There’s a bad smell emanating from a grassy, wooded site at the intersection of Gallatin Road and Briley Parkway. It’s the musty aroma of centuries-old building materials and the raw earth of recent bulldozing, overlaid with the reek of willful ignorance and bureaucratic malfeasance. It is the stench of Evergreen Place.
The outlines of the story are simple, although several key facts are in dispute. What is undisputed is that Nashville lost one of its oldest and most historically significant homes, bulldozed by owner Robert N. Moore in favor of a Home Depot. He razed it after Metro had issued, then revoked, a demolition permit. Moore and his lawyer, Tom White—who negotiated the destruction of the Jacksonian—claim they didn’t know the permit had been revoked until after the flattening.
Adding insult to injury, Metro is now negotiating an agreement with White that would absolve Moore of legal liability for the violation. What Metro gets in exchange is $3,000 to cover the cost of three days of archaeological investigation of the site. The agreement also requires Moore to preserve two log outbuildings that escaped the carnage, and to use some of the ancient timbers of the main house as an historical marker.
Metro Council member Mike Jameson—who represents parts of East Nashville but not the Evergreen property—is calling for the council to conduct an investigation. “I have gym shoes that smell better than this,” Jameson says. “The owner has stated that he wasn’t made aware of the stop work order. Not only are there photographs of the order posted on Evergreen’s front door, there’s sworn eyewitness testimony that Mr. Moore was specifically told about the order.”
Now to the gnarly details of Sept. 22:
10:38 a.m. Owner Robert Moore and his attorney apply for a demolition permit. Metro Codes staffer Rick Shepherd informs Tim Walker of the Metro Historic Zoning Commission of the application. Walker, mindful of the building’s National Register status, tells Shepherd that the demolition violates a state statute forbidding owners of pre-1865 historically significant homes from razing them if they can be repaired at a reasonable cost. In a subsequent letter, Walker, disputing structural reports Moore commissioned, says the building is “structurally sound.”
11:38 a.m. Shepherd issues the demo permit on the orders of Sonny West, the deputy codes director who’s on vacation at the time. The Metro Historical Commission (MHC) typically signs off on such permits, but it is given no such opportunity here. Metro Codes chief Terry Cobb says “Sonny West, in consciously overriding the role of MHC in our permit process, made a bad judgment.”
1:30 p.m. After a two-hour delay, Shepherd informs MHC and Metro Legal that the permit has been issued. Then the scramble begins. Cobb reads Moore’s reports about the structural soundness of Evergreen. Legal studies the state statute that forbids demolition. MHC staffer Fred Zahn rushes to Evergreen, where he informs a contractor that a stop work order is in the pipeline.
2:39 p.m. The contractor, Camille Therrien, calls and informs Moore of the situation. (Therrien has signed an affidavit confirming that he notified Moore in advance.)
4 p.m. Metro Legal tells Codes to revoke the permit and issue a stop work order. “The revocation was because we determined that the permit had been issued in error,” Cobb explains. “We needed to spend some time to determine if the state statute applied to this case. The permit could have always been reinstated later. But demolition is so final.”
Shortly thereafter, Shepherd leaves a voice mail at the office of Dixie Earth Movers, the demolition contractor, informing them of the stop work order; he conveys the same information to attorney White’s secretary. (White says neither he nor the demolition contractor learned of the calls until the next morning).
4:30 p.m. Building inspector Johnny Hargis, at Cobb’s order, posts a stop work order on one of Evergreen’s front columns and photographs it. MHC’s Fred Zahn witnesses the posting. Between 4:30 and 5, Shepherd faxes the permit revocation to the offices of White, Moore and Dixie Earth Movers.
5 p.m. Zahn leaves the site, confident that Evergreen will be there the next day.
5:30 p.m. Tom White arrives at Evergreen with Moore and the demolition contractor and unlocks the gate. According to White, about 10 people from the neighborhood are standing across the street, “and they began applauding when they see the big equipment arrive—they’ve complained about vagrants in the house and stray dogs on the property for years. We saw no stop work order anywhere. I’ve seen the photographs at Codes, and the sign looks very small. And why didn’t they post it on the front gate if they wanted to make sure we saw it?”
7 p.m. Evergreen Place is history.
The significance of that history has little to do with the fact that the house served from 1980 to 1995 as a museum honoring country music legend Jim Reeves. The central log core was built around 1790 as the home of the Rev. Thomas B. Craighead, who arrived in Nashville in 1785 to serve as the area’s first Presbyterian minister. As a living symbol of Nashville’s earliest years, Evergreen was a county treasure.
Whether Evergreen could have been repaired—and at what cost—will remain an open question. The house had stood vacant and unmaintained since the museum closed in 1995. It wasn’t secured, and vagrants had camped out there. The property was tied up in bankruptcy court until 2004, shortly before Moore bought it. MHC could not proceed with any preservation efforts before then because there was no clear ownership.
The reports Moore commissioned paint a fairly damning picture of an unsafe structure. One from Kroeger Real Estate says that repairing Evergreen “is quite likely a money-losing proposition,” whereas clearing the site and selling to a national retailer could easily yield a $1.4 million profit.
Moore never provided MHC with copies of these reports. He did, however, send a letter to Sonny West on Aug. 25 saying that in his opinion the building wasn’t salvageable, though West failed to notify MHC of Moore’s clear intention to demolish. And despite repeated requests, MHC staff weren’t given access to Evergreen until Sept. 16, less than a week before the demolition. On that Friday, staff were permitted inside, as part of a tour group that also included Sonny West, Tom White, area Metro Council member Michael Craddock and a few neighborhood representatives.
MHC’s Zahn, who worked for 15 years in the construction and carpentry of historic structures, says Evergreen was eminently salvageable. “It was 20 times better than Sunnyside,” the historic home in Sevier Park that Metro renovated to serve as the MHC office. When Zahn was finally able to see the structural reports Moore commissioned, after the demolition, he “found no evidence that the people who made these reports had any experience with historic log or timber frame construction. They even used the wrong terminology for structural parts.”
Margaret Slater, a preservation specialist, says she was “pleasantly surprised” by the condition of the house when she toured it. “I’m not a structural engineer, but I’ve been in a million old houses. The floors were incredibly stable. We had 15 people upstairs, and the floors didn’t move.” She also saw “lots of very old millwork and hardware, which could have been salvaged.”
What happened to Evergreen Place “was the absolute worst-case scenario,” Zahn says. “If it couldn’t have been restored on site, it could have been moved.” He says Spring Hill Cemetery was willing to provide a place for it. “And preservation contractors would have paid for the chance to disassemble the house and recycle the materials into other historic structures.”
Whether Metro will prosecute Moore under the state statute has yet to be determined, says Metro Legal director Karl Dean. It is Tom White’s opinion that the statute is not applicable, because it pertains only to residences. “The place became a museum in 1980,” White says. “It clearly has not been a residence in three decades.” But Evergreen was a residence for almost 200 years; its historical significance was as a residence and the structure retained its residential form.
Karl Dean, saying the agreement is still under negotiation, declines to say why Metro is willing to forgo prosecution for the stop work order violation in exchange for three days’
MHC director Ann Roberts defends her willingness to sign the agreement by saying that even a limited archaeological investigation could at least salvage something. “If we give up the archaeology, we may get the public knowledge that they knew of the stop work order, but we’d be giving up valuable historical knowledge.”
The story of Evergreen Place ultimately demonstrates how fiendishly hard it is to preserve historic architecture in Nashville. White points to the maximum fine for codes violations as $50. “At that rate, Mr. Moore could have done a bulldozer job at night. Why pay any experts for reports and investigations?”
Mayor Bill Purcell points to the weakness in the state statute, “which doesn’t explain who decides what’s repairable at reasonable cost, nor does it provide sanctions if someone violates the statute.” Purcell says he’s looking at developing “our own ordinance to give the Metro Historic Commission a true, active and controlling role in permits issued for historic structures.”
