Hello, dear friends and family,

Okay, I have been trying to get my pictures onto a contact sheet so I could show more than one pic at a time, but the gods are against the idea.  If I keep trying, I'll never post again!  And I've been told that's not good -----so here we are.

Has it really already been two weeks???  Time flies when you are having fun!  And we have had some fun lately.  K and I drove down to Nashville on Thursday,  April 26 to check out our old stomping grounds.  It has been 15 years or so since we lived in Brentwood so we knew things would have changed - but boy did things change.  It was late when we pulled into the Embassy Suites in Brentwood, so we called that a really long day and after a few meeting of the minds sessions, we went to bed.

Friday, we got up raring to go - Okay, I got up, went down, had breakfast after trying to get K out of bed.  I brought breakfast back up to him and after waving coffee and doughnuts under his nose for a while, K made it up also.  We decided to go take a peek at out old house first.  We found it after a few turnarounds - surprise!  The road no longer goes straight past our neighborhood and on to Franklin - it dead ends at a gated home.  The house looked older (somewhat as we do!) and not as well cared for as it was, but it was still there.  The neighborhood was about 3 times the size it was and all the wooded areas above our house were developed.  Wilson Pike (and yes, turns out it is named after us, can you imagine) now curves and goes to a High School complex larger than PCEP.

Carnton in Franklin, TN 

225 Unknown Confederate Soldiers

We went on to Franklin and the Main Street area was mostly unchanged - the stores were different, but at least main street was recognizable.  Tons of antique shops - we shopped until the dust got the better of us and then decided to look up the Carter House and Carnton.  For the uninitiated, there was a huge and very bloody battle during the Civil War in Franklin and these are 2 historical houses that were here during the battle.  We found the Carter House, but something was going on and it was packed, so we went on to Carnton.  Carnton found itself just about in the middle of the melee and was made a hospital for the Confederate army.  Carnton is the setting for a book, The Widow of the South,  about the mistress of the house and the work that she did there during and following the war.  (It's a good read and a wonderful story of devotion and perseverance.  I highly recommend it.)  Anyway, when we were living in TN we took most of our house guests through both of these houses and the Historical Society was starting to plan the restoration of Carnton.  I was excited to see the changes.  I had a  talk with K about the tour and how he would need to behave during the tour and he agreed he could handle it and wanted to see the house.  I was so proud of him - I know how hard it was for him to not talk and not tell his stories to all the people around us.  But he did it!  He respected the fact that the woman who was giving the tour was working and not just chatting as it seems.  I gave the tour guide one of our cards and told her we might need to leave the tour early and she was very understanding.  But we didn't have to and what a joy it was to see him try so hard to be respectful of the situation.  K has always had a strong work ethic and respect for people's work and I got to see that aspect of him again for a little bit.  The restoration was complete and beautiful and some of the stories had changed as they learned new information about the family.

The two pictures you see are K at Carnton and also at the largest confederate cemetery on the grounds of Carnton.  The story of Carnton tells of the establishment of the Confederate Cemetery and how Carrie McGavock spent her life trying to identify each soldier buried there.

Major David Wilson
and Corporal Kaye Wilson

 To the Memory

Of

David Wilson

1742 - 1804

Major.

Continental Army

Pioneer Settler

Legislator

Whose Name

Wilson County

Proudly Bears

By the end of Friday K was ready to come back home.  So we planned to find the memorial to Major David Wilson in Lebanon, TN and the Wilson Cemetery in Galatin, TN on Saturday and head on home.  We had read about both of these in the family history K's brother D shared with us a couple of years ago.  First stop was Lebanon, about 30 minutes away from Brentwood.  Lebanon had a website, so I kind of knew where we were headed.  I also found that it is nicknamed the Biggest Antique Town in America - our kind of place!  There were a lot of shops and we tinkered about for a bit, asked a few people if they knew of a monument to Major David Wilson in town without any luck until we visited the last little shop.  The owner there knew about the monument, but said Lebanon had built a new Courthouse and he wasn't sure if the monument had been moved, but that there was a memorial monument there that was new and gave us directions.  We drove over to the courthouse and the first thing we saw was a new memorial to all the Lebanon veterans who had died from WWI and later.  Disappointment!!!  But we walked around to the front and there it was!  Wow!  It is hard to imagine that we lived in TN for 5 years and missed this entirely!  It was really exciting to find this, but the day was about to get even more exciting!

Hey, these pics are going in better than I had expected!  Ha!  Well, I want to post this tonight, so.....

.........to be continued

Love and blessings, Mary