Rattle & Snap

The last and greatest of the Polk brothers' houses is across the road and farther southwest. George Washington Polk's Rattle & Snap, named for the game by which his father won the land, rests at the top of a hill; it's the most magnificent antebellum mansion in Tennessee, if not the entire South. The capitals atop the 10 Corinthian columns were cast in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, fireplaces were fashioned from marble, and the grounds were designed by a German gardener. Rattle & Snap was finished in 1845, and the Polk family had 15 happy years there before the war.

When the Civil War struck, marauding Union soldiers took a perverse delight in torching Southern mansions, and in 1862 a group with arson in mind stepped in the front door. The officer in charge noticed a Masonic ring on the life-sized portrait of the absent owner and decided to spare the house. The Civil War ruined the Polk fortunes, however, and they lost the home in 1867. Over the decades the once-elegant Rattle & Snap became rundown to that point that in the 1930s and 1940s hay was stored in it and chickens roamed the once-elegant rooms.

The house was stabilized and renovated in the 1950s but not fully restored until Amon Carter Evans, former publisher of the Nashville Tennessean, bought the house in 1979 and assembled a team headed by Henry Judd, the retired chief restorationist for the National Park Service, and turned them loose to restore the house to its 1845 appearance. When research revealed that the downstairs doorknobs had been made from silver plate, Evans ordered silver plate replicas. To reconstruct a missing ell, an old church in Nashville that was being torn down provided 88,000 bricks of the proper vintage. Asked to comment on a report that all this work cost $6 million, Evans replied, "That is a conservative estimate." He opened the house to the public, and it delighted visitors for years.

Evans's fortunes changed, however, and Rattle & Snap was sold in late 2003 to a California couple who plan to live there and open the house only on special occasions. For more information, go to this site.