History of Midway

 

Situated halfway between Nashville and Franklin beautiful Midway, a McGavock stronghold for one hundred and twenty-five years, is one of the show places in the Brentwood area.

However, long before the McGavock family settled here, it was the home of aboriginal tribes whose identity perished with them over a thousand years ago.  Archaeologists have found the McGavock land to be one of the richest sources for scientific research of these primitive people.  Attracted by the abundant springs and fertile river bottoms which were ideal for their agricultural pursuits, they settled here in considerable numbers judging from the graves and campsites uncovered over the years.  Their relationship to the American Indian, if any, is unknown since the savages questioned by Nashville’s earliest settlers disclaimed any knowledge of the ancient people.

 

These stone grave Indians left an abundance of artifacts which have found their way into collections ranging in size from that in the Smithsonian Institute to small accumulations in private homes.  Hundreds of arrowheads, vessels, and objects of pottery, wood, stone, shell, bone, and copper have been removed from the scene of their temples and town sites.  They have provided an invaluable insight into the lives of these prehistoric Tennesseans who, through some tragic disaster, met with destruction about what General Gates Thurston, in his study of Indian life, referred to as “the infinite pathos of human life”.

 

The original McGavock home was built here by Lysander McGavock (1800-1855) around 1829.  he was the son of David (1763-1838) and Elizabeth McDowell McGavock.  In 1786, David and Randal McGavock had come from Virginia to the new settlement at Fort Nashborough and, in the name of their father, had taken up over 2,000 acres of the best land available around the main village as well as several hundred acres near Freeland’s Station.  David McGavock and his family remained in Nashville when his brother came to Franklin and built Carnton.

 

Part of the tract  of land on which Midway was built was inherited by Elizabeth Crockett (1795-1862) who married Lysander McGavock in the early 1820’s, while some of it was bought from her brothers.  Her parents, James and Mary Drake Crockett, had come to Williamson County when members of the Crockett family had migrated here from Wythe County, Virginia, and settled around Brentwood in 1799.

 

Midway was built in 1847 after the first home burned.  Its walls rose from slave made brick on a foundation of limestone blocks and other materials salvaged from the ruins of the earlier house.  For a long time two of the old servant houses and the smokehouse with its nail studded door, huge iron key, and it’s hew poplar salting trough remained behind the house recalling its distant past.

 

A large spring flowed from the southern slope of a hillside overhung by venerable oaks whose boughs had shaded the redman long before the settlers came with axes, spades, and ploughs to ravage the area’s natural beauty.  Its waters refreshed man and beast for countless years and, when the railroad was being run through Brentwood, it was piped to the construction site.  It gave its name, “Good Springs”, to a post office and stagecoach tavern on the pike near the Little Harpeth River.  The tavern was operated by the Ormes family with whom Lysander McGavock traded land to straighten boundary lines.

 

During the war Midway witnessed several sharp skirmishes and then sheltered the wounded of both sides.  It served as headquarters for various commanding officers, and its grounds became the resting place for at least one Federal soldier.  During those grim days, Captain Joseph Harris, whose mother was a niece of Lysander McGavock, and who had grown up at Midway when his sister after their mother’s death, managed to slip home for a few day’s visit.  He was captured and imprisoned in Ohio until his father, a Federal officer, could secure his release.  He then went to England where he died in 1865.  In 1948, McGavock Hayes accidentally discovered Captain Harris’s father’s U.S. Naval officer’s sword, his own Confederate sword, and a machete hidden in the attic at Midway.

 

Livestock and food were constantly being hidden and retrieved during those times when raiding enemy parties would swoop down without warning.  Valuables were buried or otherwise cleverly concealed, while the meat was saved by placing it under a false roof in the smokehouse.  Trenches and breastworks remained in the meadows along creek banks until the golf green was developed in recent years.  This part of the spreading lawn has never been under cultivation, having been used for over a hundred years for pasture lands.

 

The beautiful family cemetery, enclosed by an iron fence, is north of the house.  Here Lysander  and Elizabeth McGavock rest with their six children-Ephraim, Cynthia, Sally, Emily, Hugh, and Margaret.  Here also are resting the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Lysander Hayes and McGavock Hayes.  In the mid 1950’s the property was leased to the Brentwood Country Club. With its white columns gleaming through a vista of rolling meadows and shade trees, it is one of the most imposing sites to be found in an area abounding in elegant ante-bellum homes.