Oaklands Mansion

This elegant antebellum home witnessed the surrender of Murfreesboro to Confederate forces in 1862. Confederate President Jefferson Davis visited, and the house changed hands between armies throughout the war.

Oaklands Mansion in Murfreesboro was built in four distinct phases over four decades, growing from a modest two-room brick house near a spring into one of the most elegant Italianate estates in Middle Tennessee -- all of it constructed by enslaved laborers for the Maney family. Dr. James Maney and his wife Sallie Murfree Maney, whose father Colonel Hardy Murfree gave the town its name, settled here in the late 1810s, forcibly bringing eighteen enslaved people from North Carolina. By 1840, nearly one hundred enslaved people lived, worked, and died on the estate, performing carpentry, masonry, agriculture, and domestic service. In the early 1840s, Dr. Maney moved most operations to his Mississippi Delta plantation, tearing apart enslaved families and friendships as nearly half were forced to migrate.

The mansion's most dramatic chapter came during the Civil War. On July 13, 1862, Confederate cavalry under Nathan Bedford Forrest launched a surprise attack on Union forces stationed near Oaklands' front lawn, and the Maney children watched the battle unfold from a second-floor window. Union Colonel William Duffield of the 9th Michigan Infantry was wounded in the fighting and carried into the mansion, which served as an impromptu field hospital. Duffield recovered over several months in the Maney home, where his wife joined him as a guest, beginning an unlikely friendship between the Union officer and the Confederate-sympathizing family that endured long after the war. Confederate President Jefferson Davis himself stayed at Oaklands from December 12-14, 1862, during his visit to Murfreesboro, and local legend holds that the Confederates accepted the town's surrender over a dinner of black-eyed peas and sweet potatoes inside the mansion, though no documents verify this.

The war devastated the Maneys financially. The abolition of slavery eliminated their principal source of income, and they were forced to sell Oaklands at public auction in 1884. The house passed through several families before falling into severe disrepair by the 1950s, narrowly saved from demolition in 1959 when local women formed the Oaklands Association and restored it as a house museum.

The spirits of those who suffered and died within these walls appear never to have left. Oaklands has been called one of the most haunted houses in middle Tennessee and was the first historic home in the area to offer ghost tours. Visitors report seeing women in period dresses gliding through darkened hallways -- some believe they are the war widows who wept inside these rooms when news came from the battlefields. The apparitions of children have been seen wandering the halls, said to be the souls of young ones who died in the house during its long history. Soldiers in uniform have been spotted on the grounds where Forrest's cavalry charged and where Colonel Duffield lay wounded. The sound of a funeral dirge has been heard carried on the wind, and unexplained cold spots move through rooms that have no drafts. Staff and visitors commonly report an overwhelming feeling of being watched, particularly in the older sections of the house dating to the original 1818 construction.

The mansion offers self-guided night tours and seasonal ghost tours each October, when visitors walk the dimly lit halls as guides dressed in traditional black mourning attire recount the macabre traditions surrounding death and dying in the nineteenth century. A coffin sits in the parlor, mirrors are draped in black, and period funeral music plays -- a recreation of the Victorian mourning customs that the Maney family would have observed as war and disease claimed their loved ones and the people they had enslaved.