Wooten Fallout Shelter

Hoyt Wooten, the founder of WREC radio and television, built this shelter in 1960 beneath his Whitehaven estate: a 13-room complex with dormitories, a communications center, a dining room and a morgue, powered by generators fed from underground tanks. No attack came. Wooten printed postcards and opened the shelter for tours. After his death in 1969 the estate became the Lion's Gate subdivision and the shelter its community center. It now stands empty, though it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2019.

What the plaque says

Wooten Fallout Shelter In the early 1960s, Hoyt Wooten owner and founder of WREC radio station and WREG-TV built a Cold War-era shelter engineered to survive the aftermath of a nuclear attack. A single contributing building comprised of above and below ground sections, it was designed to accommodate up to sixty-five people in the event of a nuclear war. The fallout shelter includes a large recreation room, women's and men's dormitories, restrooms, a radio communication room, an industrial kitchen, a morgue, and storge spaces.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Graceland — 2.2 mi
  Elvis Presley's 1939 limestone house in Whitehaven, bought in 1957 and opened as a ticketed museum in 1982, with his grave in the Meditation Garden and a commercial visitor campus around it.
• C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa — 6.8 mi
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• Stax Museum of American Soul Music — 7.1 mi
  A rebuilt Stax studio on the site of the old Capitol Theatre, with a replica of the sloped-floor Studio A, Isaac Hayes's Cadillac and the story of an integrated soul label.
• Elmwood Cemetery — 7.7 mi
  Memphis's oldest active cemetery, a rural garden cemetery of about 1,500 trees opened in 1852, with Black civic leaders, yellow fever victims and the city's whole history in its lots.

More markers nearby

• Elvis Aron Presley — 2.3 mi
• Big Walter Horton — 3.6 mi
• Capleville Church of Christ/Easthaven Church of Christ — 3.9 mi
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