Montpier

Perkins came west from Pittsylvania County, Virginia, with a party of kinsmen, and in 1805 Thomas Jefferson made him a land registrar in the lower Mississippi Territory. Back in Williamson County he married his cousin Mary in 1808, sat in the state Senate from 1815 to 1817 and returned to the House in the 1840s. Enslaved workers built Montpier in 1821 and 1822, firing its bricks and cutting its timber on the place. The two-tier Greek Revival portico came in the 1850s. The house remains a private residence.

What the plaque says

Montpier Nicholas Perkins (1779 - 1848) established this 12000-acre estate about 3 miles S.W. in 1810. In 1807, an official Mississippi Territory, he had arrested former vice president Aaron Burr and taken him from Ft. Stoddert, Mss., to Richmond, Va., for trial on charges of treason. He was later territorial attorney general in Mississippi. His house is about 1 mile west of this road: he is buried near the junction of two rivers 0.3 miles east.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carnton — 7.4 mi
  The McGavock farm in Franklin, worked by 44 enslaved people in 1860, that became the largest field hospital of the Battle of Franklin.
• Fort Negley — 11 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.
• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 12 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.
• National Museum of African American Music — 12 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

• Aittafama Archaeological Park — 3.0 mi
• Fight at Hollow Tree Gap — 3.8 mi
• Retreat from Nashville — 5.0 mi
• Harpeth Academy — 5.3 mi