A Woman Challenged: The Life of Granny White

Imagine that you were born in 1743 as Lucinda Wilson was. In about 1760 she became the second wife of Zachariah White and helped raise his children in addition to a brood of her own. Zachariah wanted land badly enough to risk his scalp. He joined James Robertson to go overland to the North Carolina Cumberland territory to establish the settlement of French Lick where the city of Nashville now stands.

Zachariah was a militia man, a farmer, and a part-time professional. He taught the first school at French Lick in the spring of 1781 but was killed at the Battle of the Bluffs later that year. He left Lucinda, called Lucy, and his heirs cash poor. They could not pay the surveyor fee necessary to be eligible for a grant of 640 acres awarded by North Carolina to the families of men killed defending the settlement.

Seventeen years later, in 1801, Lucy was told by the courts of Surrey County in the Tidewater district of North Carolina that she was a woman, too old and too poor to take on the responsibility of her two orphaned grandsons, Thomas and Willis, ages 8 and 9. They were to be bound over to a tradesman to keep them out of the poorhouse. She would not be told "no" again, certainly not by North Carolina.

Lucy loaded her spinning wheel and household goods on an oxcart pulled by a yellow longhorn steer. She left in the middle of the night with Thomas and Willis and an elderly slave named Uncle Zachary. They traveled three miles a day and walked the 800 to 900 miles through Indian territory and the rugged Carolina mountains leading the oxcart toward the Cumberland settlements where she had three adult children and a number of step-children. Along the way they made stop-overs long enough to become self-sufficient. In Roane County, Tennessee, at a place called Meredith, she put up a Ginger Cake Stand and sold baked goods to travelers.

Lucy was 60 years old, a small, white-headed woman when she arrived in Nashville in 1803. She put up another Ginger Cake Stand and operated a tar pit or kiln for greasing wagon axles. After that she purchased, for a nominal price and with indefinite time to pay it off, 50 acres comprising two faces of a pair of confronting hills. The land was located on an old buffalo path that had become the first road south out of Nashville toward Franklin. One hill had to be dug away to make a place for a log house. The other hill was planted in grapevines, fruit trees, and garden produce. Apples rolled down the hill to a fence and pumpkins had to be staked to a hillside.

By 1812 Lucy had opened an inn that attracted travelers from the Natchez Trace four miles to the west. She was known for her fine cooking. She made and served her own whiskey. She had the best brandy and applejack and the best pancakes and the cleanest beds. She charged 12 1/2 cents a night for a room and 50 cents a night to board horses. Lucy was innkeeper, housekeeper, and cook. She also managed to weave the cloth to make the bed linens and wearing apparel. When more guest rooms were needed she added wings, a room at a time.

Lucy’s grandsons called her "Granny" and soon the customers did, too, and so she is remembered today as Granny White. Granny died in 1816 at 73 years old. She had money, slaves, horses, and cattle at her death. Thomas died as a youth in an accident, so Willis inherited but the tavern was not open to paying guests after Granny died. Willis married Winifred, had ten children, and moved to Nashville so the children could go to school. Willis and his wife returned to the inn in their old age after the children were gone.

The inn was half rotted at the time of the Battle of Nashville. Everett Beasley acquired the lands in 1930, and in 1942 he replicated the log tavern at the same location with logs from a frontier inn in Dickson County. After 30 years the old logs began to sag just as Granny’s originals had. In 1983 Robert Neil and Vander Linder carried the logs to Cheatham County where they constructed a log house that stands today.

One hundred sixty-five years after Granny’s death the property was developed into 43 residences called The Inns of Granny White. Her fenced grave site is at the entrance. To get there from Nashville you go the way the buffalo did along the street to Franklin named Granny White Pike.

Granny did not accept the social wisdom of her day. She did not let being a woman, being old, or being poor defeat her. After a hopeless beginning she became self-reliant, an entrepreneur. In her day, however, she was infamous. She flaunted the law, engaged in commerce, and made and sold liquor. She took strangers into her home. She accepted the challenge of frontier life and did what she had to do.