tract west of the confluence of the Stones and Cumberland Rivers. Ten years later, he sold his stake to David Buchanan, who had moved to the area from Virginia. Between 1805 and 1812, Buchanan sold almost 500 acres he had acquired from Coonrod to settle various debts. Willie Barrow, a wealthy Nashville businessman, bought 175 acres in 1812 and acquired other properties in the bend. Though he likely never lived there, Barrow's estate was the eventual site of Two Rivers Mansion., Following the Panic of 1819, Barrow was forced to sell his holdings in the bend. William Harding purchased several tracts of the former Buchanan property from Barrow and others before moving to the site in 1823. By 1832, he had acquired more than 1,100 acres, where he raised cotton and livestock and ran a still. In 1831, Harding married Elizabeth Clopton, but he died in May 1832, four months before their daughter was born. When the daughter, William Elizabeth Harding, known as Willie, turned eighteen and married David McGavock in 1850, she inherited her father's entire estate. Together she and David built Two Rivers Mansion. The McGavock family was the last to own the property before it was acquired by the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County in 1966 and redeveloped as a park., The Civil War Years and Beyond (1864-1970s) , Little is known about the Two Rivers estate during the Civil War, although in the years that followed, the social, cultural, and economic relationships that had defined the South were transformed. Two Rivers had numerous outbuildings and hundreds of acres of improved land to farm, so the McGavocks, like other planters in need of farm hands, leased houses on the property to laborers and their families through a process of tenant farming or sharecropping. Some of the new tenants may have been people formerly enslaved to the McGavocks. The property lost some of its value after the war, but by 1880, the estate's 700 improved acres, 400 unimproved acres, and 100 wooded acres had a value of approximately $100,000, almost twice its worth in 1860. In 1887 David McGavock and his son, Frank, purchased the estate's first Morgan horses and began a stud farm., The Two Rivers Stock Farm also had cattle, a garden, an orchard, and a dairy operation. There were more than fifty buildings on the property, including barns, horse stalls, tenant houses, and sheds. Many of these structures were destroyed by a tornado in 1933. Following the financial Panic of 1893, the farm was near bankruptcy. In the early 1900s Frank's son, Spence, avoided losing the property altogether by leasing it out while he worked as a traveling shoe and boot salesman. Spence died in 1936 and his widow, Mary Louise Bransford McGavock, moved to her family home, Melrose, while caretakers continued the farming operations. She returned to Two Rivers in 1954 and remained there until 1965. In 1966 she sold the mansion and 475 acres from the estate to the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County for one million dollars.