Belle Meade Deer Park

The deer park was the showpiece of a working plantation. John Harding bought 250 acres on the Old Natchez Road in 1807 and built Belle Meade into twelve hundred acres, selling blacksmith services, lumber and farm products and establishing a stud farm. By the 1850s his son William was among the wealthiest men in Tennessee. When Federal authorities jailed William for six months during the Civil War, his wife Elizabeth ran the place and was responsible for about 150 people, most of them enslaved. After the war its thoroughbreds made Belle Meade famous.

What the plaque says

Belle Meade Deer Park Jackson Boulevard follows the contour of the 408-acre Belle Meade Plantation Deer Park, established by John Harding in 1833 or 1834. The park became a favorite picnic spot for Nashvillians. By 1854, it held approximately 200 deer and 14 buffalo. A few deer which survived the Civil War returned and rapidly multiplied. When the park closed in 1904, it held between 250 and 300 deer and a few elk.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 5.2 mi
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• Fort Negley — 5.3 mi
  The largest inland stone fort of the Civil War, built in 1862 on St. Cloud Hill by more than 2,700 conscripted Black laborers, hundreds of whom died.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 5.7 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• National Museum of African American Music — 5.7 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.

More markers nearby

• Richland Creek Bridge — 0.4 mi
• West Meade — 1.3 mi
• Battle of Nashville: Harding Road — 1.6 mi
• Battle of Nashville: Redoubt No. 5 — 2.0 mi