West Meade

Howell Jackson was a Democrat appointed to the Supreme Court in 1893 by Republican President Benjamin Harrison, a friend and former Senate colleague, and the Senate confirmed him unanimously. He developed tuberculosis soon after joining the Court and wrote only 46 opinions. In 1895, when the justices split four to four on the federal income tax, he returned to Washington to hear the rehearing and dissented. The Court struck the tax down, and Jackson died in Nashville on August 8, 1895, about eleven weeks later. His daughter Louise married Hill McAlister.

What the plaque says

West Meade In 1883, Gen. William G. Harding gave his daughter, Mary, 2600 acres of his farm, Belle Meade. The same year, Mary and her husband, U. S. Senator Howell E. Jackson, bought a 131-acre farm adjoining that tract. They built this home at a cost of $14,905. During his lifetime, Howell was a U. S. Senator and a justice on both the U. S. 6th Circuit Court and the U. S. Supreme Court. The house remained in the family until 1944 when the farm was sold and subdivided.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 6.4 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 — 6.6 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 — 6.9 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 — 7.0 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.

More markers nearby

• Belle Meade Deer Park — 1.3 mi
• Richland Creek Bridge — 1.3 mi
• Richland — 2.7 mi
• Battle of Nashville: Harding Road — 2.7 mi