Belle Meade Plantation

Belle Meade Plantation (5025 Harding Rd., 615/356-0501, www.bellemeadeplantation.com, $10 adults, $8.50 seniors, $4 children 6-12) is a tribute to the kind of lifestyle possible when one doesn't have to pay one's workers.

Belle Meade, known as "The Queen of Tennessee Plantations," focuses on an 1853 Greek Revival mansion, which once commanded a 5,300-acre plantation staffed by 130 slaves. The stone columns still bear scars from Civil War bullets. Now down to a more manageable 30 acres, the plantation includes the mansion, the log house that preceded the mansion, a carriage house, and various outbuildings. While Belle Meade is an antebellum mansion, the house has been restored to its appearance in the 1880s. Thirty-eight percent of the furniture is original to the house.

This plantation figures prominently in the annals of thoroughbred horse racing. John Harding, the patriarch of the family that owned Belle Meade, began breeding horses here in 1816 and boarded horses for Andrew Jackson. The oldest racing silks in America are from here, and when the first Kentucky Derby was run, six of the 15 horses had ties to Belle Meade. In 1881, Iroquois, the first American-bred and owned horse to win the English Derby, came from this plantation.

One of the plantation's odder claims to fame is that it was the place where President William Taft, a portly soul, got stuck in one of the mansion's bathtubs. His hosts were so mortified that they installed a "stand-up tub" in which the water came out of "a multitude of tubes." This was Nashville's first shower, and Taft--who came back to Belle Meade--liked it so much he had one put into the White House.

One of the newer board members of Belle Meade Plantation, like many board members of such properties, has longtime family ties to the state and the city. Unlike her colleagues on the board, however, Luvenia Butler is the descendant of slaves who belonged to the owners of Belle Meade.

Tour guides dress in period outfits. To get there, head out of Nashville on West End Avenue (U.S. 70) and follow the signs.