Adelicia Hayes Franklin Acklen, one of the wealthiest women in the antebellum South, built Belmont Mansion between 1849 and 1860, and you are looking at one of the finest surviving antebellum houses in Tennessee. Adelicia inherited enormous wealth from her first husband, cotton planter Isaac Franklin, whose fortune was built entirely on enslaved labor — he is estimated to have been the largest individual slave trader in American history. With that wealth she built Belmont: a 180-acre estate with an Italianate mansion, formal gardens, a water tower, a menagerie of exotic animals, and one of the largest private art collections in the country.
During the Civil War the estate was occupied by both Confederate and Union troops at different moments. Adelicia negotiated with both sides to preserve her cotton and her property — a display of pragmatic power rarely acknowledged in women of the era. After her death the property became Belmont University.
The mansion is open for tours, and its restored interiors make the scale of antebellum wealth — and its human cost — vivid in a way that text cannot.