Construction began on Two Rivers Mansion, the home of David and Willie McGavock, in 1859, and when completed almost twenty years later, the house was one of the most prominent structures in Nashville and overlooked the McGavocks' 1,100-acre farm. For more than a hundred years after Euro-American expansion into the Cumberland River Valley in the mid-to-late 18th century, the land within this ox-bow curve of the Cumberland River, six miles northeast of downtown Nashville, was known as McSpadden's Bend and changed hands many times. Nicholas Coonrod received a 640-acre land grant there in 1784, sold it ten years later to David Buchanan of Virginia, and between 1805 and 1812 Buchanan sold nearly 500 acres to settle debts. In 1812 Willie Barrow bought 175 acres and added other properties in the bend, but after the Panic of 1819 he was forced to sell. William Harding then purchased several tracts and moved there in 1823; by 1832 he had assembled more than 1,100 acres, where he raised cotton and livestock and operated a still. Harding married Elizabeth Clopton in 1831, died in May 1832, and their daughter, William Elizabeth Harding, called Willie, inherited the estate when she turned eighteen and married David McGavock in 1850. Together they built Two Rivers Mansion, and the McGavock family remained the last private owners before the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County acquired the property in 1966 and redeveloped it as a park. Little is known about the estate during the Civil War, but afterward the McGavocks leased houses on the property to laborers and their families through tenant farming or sharecropping, and some of these tenants may have been people formerly enslaved to the family. Although the property declined in value after the war, by 1880 its 700 improved acres, 400 unimproved acres, and 100 wooded acres were valued at about $100,000, nearly twice its 1860 worth. In 1887 David McGavock and his son Frank bought the estate's first Morgan horses and began a stud farm, and the Two Rivers Stock Farm also included cattle, a garden, an orchard, and a dairy, with more than fifty buildings such as barns, horse stalls, tenant houses, and sheds. A tornado destroyed many of these structures in 1933. After the Panic of 1893 the farm neared bankruptcy, and in the early 1900s Frank's son Spence preserved it by leasing it out while he worked as a traveling shoe and boot salesman. After Spence died in 1936, his widow Mary Louise Bransford McGavock moved to Melrose while caretakers continued farming, then returned in 1954 and stayed until 1965. In 1966 she sold the mansion and 475 acres to the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County for one million dollars.