Historical records matching Adelicia Acklen
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About Adelicia Acklen
Adelicia Cheatham (Hayes)
- https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/7742953/adelicia-cheatham
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelicia_Acklen
- http://www.tennessee.gov/tsla/history/manuscripts/mguide09.htm
- http://haygenealogy.com/hay/patriots/civilwar/plantationbios.html
The wealthiest woman in the United States in the 19th century, known locally as Adelica Acklen (in spite of her many husbands).
In brief: She went down to Louisiana just after the Civil War started to protect her cotton from the late Isaac's 6,000 acres. First she had to talk the Confederates out of burning it, then she had to talk the Yankees into letting her ship it to New Orleans. That she succeeded is testament to her spirit and intelligence.
There she found the cotton market had collapsed, so she shipped it to England where it sold for then $900,000 dollars. Until she could leave the U.S., the gold was on deposit as a letter of credit with Rothschild.
She just kept on marrying wealthy men, and getting them to sign pre-nuptials.
Adelicia Hayes Franklin Acklen Cheatham was born on March 15, 1817, in Nashville, Tennessee.
In 1839, at age 22, she married Isaac Franklin, a slave trader and plantation owner. In 1846, after his death, she inherited the Fairvue Plantation in Gallatin, Tennessee, 8,700 acres (35 km2) of cotton plantations in Louisiana, more than 50,000 acres (200 km2) of undeveloped land in Texas, stocks and bonds, and 750 slaves.
In 1849, she remarried to Joseph Alexander Smith Acklen. Together, they built the Belmont Mansion in Nashville. In 1887, before she died, she sold the house, which was later used for Ward–Belmont College, followed by Belmont University.
Adelicia Acklen, "the mistress of Belmont," was one of the wealthiest and most interesting women of the antebellum south. She was the daughter of Oliver Bliss Hayes, a prominent Nashville lawyer, judge, Presbyterian minister, land speculator, and cousin to President Rutherford B. Hayes. Born in Nashville, TN in 1817, she was engaged at age 17 to Alphonse Gibbs when he precipitously died. Five years later in 1839 she married a 50-year old wealthy cotton planter and slave-trader, Isaac Franklin. They were married for seven years with four children (all died in childhood) when Isaac died of a stomach virus while tending to his plantations in Louisiana; the widow Adelicia Acklen was left with an inheritance of $1 million that included seven Louisiana cotton plantations, the two-thousand-acre Fairvue Plantation in Gallatin, Tennessee, more than 50,000 acres of undeveloped land in Texas, stocks and bonds, and 750 slaves.
Adelicia married her second husband, Colonel Joseph A. S. Acklen, in 1849. Joseph, a handsome attorney from Huntsville, Alabama, didn't quite sweep Adelicia off her feet; two days before they were to be married, Adelicia presented Joseph with a prenuptial agreement specifying that she would be sole owner and final authority over all the properties she brought into the marriage. The couple began immediate construction of Belmont (completed in 1853), a twenty-thousand-square-foot summer villa, with 36 rooms, including an art gallery, conservatories, lavish gardens, aviary, lake and zoo. The Acklen's with their four surviving children (two died in childhood) lived a sumptuous lifestyle, traveling between Belmont in the summer and their Louisiana plantations in the winter. The Acklen's entertained such notables as President Andrew Johnson, inventor Alexander Graham Bell, socialite Octavia La Vert, philosopher Thomas Huxley, and soldier of fortune William Walker, as well as numerous Confederate officers and political figures. Joseph was a superb businessman and plantation manager, who gave up his law practice to manage the family businesses, to triple his wife's fortune by 1860.
The Belmont Mansion in Nashville, Tennessee, built in 1850 by Joseph & Adelicia Acklen (she inherited 7 plantations and 659 slaves in Louisiana from her first husband, slavetrader and planter Isaac Franklin) Joseph died in 1863, at the Angola plantation in Louisiana, age 47, a carriage accident during the Civil War, and shortly thereafter Adelicia journeyed to Louisiana in an attempt to save the nearly 3,000 bales of cotton stranded on the Acklen plantations. She faced financial ruin when the Confederate army threatened to burn her cotton to keep it from falling into Union possession. She hired a gunboat to take her down the Mississippi River, and first negotiated with the Confederate's not to go on a raid to burn the cotton. Next she charmed the Union to release the cotton to her and to take it by wagon to New Orleans. In New Orleans, the bottom fell out of the cotton market price. Discovering that cotton was in high demand in England, she managed to get her cotton on a ship to Liverpool where it was sold to the Rothchilds of London for a reported $960,000 in gold.
In 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered and the Civil War was over. Three weeks during the summer of 1865, Adelicia and her children sailed for England to retrieve the money made from this cotton sale, after which she took her family on a European Vacation. They went to France and was presented to the court of Napoleon III. In February 1866, she was in Italy where she bought some statues for Belmont Mansion. Sometime later during 1866 came back home. In 1867 the fifty-year-old Adelicia Acklen married Dr. William Archer Cheatham, a respected Nashville physician. Cheatham also signed a prenuptial agreement. The wedding was held at the Belmont mansion and 2,000 people were invited. Napoleon III was on the guest list but couldn't come. Instead he sent Adelicia a gift, a diamond tiara which she wore to the reception. The couple was married for 17 years before the separated for unknown reasons. In early in 1887 Adelicia sold Belmont (now part of Belmont College) and left Nashville. Adelicia relocated to Washington, DC. with her daughter Pauline, her last surviving daughter. She died from pneumonia in New York City on May 4, 1887, while on a buying trip from her new home in Washington, DC, survived by one daughter, and three sons; her son Joseph was a U.S. Representative from Louisiana (and a proponent of women's suffrage).
Her son, Joseph H. Acklen, was a U.S. Representative from Louisiana.
- Residence: 20,000 sq ft. summer home patterned after an Italian villa. Belmont had running water throughout the mansion before the White House did. It had a zoo, a water tower and a bowling alley. , Belmont Mansion (originally named Belle Monte), completing construction by 1853, was set amidst elaborate gardens. There were numerous outbuildings, including the water tower, still standing today; it provided irrigation for the gardens and supplied water for the fountains. In front of the water tower stood a two-hundred-foot long greenhouse and a conservatory. Also on the grounds were an art gallery, gazebos (still standing today), a bowling alley, a bear house, and a zoo. Adelicia Acklen opened the estate to the citizens of Nashville to enjoy the zoo, as no public zoos existed., , In 1859, the Acklens hired Adolphus Heiman, a Prussian born architect working in Nashville, to enlarge and remodel Belmont Mansion. Heiman enclosed the back porch to create the Grand Salon, a very large room containing a French-style, barrel-vaulted ceiling. Architectural historians described the grand salon as “the most elaborate domestic space built in antebellum Tennessee.” With this new addition, Belmont Mansion contained thirty-six rooms and approximately 10,000 square feet of living space. An additional 8,400 square feet of service area was located in the basement. The house was filled with fine furniture, paintings, and marble statues., Two women from Philadelphia purchased Belmont Mansion and, in 1890, opened a girl’s school. Later merging with Nashville’s Ward Seminary, the school was renamed Ward-Belmont, and became an academy and junior college for women. In 952, the school again changed ownership and the school became the present-day Belmont University. Belmont University is a coeducational, liberal arts school offering bachelor and graduate degrees., Belmont Mansion was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. Belmont Mansion Association, a private nonprofit restoratio...
- Reference: MyHeritage Family Trees - SmartCopy: Dec 24 2017, 0:05:02 UTC
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Adelicia Acklen's Timeline
| 1817 |
March 15, 1817
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Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee, United States
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| 1840 |
1840
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| 1844 |
1844
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1844
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| 1850 |
May 20, 1850
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Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee, United States
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| 1852 |
October 20, 1852
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October 20, 1852
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| 1855 |
September 6, 1855
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Nashville, Davidson, Tennessee, United States
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| 1857 |
July 25, 1857
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Nashville, Davidson, Tennessee, United States
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