Belle Meade Plantation

Belle Meade in 1864 was a plantation worked by about 136 enslaved people, and the war had reached them long before Chalmers's cavalry did. Federal authorities had arrested William Giles Harding, a Confederate supporter, and held him for six months, while Elizabeth McGavock Harding ran the place and looked after what she called her family of 150 persons, most of them enslaved. Union soldiers quartered in the mansion for weeks and looted it. After emancipation, 72 of the people once held here chose to work on for wages, most living in houses off the main grounds.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 5.4 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 — 5.7 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 — 6.0 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 — 6.1 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

• Belle Meade Plantation — steps away
• Belle Meade Deer Park — 0.4 mi
• Richland Creek Bridge — 0.4 mi
• West Meade — 1.0 mi