The Sam Davis Home is one of Tennessee’s most significant Confederate memorial properties. Samuel (“Sam”) Davis, born here in 1842, enlisted in the Rutherford Rifles (Co. I, 1st Tennessee Infantry) in 1861 and fought in western Virginia. After his enlistment expired, he returned home and joined Capt. Henry B. Shaw’s Coleman’s Scouts, Confederate cavalrymen who gathered information on Union troop movements and were considered spies by Federal authorities. In November 1863, while carrying documents and newspapers to Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, he was captured near Pulaski. Union Gen. Grenville M. Dodge interrogated Davis and offered him freedom if he would reveal who had supplied him with confidential reports from the Union camp in Pulaski. Davis refused, and after a quick military trial he was sentenced to death and executed in Pulaski on November 27, 1863. Davis and his reported statement, “If I had a thousand lives to live, I would have them all rather than betray a friend,” quickly became legendary. In 1909, the State of Tennessee dedicated a monument to the “boy hero of the Confederacy” on the state capitol grounds. In the 1920s, local residents acquired his family home and 168 acres of the farm as a memorial. In addition to the main house, the historic farm includes Davis’s gravesite and several outbuildings, including slave quarters, a kitchen, and a smokehouse, and a museum interprets Davis’s life and the war in Rutherford County.