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The Trousdale Place
The ground upon which Gallatin was located originally belonged to James Trousdale, father of William Trousdale, famous "Warhorse of Sumner County," and afterwards Governor, and later United States Minister to Brazil. Likewise was James Trousdale grandfather of the late Hon. Julius A. Trousdale, Gov. Trousdale's son. The deed called for 641 (641.80) acres, and eighty one-hundredth, the fraction, the deed stated, was for a road. One acre was reserved for Mr. Trousdale himself, which left 640 acres for the town site. Upon this reserved acre on the south side of the public square James Trousdale built the first house in Gallatin. It was afterwards torn down and a part of the material used in the house still standing in the rear of the original site. How inspiring that to this day the good name of that pioneer carries on in Trousdale Place, the home of the Trousdales through the honors that have come to them through generations! The late Mrs. Annie Berry Trousdale, who died December 25, 1935, at her home in Nashville, had, after the death of her husband, in 1899 deeded Trousdale Place to Clark Chapter, U.D.C., the beautiful old mansion with its rich traditions to be a memorial to her husband, distinguished soldier and statesman, Julius Augustus Trousdale, of beloved and honored memory. Julius Trousdale was Speaker of the House of Representatives of the State of Tennessee, and came near defeating Bob Taylor in the race for Governor in the early 1890's. Trousdale Place now enshrines Trousdale Library, and is in use nearly 365 days a year as a community center where about twenty local clubs hold conferences, public assemblies, and every conceivable civic meeting fostering public enterprises. It is no ordinary "dead shrine" where visitors walk through the "dim religious light" of musty faded rooms in austere silence, but a living force in community life. On the walls of the stately old rooms is written in paintings, documents, and mementos the glory and the heartbreak of the Confederacy.
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Exalted Valor*
(From an article by Josephine Murphey, published in The Nashville Tennessean Magazine, July 11, 1948)
"Trousdale Place, a handsome old brick house shaded by handsome old trees a minie ball's throw from the public square in Gallatin, Tenn., is the ancestral home of the clan of Trousdale, a name prominent in Middle Tennessee since the state was born, and the spiritual home of the 70-odd members of Clark chapter No. 13, one of the earlier chartered units of the National (later United) Daughters of the Confederacy, into whose loving care the house was delivered in 1900.
Clark Chapter makes a sentimental pilgrimage to Trousdale Place on the first Saturday in each month, for the regular U.D.C. meeting, and on the other Saturdays the house is open for the convenience of sight-seers, patrons of the chapter's small historical and current library, and those who merely wish to browse among the Confederate mementos and memories with which the house is filled. Tourist and Sumner countian alike, however, are apt to understand the appraisal of a past president of Clark Chapter who murmured the other day, 'I wish I could come here oftener. It's like stepping into another world.'
It was another world in which Trousdale Place came into being; a world of leisurely and gracious living, of high ceilings and high ideals, a world in which the distinctive agrarian culture of the ante-bellum South was beginning to develop, and with it the pleasantly paced social order which made those times, in succeeding years, a favorite subject for personal and literary nostalgia. There was still much of the frontier in evidence in 1822, when Trousdale Place was built (although not by a Trousdale), but spreading halls of slave-made brick were beginning to replace chinked and daubed log cabins, and the rougher edges of the wilderness country had been polished.
The land on which Trousdale Place stands was part of the 640-acre grant which James Trousdale, captain in the Revolution who had been with Washington at Yorktown received for his military services from the State of North Carolina. Although the grant was dated December 4, 1784, the doughty captain did not settle the land until 1796, the year in which Tennessee achieved statehood and a decade after Sumner county had been carved from Davidson. Five years later, when the state legislature authorized the purchase of land for the establishment of the Sumner county seat, the Trousdale farm was the site selected, and one of the lots in the new town of Gallatin was bought by John H. Bowen, an attorney, who built on it the brick house which was to become known later as Trousdale Place.
The house was not entirely completed when Bowen died in 1822, and it was purchased soon thereafter by William Trousdale, the son of Captain James who
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