Maxwell House coffee paid for Cheekwood Estate and Gardens, the 55-acre botanical garden and art museum you have arrived at. Leslie Cheek made his family's fortune as a distributor for Maxwell House coffee — named for the Nashville hotel where the blend was first served, which is also where Theodore Roosevelt reportedly tasted it and pronounced it good to the last drop, though the story may be apocryphal. With that coffee fortune the Cheek family commissioned a Georgian Revival mansion and elaborate gardens beginning in 1929, completed in 1932 at the depth of the Depression.
When the family could no longer sustain the estate privately, they donated it to the city in 1957. Cheekwood has since developed into one of the South's premier botanical institutions, with collections of sculpture, decorative arts, and an art museum housed in the original mansion. The garden's seasonal installations — especially the holiday light displays — draw visitors from across the region.
The grounds give a sense of what Nashville's old money looked like when expressed in landscape and stone rather than neon.