Oaklands Mansion

Oaklands Mansion was the home of the Maney family from approximately 1815 to 1884 on property inherited by Dr. James Maney and his wife, Sally Hardy Murfree Maney, from Sally’s father, Lieutenant colonel Hardy Murfree, for whom Murfreesboro is named. It began as a two-room brick house and was expanded over time into a large mansion, while barns, slave quarters, a kitchen, a smokehouse, a carriage house, stables, brick kilns, and other buildings stood on the grounds, though only the mansion and portions of the spring house and root cellar remain. The first section of the house was built between 1815 and 1820 as a one-and-one-half story masonry residence, a second section was added in the 1820s, and a third section added between 1830 and 1840 included a second story addition to the original section and a two-story rear wing. After Sally Maney’s death in 1857, her son Lewis and daughter-in-law Rachel Adeline Maney took over Oaklands and hired local architect Samuel Richard Sanders to design the front Italianate addition, completed in 1860, with a verandah, arched entrance, four front rooms, and a freestanding spiral staircase, making Oaklands one of the most elegant homes in Middle Tennessee. Lewis and Adeline lived there for about one year before the Civil War began, and like many prosperous Southern families, the Maneys lost much of their wealth and property during and after the war as emancipation ended the free labor on which the plantation depended and other hardships forced sales of Oaklands land. In the late 1860s, most of the front drive was subdivided and sold as Maney’s Addition, and in 1872 Dr. Maney sold 20 acres to the city of Murfreesboro for Evergreen Cemetery. In 1884, the mansion and 198 surrounding acres were sold at public auction to pay Lewis Maney’s debts, passing to Elizabeth Swope, then to her daughter Tempe and son-in-law George Darrow, and later in 1912 to Mr. and Mrs. R. B. Roberts. After Mrs. Roberts sold the home in 1936 to the Jetton family, the house was left vacant in 1954, sold to the city in 1958, and then saved from demolition in 1959 when local women formed the Oaklands Association, Inc. The city conveyed the house and 0.3 acres to the association for a museum, Oaklands opened for tours in the early 1960s, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, and remains one of Murfreesboro’s most treasured landmarks.

Murfreesboro, Tennessee · United States