Davies Manor - Property As A Historic Site

Property As A Historic Site

After Dr. William Little Davies bequeathed the home and land to his cousin, Ellen Davies-Rodgers, she began an extensive renovation and preservation project on the log home with the eventual goal of opening the home to the public for tours, with the help of the Zachariah Davies Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Ms. Davies added electricity to the home in the late 1950s and began hosting tours, meetings, parties, and events. Upon her 1994 death, the Davies Manor Association, Inc. took on the task of preserving and interpreting Davies Manor Plantation. Their mission "is to preserve and enhance Davies Manor Plantation as a portrayal of early Shelby County farm life for the education and enjoyment of visitors." The museum is currently open Tuesday through Saturday, 12:00 to 4:00. The tour consists of a short video, followed by a docent-led tour of the house. In 2011, museum staff added a self-led walking tour of the grounds to complement the tour of the log home.

Several outbuildings comprise the grounds of Davies Manor. Mose's Cabin is a small tenant cabin used to interpret the life of both slaves and tenant farmers on the plantation, and is named after Mose Frasier, a worker on the plantation in the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries. The Gotten Cabin is a 1948 structure built by a local family in the style and with the materials of the 1830s. The Liberty Cabin originated in Middle Tennessee and is built in the mid-Atlantic/ Pennsylvania style. Both cabins were moved to Davies Manor from Libertyland theme park in 2006.

Davies Manor was used as the setting for several scenes in the movie "One Came Home" (2010) directed by local film-maker Willy Bearden.

Read more about this topic:  Davies Manor

Famous quotes containing the words property, historic and/or site:

    By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    It is, all in all, a historic error to believe that the master makes the school; the students make it!
    Robert Musil (1880–1942)

    It’s given new meaning to me of the scientific term black hole.
    Don Logan, U.S. businessman, president and chief executive of Time Inc. His response when asked how much his company had spent in the last year to develop Pathfinder, Time Inc.’S site on the World Wide Web. Quoted in New York Times, p. D7 (November 13, 1995)