Hello everybody, I hope you had a safe and fun Memorial Day and are looking forward to an awesome summer! As I said in the last article, I am doing a series on historical homes here in Rutherford County. This month’s article is special to me because it deals with family.

I will be talking about the oldest frame home in Rutherford County, built in 1807 in the Blackman community. The home, located on Blackman Road, is known as the Bass-Manson-Batey Home.

My first cousin, Kari Norton Batey now lives in this home along with her husband, Charlie, and their daughter, Eliza.

James Bass, who was a Revolutionary War veteran, and his wife, Temperance Jordan Bass, built the home in 1807. James died in 1826 and is buried on the back part of this property.

The home sits on what was originally a part of a Revolutionary War land grant that belonged to Maj. James Armstrong of North Carolina. It consisted of 6,000 acres that was divided between five of his kids, bringing each parcel down to 1,200 acres. Armstrong Valley Road is named after Maj. James Armstrong.

James Bass, who built the home in 1807, used hand-hewn red cedar logs.

The floors downstairs are ash and the floors upstairs are yellow poplar. It does still have some original 1807 windows and floors, but because of insurance purposes it now has a metal roof.

There is a root cellar under a detached building, also still on the property.

The home itself had five total fireplaces. The Bass girls slept in the front of the house, upstairs, with the Bass boys in the back.

Dr. James Manson later owned the home during the Civil War. He came from Pennsylvania. His wife was one of the Crockett girls from the Springfield home, which we talked about last month. The home was a hospital during the Battle of Stones River (1862–63).

Maj. Frank Ward of the Union Army led a charge during the battle and was shot through the lung. He made his way to Dr. Manson’s home several days after the Battle. Frank’s brother in Pennsylvania got word of his brother in Murfreesboro and he traveled to the Manson home to recover his brother’s body, but Frank was still alive. Frank did eventually die in the home, 12 days after the battle, and his family buried him in Pittsburgh.

As the war went on, sometimes the Yankees had control of the area and the home, and sometimes the Rebels had control. There was a time when a Major Givens was ready to burn the house down, until he found out that Dr. Manson was a Freemason, which saved the home.

Dr. Manson had his office at the home, and the structure is still attached to the house in the back.

Another story about the home: In the 1920s there was a cook who died upstairs. Her name was Pinky and she weighed nearly 400 pounds. In order to get her out of the home for proper burial, they had to remove the door upstairs and take her body out onto the balcony, where they had a pulley system to hoist her down. I’ll bet that was a sight.

I grew up with Dr. Manson’s great-great-grandson, Jim Manson. If you didn’t know, Manson Pike was named after Dr. Manson.

In the 1920s Ernest Green Burgess Sr. bought the home and lived there.

Charlie Batey’s parents, John Charles Batey Jr. and Effie Burgess Batey, bought the home in 1947.

The old home has seen a lot of history. It was around during the great quake of 1812 that occurred near the New Madrid fault near Memphis. That earthquake was somewhere close to an 8.2 on the Richter scale. It was so violent, the Mississippi river ran backwards and church bells rang in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from the aftershocks. The Bass-Manson-Batey Home stood from the times of the Battle of New Orleans in 1812 to the COVID pandemic of 2020, and throughout all of the world events in between, from the Civil War and two World Wars all the way to the Persian Gulf Wars and conflict in Afghanistan—this is not to mention the tornadoes and other weather events that occurred during that time.

If I could live to be 218 years old, I wish I could look a tenth as good as what the old Bass-Manson-Batey Home looks like, still standing on Blackman Road just outside of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

I want to thank Charlie Batey for siting down with me, and Kari and Eliza for helping make this piece happen.

Now, in closing, go out and do something nice for somebody. God bless.