McAlister's Crossroads stands on what was a 12000-acre Revolutionary War land grant that John McAlister bought in 1807 from the estate of General Francis Nash, for whom Nashville was named. The crossroads was the site of a U.S. Post Office and lay near Cabin Row Plantation, McAlister's home. In 1828, thirty-seven years before the Emancipation Proclamation, he gave his sixty-two slaves their freedom and 1000 acres.