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(upbeat music) - I am Mike Galligan, with the Law Offices of Galligan & Newman in McMinnville, Tennessee.

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(melodious music) - I'm Avery Hutchins, your host for Where Stories Live.

In this episode, we explore Falcon Rest Mansion & Gardens, a Queen Anne-style home built around 1896 in McMinnville, Tennessee.

The original owner was Clay Faulkner, son of Asa Faulkner, one of Tennessee's wealthiest industrialist at the time.

The Faulkner family was so extensive that Clay had numerous relatives located all over the McMinnville community, including Charles Faulkner Bryan, after whom the Bryan Fine Arts Building at Tennessee Tech is named.

Clay wanted to be closer to work as the two and a half mile buggy ride from town was causing him much discomfort.

However, Clay's wife, Mary Clay Faulkner, had no desire to move.

Clay promised her he'd build her the finest mansion around if she agreed to move to the 144 acre tract just south of Faulkner, Mountain City Woolen Mill, and she agreed.

And in 1897, Mrs. Faulkner and their five children moved into the beautiful home.

Charlien McGlothin, the current co-owner and General Manager of Falcon Rest walks us through the history of the Faulkner family and how they impacted the community.

(melodious music) - In 1900, there were 2,000 people in McMinnville.

And I think it was a fairly prosperous town.

The railroad connected it to Manchester, therefore Tullahoma and Nashville and Chattanooga.

There was a lot of manufacturing.

A great deal of water-driven mills were here.

There were more plants to grow native here than anywhere in the United States or Europe.

It started the nursery business.

So McMinnville became known as the Nursery Capital of the World and had a lot of peach orchard.

I think peach brandy was a popular product in the early 1900s.

(melodious music) Clay's father Asa Faulkner was the first major industrialist in McMinnville, one of the richest men in the state and he owned thousands of acres in this area.

Clay and his brothers started a mill across the road in 1873.

They had eventually split up.

The other brother took over the mill that Clay's daddy had originally established.

And when he died in 1889, his wife inherited the property on this side of the road.

Bought 144 acres from her for this mansion.

He'd gotten tired of the buggy ride from town, so he told her if she'd moved out here to be closer to the mill, he'd build her the grandest mansion in Tennessee.

In 1902 there was a huge flood and when Clay was cleaning up he discovered a manganese spring which was cured to mineral water.

So eventually he closed the mill and opened the Faulkner Springs Hotel in 1906.

So he said it was an ideal health and pleasure resort.

Clay almost died of a kidney element.

That was one of the reasons he got tired of the buggy ride.

Somebody told him he had curative mineral water across the road by the mill.

So he started drinking it and he got so much better.

He was able to get $35,000 worth of life insurance.

Short story, barreling it up, selling it all over the country under the label of Faulkner Mineral Water.

After the flood, he also had the manganese spring, so with the two curative waters.

This area was mainly Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War, but Asa Faulkner, Clay's father was a Union sympathizer.

He owned a few slaves but he was against secession.

But when the war started, Clay was 16.

So they shipped him off to a military academy in New York to get him away from the Confederate draft.

By the time Clay was 18 in 1863 both sides had mandatory draft laws.

It looked like the Union was gonna win so he enlisted it to private.

He mustered out in 1865 as a private and I think he stayed as far away from things as he could.

Mrs. Faulkner was known as Mary Clay Faulkner.

A good speed described her as a very cultured lady.

She grew up in Carthage.

She was 26 when they got married in 1873, but they did have five children over a range of about 11 years apart altogether.

She was very active with Christian Endeavors which was a youth organization for the Methodist Church.

And some of the families said they thought she was sort of shy.

I think Mary had a formal relationship with her children.

She never allowed her children to come into the bedroom.

She would meet them in the morning room for a devotional before breakfast.

They loved her.

And after Clay died, she moved to Nashville next to where the governor's mansion was and Thula and Herschel moved with her even though he was already 41 by then.

So the family stuck together.

Herschel was their second notice, he was 19 when they moved in.

The grandchildren said he was lovable but lazy with the capital L. One time he was asleep on the lake bank by the hotel and he had molasses on his feet.

Somebody woke him up said, "Herschel, why do you have molasses on your feet?"

He said, "To keep the flies away from my head."

Nobody said he was stupid, just lazy though.

He invented an oil burner for a stove and patented it and the lived the rest of his life off the proceeds of the patent.

Herschel and Thula never got married, so that's why they moved to Nashville with Mary.

Daisy was their middle daughter.

She was 16, she was a gifted artist.

We have several of her drawings and paintings in the mansion.

Virginia was their youngest daughter.

She was 10, very beautiful woman and the only one who actually stayed here in McMinnville.

So when Mary moved to Nashville, Virginia inherited most of the furniture that she didn't take with her.

Thula was a gifted pianist.

She also is famous in the family perpending, everything she could get her hands on was gold leaf paint.

The picture that George was talking about upstairs at the birthday party where they had the instruments the girls were playing they were not real instruments, they were fake instruments that they were posing for (indistinct) to take their picture.

One of the Daisy's granddaughters was here a while back and she said, "I love to see pictures of my grandmother."

Like that because she was always cutting up doing something.

They were very active in the church.

Clay was Chairman of the Building Committee for First Methodist Church downtown who was also Sunday school superintendent for several years.

They even sponsored a big Christian endeavor or convention for the state that they had out here in the hotel while they still lived here.

Clay had the mill across the road.

He had the Great False Cotton Mill out at Rock Island Park and he had 144 acres to manage here.

So I imagine he spent most of his time working.

Mary was a homemaker, but she did not cook.

She did not have a key to the kitchen door.

The cook had the only key to the kitchen door.

So she did little work.

I kind of think she might have been a little bit shy 'cause they said she was always the last one to arrive at church and she would leave before the final hymn was over.

They actually had a room upstairs for the governess which did not have an entrance into the main mansion, you had to enter from the back veranda.

Their carriage driver was named Mr. Webb and their foreman was Mr. Garman.

These were people who were good solid Christian people who were successful financially, but he worked for a living.

His father was very wealthy.

He had 19 children, so that money was divided out.

Clay earned his money.

(melodious music) - Clay Faulkner died in 1916.

Mary and the remaining family members moved to Nashville and she sold the house to a local contractor named George Beach three years later.

The mansion passed through the hands of various owners, including a doctor who would welcome and treat patients.

The current owner, George McGlothin, bought it at auction in 1989.

However, it probably would've helped if George had told his wife Charlien before buying the house.

Let's see what happens after he wins the bid.

- In the 1930s, Dr. Reynolds bought the mansion.

He was a combination pharmacist, doctor.

They said he sounded like a gruff old farmer and someone said that he would get pills and barrels and sort them on the veranda as different placebos.

Don't know if that's true or not but that's what they were told.

In the 1940s it converted to a nursing home, by the 50s it was one of the first full skill hospitals in the whole area, the second one probably, and it stayed open until 1968 when Medicare came in.

And the doctor said, "We're just going to shut the doors "and leave everything the way it was "'cause they're not gonna tell me how to run my hospital."

My husband's sister was born here.

And when the doctor shut it, he boarded it up.

Then he had somebody come in and try to tear it down because he couldn't sell it.

That was why it was such a mess when we got it.

He had converted it into a green hospital and aid on and dividing rooms and made a mess of it.

So I owed Dr. Dietrich a lot.

He saved my husband's life when he was nine.

So I have a husband and a daughter to show for that and he messed up this building so much that when my husband showed up at the auction, nobody else wanted it.

We lived in Fayetteville, but McMinnville had really started to prosper, a lot of industry was coming in.

So he came to visit his parents down the road.

Said he was looking for rental properties.

His mother said, "Do you know the old hospital is up for auction?"

And his daddy said, "Don't tell him than he might go buy it."

We'd already restored two old houses.

So he came and looked and he got his curiosity up and he showed up at the auction.

- And I bought this place without my wife ever having seen it.

And I tell all men, "Don't ever do what I did."

We lived in a Fayetteville Tennessee, which is about 80 miles away.

I brought my wife on Easter Sunday on the way to church.

I took her to the worst part and I said, "Honey," I said, "what do you think of it?"

She pointed the worst part and she said, "You put a mortgage on my house for this?"

Immediately I knew I was in trouble.

We went to church and she repented and the rest is history.

People asked me, "Where in the world did you get all these furnishings?"

Well, about 43 years ago my wife came to me said, "Let's have a two day yard sale."

I was really with it.

I said, "What's that?"

She explained it what a yard sale was.

I said, "Nobody's gonna come."

Famous last words, everybody in the community showed up.

I got the spirit of it and over the next two days I sold all the furniture we had at that house, and I started buying what you see inside this very home.

So it's a very understanding woman who this month has tolerated me 54 years.

Miracles do happen.

I still have a little a hair.

- There was a second mortgage on it for more than the first.

So he wanted to get a word in Edgewise.

They had the opening bid for what the hospital was owed.

He bid $50 more and nobody else said anything.

So he had a house and I had never seen it.

(melodious music) We worked on it for four and a half years and then 95% of the restoration ourselves.

Of course, we've still been working on it for another 30 years and continuing to make it a lot better.

- I came here with dark hair, but now I've got gray hair, but I spent a year of my life underneath the mansion putting in plum in there, electric wires and everything like it.

And I went under dark-headed and I came out looking like this.

And I'm not kidding you, that's true.

My hair went from dark to white over a year I spent underneath this mansion here.

I tell people, "Anything it doesn't look good, "wasn't done well here, my wife did it."

There was not a evergreen here on this property when I started this.

And so I decided, "What need some evergreens?"

This tree right here we're sitting under right here wasn't here.

None of this stuff was here, actually none.

The hedge wasn't here.

There are hundreds of hollys around the mansion and I watered them for one solid year.

All the hollys were in the hedge.

We're still working on it and as you can tell it's working on me too.

(melodious music) - Now that we know that George and Charlien's marriage is more or less safe, we can look at what makes the home unique and what made George by the Queen Anne estate on such a whim.

Clay Faulkner made sure the mansion had numerous features that most people today would consider a commonplace.

Some examples include closets, indoor plumbing, air conditioning, electricity, hardwood floors and a brick exterior.

You might not think twice about any of that today but back then it was completely a different story.

For example, most Tennesseeans did not have regular access to electricity until the 1930s.

Air conditioning wasn't a common commodity until even later than that.

Of course, more luxurious elements like grand staircases, marble fireplaces, and custom made woodworking transcended Falcon Rest Mansion from a home with modern conveniences to an estate of utmost opulence.

But there's still a lot more to uncover.

Let's see what Charlien has to say about the mansion's other features.

(melodious music) - It was very much like it is now.

The walls inside and outside are solid brick very obvious what the floor plan was if it goes all the way down to the bedrock inside or out, that's original.

The woodwork is mostly original.

Some of it had to be reproduced but we have the majority of that.

When they lived here, the woodwork was stained and there was wallpaper on most of the rooms.

Almost all of the wallpaper was gone when we got here.

The doctor painted the woodwork hospital green.

So the folks who started working on it in '83 had started painting the woodwork period color and we just followed suit on the mini rooms that they had not done.

They had finished three rooms when we got here.

The nature was originally natural brick.

The doctor painted it white 'cause it looked like a hospital.

So he turned the white down with the gray.

But in the back, the breezeway had been enclosed for the hospital as inside hallways, and the doctor put plaster on the walls.

It was more like concrete.

The only way my husband would get that off was to chip it off of the hammer and chisel that much in a time, picking 14 days to do it.

When he did it revealed the original brick like the whole mansion was.

And the preservation people said there's penciling between the brick.

White lines put between the bricks to define them that was done with chalk dust and then they had black penciling which I said was even more rare.

So I said, "Don't paint over the penciling."

So if you look at the breezeway you know what the original brick looked like.

The original kitchen was not attached because it had a cold burning stove, so it was separated from the main building to keep it cool and for fire safety.

Next to the kitchen there was a pantry and then across the breezeway there was a smoke house.

They had indoor plumbing.

There was a reservoir across the road that provided pressurized running water not only for the mansion was a fire protection system for the mill village.

They had electric lights that were powered by a generator at the dam for the mill.

The machinery and the mill across the road was powered by dam across the creek.

So they had a generator there where they made their own electricity for the lights in the mill and in the mansion.

They had central steam heat.

There was a boiler in this basement that brought steam through pipes in the walls, the radiators in all the rooms.

And then they had a spring water system where they did pipe that pool spring water from the other side of the creek under the creek bed underground the springhouse for refrigeration.

And then under the mansion as a primitive form of air conditioning.

There's an article on the front page of the Southern Standard in December of 1896 that said it would've all the modern conveniences and improvements of the modern city residence.

And that's why PBS compared it to that other little place they building in North Carolina called the Biltmore.

The mansion is entered from a huge fourier with a staircase that has stairs with six inch risers.

Makes it really easy for our senior tourist to climb the stairs.

To the right there was a parlor with a huge spindle free spanning the whole ceiling as the unique decorative element.

Mr. Faulkner's room was behind the parlor.

Mrs. Faulkner's bedroom was across the hall.

We figured that's because Clay's daddy Asa Faulkner over a 40 year period of time fathered 19 children.

Clay and Mary only had five.

So that separate bedrooms had anything to do with that or not.

Next to Mary's room, there was a morning room, a family room where they would go there most often for devotional just to be together as family.

It has six doors and two windows in a mantle.

So it was definitely the passageway for the whole house.

Their dining room was where the kitchen for the Falcon Rest Mansion is now.

When we did the restoration we put a modern, very serviceable but old-fashioned looking kitchen dining room was because we didn't wanna go across the breezeway to the kitchen.

And we used the hospital nurses' station to hide our very modern generic range.

Upstairs were the children's bedroom.

There were four bedrooms that opened out to the upstairs sitting room, which is some of the most beautiful architecture and the building has these three arched windows that look out over the grounds.

It was a children's playroom and school room.

They didn't have closets.

It is unusual to see closets in a places age.

A lot of places they tax houses according to the number of rooms they had.

Closets sometimes counted as a room.

People never liked to pay taxes.

We figured the Faulkners just said were rich enough to pay it or maybe they found a loophole that said," If it didn't go all the way to the ceiling, "it didn't count."

But they are original We had the original main electric breaker that was in the mansion when they were here.

We had the knob and tube wiring.

But now people ask us, "Is there anything you found in the walls?"

No, all the walls are solid brick inside and out.

One of the doctors from the hospital visited right after we opened and he brought us a Confederate $20 bill.

He said Dr. Dietrich had two of them in the wall under the wallpaper I suppose, in the mansion.

And he, Dr. Dietrich kept one.

He kept the other.

He gave it to us and we thought, "Well, why would people put money in the wall?"

Somebody said, "It's for good luck."

But of course, Confederate money was not negotiable in 1897.

So I figured Clay wanted the luck.

We didn't wanna waste the money.

So he used the Confederate money instead.

- Visitors often praise Falcon Rest ability to demonstrate how social elite lived over a century ago, but the mansion also has a strange ability to make you feel right at home.

Charlien talks to us about she and George helped encapsulate the experience of being transported back to the turn of the century.

(melodious music) - When the hospital was here they had built an ugly concrete block building behind the mansion as a laundry room cannery and built processing plant for the hospital.

They were Seventh Day Adventists, so they didn't eat meat, they didn't drink caffeine and they didn't give any to their patients even though most of them were Baptist Church of Christ.

When we got it, we started getting all these church and senior groups wanting to come and tour and then they wanted to eat.

So we started out serving them on the veranda but that only works in good weather.

So we decided to go ahead and redo the building out back that the doctor had built.

Add onto it and we do it.

My husband designed the courtyard in about 20 years ago to give us a private place outside for events like weddings.

Of course, now the holly hedge surrounds the whole original part of the property that we bought in 1989.

So it makes the whole thing private.

It's like you leave the 21st century, you go through the secret entrance into the hedge and you enter the 1890s.

Mr. Faulkner named his mansion Falcon Rest.

I think it's very appropriately named because people always say it seems so restful and peaceful here and it's very elegant, but it's not garish like a lot of things from the period were.

It's a friendly elegance.

It just kind of draws people in, makes someone wanna sit on the veranda and rock.

And even though it's fancy, it feels like home.

(melodious music) - Falcon Rest continues to attract visitors from all over the country and hopefully you can see why.

When you walk through the gardens and over the threshold you'll feel right at home in the late 1800s.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Where Stories Live.

If you like this program please visit our website and stay tuned for our next episode where we will go Where Stories Live.

(melodious music) (upbeat music) - [Announcer] This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

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