Albert Gallatin Harris purchased this farm in 1829 and built the present house in 1857. After camping on the land during the Civil War, Union troops ransacked the farm and killed or stole all the livestock, but they did not burn the house because the Harris family had cared for a sick Union officer and nursed him back to health. When Union soldiers stole nine-year-old Ada Harris’s pony, she shouted after them in anger. According to a former slave, Harris and his son John hid silver coins under the brick floor in the basement and paper money beneath the horse troughs, while the slave and Harris’s wife Lucy Pernecia checked each day to make sure passing Union soldiers had not taken it. In 1863, at age fifteen, John Williamson Harris ran away from home and joined the 20th Tennessee Cavalry under Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, serving as a courier for the rest of the war. Oak trees on the property still bear long metal spikes driven into them by troops who camped there, and ax heads and a bayonet have also been found. The farmhouse is the only remaining residence in McKenzie that sheltered both Federals and Confederates, and family receipts confirm that members of Forrest’s cavalry frequented the farm between 1862 and 1865, including Confederate Capt. William Lindsay, who bought corn at $2.50 per bushel to feed Forrest’s horses and hired Harris’s blacksmith to nail on sixty-two horseshoes. Although remodeled in 1957, the house still retains its original frame beneath the brick, along with the basement fireplace, hand-hewn beams, and foundation, and the farm has been placed under a permanent conservation easement with the Land Trust for Tennessee.