Whitehaven, Memphis

Whitehaven is the southernmost community within the Memphis city limits, and its name has nothing to do with race, despite what the sound of it might suggest to a modern ear. It takes its name from White Haven, a plantation named for its owner, Colonel Francis Marion White, an early settler and major landowner. The area incorporated as its own municipality in eighteen seventy-one before eventually being annexed into Memphis.

Whitehaven is best known today as the address of Graceland, the colonial-revival mansion Elvis Presley purchased in nineteen fifty-seven for about one hundred three thousand dollars when he was twenty-two years old and already the biggest recording artist in America. Elvis lived there until his death in nineteen seventy-seven, and Graceland has since become one of the most visited private homes in the United States, drawing more than six hundred thousand visitors a year to this corner of South Memphis.