Alex Haley House Museum

Will Palmer ran a lumber business and mill in Henning, and in 1918 and 1919 he and his wife, Cynthia, built this ten-room bungalow. Their grandson Alex Haley lived here from 1921 to 1929, after his mother, Bertha, brought him home as a baby, and he came back often afterward. On the front porch he heard older relatives tell family stories, among them the story of Kunta Kinte, a young man taken from his home in West Africa.

Those stories became Roots: The Saga of an American Family in 1976. The book was translated into dozens of languages, it won Haley a special Pulitzer citation in 1977, and about 130 million people watched the ABC miniseries that year. It set many Black American families, and many others, searching for their own histories. It has also been questioned. Haley settled a plagiarism suit brought by the novelist Harold Courlander in 1978, and genealogists have found that the written records do not support the line of descent he described through Virginia and North Carolina.

Haley died in 1992 and is buried in the front yard. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, and it was the first state historic site in Tennessee devoted to African American history. The museum and interpretive center stand beside it. Fort Pillow is a short drive west, and the two make a day.