Travellers' Rest

Digging the cellar in 1798, Overton's workers found arrowheads, pottery, animal bones and human remains. Overton first called the house Golgotha, the hill of skulls. Archaeologists working on the site between the 1800s and 1996 determined that a Mississippian village of two to three hundred people stood there between A.D. 1000 and 1400. Enslaved people built and maintained the house and fields of the plantation, and the bricks, tools and layout of the yard record their work. The Colonial Dames saved the house from demolition in 1954.

What the plaque says

Travellers' Rest The first part of this house was built in 1799 by Judge John Overton, one time Revenue Collector for the Mero District of North Carolina, later member of the Tennessee Supreme Court and longtime friend of Andrew Jackson. These two with General James Winchester, developed west Tennessee and founded Memphis in 1819.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Negley — 4.9 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.
• National Museum of African American Music — 6.0 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.
• Ryman Auditorium — 6.0 mi
  The 1892 brick tabernacle in downtown Nashville that was the Grand Ole Opry's home from 1943 to 1974, now a National Historic Landmark and working concert hall.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 6.1 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.

More markers nearby

• Hood's Retreat December 16, 1864 — 2.4 mi
• Battle of Nashville: Franklin Pike — 2.6 mi
• Hiram and Eveline Overton's Wagon and Blacksmith Shop — 2.6 mi
• Confederate Defenses — 2.7 mi