If the Walls Could Speak: The Brooks-Woodring-Kemp House

snowfall February 2006

The plight of friends and family during this recent round of home foreclosures has been difficult to endure. I’m grateful to partner with a local Franklin bank that places importance on its hometown relationships and going the extra mile to help people in tough places of life. Though many folks here in Franklin have suffered through financial upheavals and restructuring of their lives, they thankfully continue to find themselves with their well-beloved roofs over their heads and familiar soil under their feet.

While I myself have been spared the immediacy of dislocation, the house in which I live has seen the trials of the lives of three families other than my own. I often wish my walls not only had ears but also had mouths with which to speak the stories of the events it has witnessed. One such story would be the happenings of the Woodring-Nave family who lived here from 1851 until 1911. Their tenure brought many joyful occasions as well as tragic events, births to deaths, weddings and funerals, the War and Reconstruction.

When in 1851 beautiful young Emily Nave, of the Bunker Hill, Tennessee Nave clan, married George Woodring, a newly-arrived stonemason, her father presented the couple with the generous gift of a spacious house set on a five-acre lot a mere three blocks from the Pulaski town square. It was the perfect place for the artistic craftsman to ply his trade in the booming economy of The Land of Milk and Honey. The 1850s in Tennessewas an epoch of plenty – plenty of land, plenty of crops, plenty of building, plenty of opportunity. George Woodring took advantage of all his opportunities, and when the War began in 1861, he was regarded as one of the leaders of Pulaski, Tennessee.

Unfortunately, Pulaski fell to Union occupation troops in early 1862. Military law was put into place, and the land of plenty became a land of deprivation.

Ever resourceful, however, the Woodring family became leaders in the underground resistance. In their case, underground was a literal term, in that, after a little careful tunneling, the root cellar under their house opened into a cavern that was part of the cave system underneath the town of Pulaski. Many people who might otherwise have starved received food via the Woodring tunnel.

At the war’s end, Mr. Woodring found himself in much the same situation as many other Tennesseans in that he had no currency with which to pay the exorbitant property taxes on his home and little hope of finding enough work to earn money to sustain life, much less pay taxes. The hopelessness of the situation draped over the family, and they prepared themselves to be evicted. Fortunately, however, the Woodrings had many friends in Pulaski. On the day of the foreclosure sale, these friends pooled their own limited funds and bought the Woodring’s house. These wonderful friends not only bought the house, but they, with great legal foresight, deeded the house back to Mrs. Woodring with the codicil that the house belonged solely to Emily Nave Woodring, who was “not responsible for any of the debts of her husband, George Woodring.” Brilliant!

The Woodrings raised four sons and one daughter in this house. Mr. Woodring lived alone in the house for a couple of years after Miss Emily passed on. After his death, the house was sold to the Butler family, who lived here until their deaths in the 1940s. The house stood abandoned from this time until we moved it in 1991 from its original house site in Pulaski to its current setting in the rolling hills of Williamson County, Tennessee. I’ve loved every moment of my time as an inhabitant of this house. Perhaps someday in the distant future, these walls will whisper my story to a new generation of inhabitants.

The house as I found it in February 1991--

Comments

[Gail Hyatt]

What a great story. You should include a photo or two.