White House: Named for a Tavern on the Old Kentucky Road

The Tennessee city of White House takes its name from a roadside inn, not the one in Washington. In eighteen twenty-eight, a Virginia settler named Richard Stone Wilks paid two hundred dollars for land straddling what is now the Robertson and Sumner county line. The following year he built a tavern along a well-worn trail that Native Americans had long used to travel between Kentucky and Nashville.

The trail became the Louisville and Nashville Turnpike, later US Highway Thirty-One W, and Wilks painted his inn white to stand out to travelers. The landmark worked. The community that grew around it inherited the name.

White House was settled by eighteen thirty-five and formally incorporated in nineteen seventy-one, by which time the old inn site sat along one of the busiest corridors in Middle Tennessee.