Belle Meade Plantation

Belle Meade Historic Site and Winery
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
Belle Meade Historic Site and Winery
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Location	5025 Harding Pike Belle Meade, Tennessee
Coordinates	36°6′20″N 86°51′54″W / 36.10556°N 86.86500°W / 36.10556; -86.86500
Built	1807
Architectural style	Greek Revival
NRHP reference No.	69000177[1]
Added to NRHP	December 30, 1969

Belle Meade Plantation, now officially titled Belle Meade Historic Site and Winery, is a historic farm established in 1807 in Nashville, Tennessee, built, owned, and controlled by five generations of the Harding-Jackson family for nearly a century. The farm, named "Belle Meade" (beautiful meadow), grew to encompass 5,400 acres (22 km²) at its zenith and used a labor force of 136 enslaved workers. The farm's centerpiece was a Greek revival mansion built in 1853. Belle Meade Farm gained a national reputation in the latter half of the 19th century for breeding thoroughbred horse racing stock, notably a celebrated stallion, Iroquois. In the Civil War, when the Union Army took control of Nashville, the mansion was pillaged and looted by soldiers who spent weeks quartered there; the owner was imprisoned. In the aftermath, the plantation recovered, but with greatly reduced capacity. Roughly half of the enslaved persons returned as paid employees after the war and lived in their own homes nearby. After a financial downturn in 1893 and later the death of the owner and his heir, the estate was dismantled and sold in parcels in 1906.

Much of the vast area of the original plantation became incorporated in 1938 as the City of Belle Meade that became an upscale residential area that included Nashville's Cheekwood Botanical Gardens, Percy Warner Park, and The Belle Meade Country Club. Since 1953, the mansion has been administered in trust by the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities, a private non-profit corporation.^[2] In the 1970s, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The historic site is now operated as an attraction, museum, winery (non-profit), and onsite restaurant together with various outbuildings on 30 remaining acres of property. Many original outbuildings are preserved, including a dairy, gardener's house, carriage house, stable, mausoleum, and the original Harding Cabin. Since the 1990s, the management has made an effort to reconcile the past by featuring stories of African Americans who worked there before and after emancipation.