West of the Nashville Turnpike stood the home of Mary Kate Patterson, a Confederate spy who assisted Capt. Henry B. Shaw's Coleman's Scouts, a Confederate cavalry unit and spy network serving the Army of Tennessee, from 1862 to 1865. She befriended Federal soldiers and obtained passes to Nashville, where she secured supplies and messages and smuggled them to the Scouts in the false bottom of her buggy. Her brother Everard Patterson also served in the Scouts, and her family sheltered and fed Confederate soldiers, using arrangements of louvers and lanterns in the windows to signal when it was safe to come in for medical help and hot meals. Her best-known mission came in November 1863, when her neighbor Sam Davis, one of the youngest Scouts, asked her and her cousin Robbie Woodruff to get a list of items in Nashville for Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg. Patterson later recalled their last meeting, when she brought Davis a warm breakfast and spent Sunday with him shortly before Federal troops in Giles County captured and executed him for spying. She then traveled to Pulaski to identify his body. In 1864 she married Davis's half-brother John Davis, also a Scout. She lived in La Vergne for most of her life, and when she died in 1931 she became the first woman buried in the Confederate Circle in Nashville's Mt. Olivet Cemetery.