McGavock-Gatewood-Webb House

The McGavock-Gatewood-Webb House in Nashville is an antebellum residence built around eighteen forty by James McGavock and later owned by the Harris, Lindsley, Gatewood, and Webb families. The McGavocks were one of Nashville's founding dynasties; Randal McGavock, a brother of the man who built this house, served as mayor in the eighteen twenties and built Carnton Plantation south of the city, which became a major Confederate field hospital during the Battle of Franklin in eighteen sixty-four. This East Nashville house, once known as Blue Fountain, represents the urban face of that same planter class: the gracious homes of a city built on cotton commerce and enslaved labor. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it survives as an artifact of the antebellum world that the Civil War destroyed and the Lost Cause movement spent a century trying to romanticize.