Riverwood (Nashville, Tennessee)

Riverwood is a privately owned historic house located in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. At 9,200 square-feet it sits on 8 acres of its original 2,500 acres. It has been a wedding and event facility since 1997.[2][3][4]

Riverwood
Location1833 Welcome Lane, Nashville, Tennessee
Coordinates36°12′0″N 86°42′36″W
Area6 acres (2.4 ha)
Architectural styleGreek Revival
NRHP reference No.77001264[1]
Added to NRHPJuly 20, 1977

Location

The mansion is located at 1833 Welcome Lane in Nashville, Tennessee.

History

The rear wing was built in 1799 by Alexander Porter, an Irish immigrant who came to Nashville in the mid-1790s.[2][3] He originally named it Tammany Woods after his family home in Ireland.[2] By the 1820s, he built a two-story Federal-style home a few feet away from the rear wing.[2] In 1850, a third story was added, alongside a Greek Revival portico supported by six Corinthian columns. Guests included President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) and his wife Rachel Jackson (1767-1828), who was an aunt to Alexander's son's wife.[2]

In 1859, Judge William Frierson Cooper (1820–1909), a member of the Tennessee Supreme Court, purchased the property.[2] He renamed it Riverwood as it was by the Cumberland River.[2] His brothers and their wives lived in the house with him.[2] In the 1880s and 1890s, plumbing and electricity were added.[2] The dining room was also extended, and the two houses were united.[2] After his death in 1909, his brother Duncan Brown Cooper inherited the property.[2]

When Cooper died in 1922, his daughter Sarah and her husband Dr. Lucius E. Burch, a Dean of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, inherited the house.[2] They had a son, Lucius E. Burch, Jr.. Their annual Christmas Dinner was attended by the Nashville elite.[2] Robert Penn Warren spent a summer in one of their cottages during his stay at Vanderbilt University.[2] Presidents Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk (1795–1849), Franklin Pierce (1804–1869), Andrew Johnson (1808–1875), Grover Cleveland (1837–1908), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), and William Howard Taft (1857–1930) and Vice President Adlai Stevenson I (1835-1914) visited the house.[2] The Burches lived in it until 1975.[2]

The property was purchased by Joe and Jackie Glynn in 1994. Over the next three years, the Glynns restored the property and opened the property to facilitate weddings and small events in 1997.

In June 2015, the Glynn's sold the property to investors Debbie Sutton, Steven R Shelton, and Matt Wilson.

Riverwood Mansion has been featured in multiple music videos, television shows, and magazines, most recently on the October 2015 cover of Southern Living Magazine, featuring Reese Witherspoon.

Architectural significance

It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 20, 1977.[1]

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gollark: Well, I have no idea what y ou're doing... and this already seems to be heavily built around a lot of unsafe, so I'd have to rewrite the whole thing.
gollark: Do you want me to execute Protocol Epsilon or something?
gollark: You could create an issue asking for per-byte access, except *they seem to provide that but you just want to ignore ownership*!
gollark: Well, they *can* do it, but probably *shouldn't* and I won't depend on any library which recklessly uses unsafe.

References
  1. "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. July 9, 2010.
  2. Riverwood Mansion, History Archived 2013-04-07 at the Wayback Machine
  3. Eleanor Graham, Nashville: a short history and selected buildings, Historical Commission of Metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County, 1974, pp. 18-19
  4. Joseph Frazer Smith, Plantation Houses and Mansions of the Old South, Courier Dover Publications, 1941, p. 243
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