Franklin developer to turn historic African-American farm into park, community center
FRANKLIN – Greg Gamble twisted the metal doorknob on the screen door and stepped inside.
At the threshold, Gamble looked down at debris of family life scattered on the hardwood floors. Photos of the Carothers and Kinnard families sat inside shattered glass. Letters written in precise cursive lay astray on the floor. Newspapers from the 1940s perched on a nearly destroyed couch.
Gamble, a landscape architect who will work on renovating the 1937 home, hadn't seen anything quite like it in his other Franklin projects. For the last several years, no one has occupied the John Carothers home on Huffines Ridge.
Family members had battled in court over how to sell the 23-acre property after Ezeal Carothers died. Now a planned development could give the house new life in the coming years.
"We are excited there can be an adaptive reuse," Gamble said. "This will be the trailhead of 8 acres of land that will be an open area for residents in Franklin to use."
The story of the house
In 1937, John Carothers used limestone from his property to construct the house that still stands today.
Documents submitted to the U.S. Department of the Interior show that he purchased the property in 1933 for $25 per acre. With the help of his son Ezeal Carothers, the two built the one-and-a-half-story home.
The Carothers family farmed the land beside the home for wheat, tobacco, hay and a garden. Cows and chickens lived there as well. Ezeal Carothers also farmed 355 acres across the road owned by a Nashville businessman.
"The Carothers House is a good example of a local adaptation of stock building plans using native materials," historians wrote in the 1989 application to add the home to the National Register of Historic Places. "The Carothers House was the first stone house to be constructed by John Carothers, who later built two other stone houses from stock architectural plans. One house is now demolished and the other, located on Jordan Road and built circa 1941, is slated for demolition. All three houses were constructed from limestone quarried from the Carothers farm by Ezeal Carothers."
Historians also said the home should go on the registry to preserve African-American history in Williamson County. The property provided an example of farm life before the Civil Rights movement.
"Black sharecropper-tenant farmers were seldom able to escape the debt owed to the white landowners and to acquire their own farms," Tennessee Historic Preservation Specialist Elizabeth A. Straw wrote in the application. "In Tennessee, three-fourths of all blacks lived in rural areas and were primarily farmers. Housing for rural black farmers consisted mainly of small cabins constructed loosely of logs or slab boards. Windows rarely had glass or screens and were usually covered with wooden shutters."
John Carothers originally left the property to his children: Ezeal Carothers, who died in 1998, and Viola Howse Carothers, who died in 2000.
After some litigation, the family decided to sell the property to GCI acquisitions for $12 million in June. The deal is set to be finalized in 2019.
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Plans for the property
Jordan Goldberg can't remember exactly how his development company GCI found the property on Huffines Ridge.
But after years of looking in the Nashville area, they finally found a place in Franklin where they could build both apartments and a hotel. Goldberg said this property presented an interesting challenge because it's on the National Register of Historic Places.
Plans currently call for 426 apartments, ranging in size from one- to three-bedroom units. A 170-room hotel and 17,000 square feet of office space are also planned.
But most compelling to Goldberg is using 8 acres for parkland and turning the house into a community center.
"Before, it was closed off to the public," Goldberg said. "But we are able to do good in the community, yet still have a development that’s successful. When we saw a very interesting opportunity to create a development and yet to retain the historical element of this property, we knew we wanted to save the home on this property."
Reach Emily West at erwest@tennessean.com, at 615-613-1380, or on Twitter at @emwest22.