Nina Cardona and Emily Siner had a cool article over at WPLN a while ago about William Edmondson 's sculpture selling for three-quarters of a million dollars. I've been thinking about it ever since because Edmondson made gravestones. That was how he got into the sculpture-making thing in the first place, making headstones.
I've been in a lot of Nashville's graveyards. I've never seen an Edmondson headstone. I've asked around and the general consensus seems to be that they've probably just been stolen over the years, which means that they may still survive, stuck in a corner of someone's basement.
These are not the only things of historical significance missing from history which I suspect may still be around.
Take the state museum's mummy. Jeremiah George Harris, a newspaper editor (newspaper editors used to be a lot weirder) here in Nashville, ended up in Egypt and, so the story goes, did a couple of favors for a guy who thanked him by giving him six mummies, which he then shipped back to Tennessee. So, where are the other five?
Some of you older readers may remember the carousel horses in Harvey's department store downtown, which originally came from the carousel at Glendale Park, an amusement park run by one of the streetcar companies which was situated out by Lipscomb University. When Harvey's closed, the historic horses disappeared. You have to think that some of those horses may have survived and are being kept in someone's attic or garage.
I also have a hard time believing that all of the papers of the Baxter brothers aren't anywhere. The Baxters are some of my favorite historical Nashvillians. Lawyers, Masons, Confederates, but also railroad men and educational reformers, they helped run some of the most important railroads in town (Baxter, Tennessee is named for one of them.) and at least a couple of them were some of the earliest faculty at Vanderbilt's law school. They were married into some of Nashville's most prominent families and Edmund, at least, had a really awesome beard. Hell, Jere was beloved enough to get a school and a statue in his honor and hated enough that his enemies put up a fake statue of the great land pirate John Murrell to make fun of Baxter. These are some characters! How do four literate, important lawyers leave no paper trail? Again, I think that's in someone's attic and they don't realize what they have.
But it would be fun to find that stuff now, recover what we thought we lost.
