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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
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Description of Subject Matter: Nathaniel Frances Cheairs IV, a French Huguenot descent, was born on the property on December 6, 1818. As he matured, he began courting a girl from Spring Hill. The object of his affection was Miss Susan Peters McKissack, daughter of Master William McKissack II. When Nathaniel IV announced to his father of his intentions of marrying Susan, his father had only one objection. All of the “Nathaniels” prior to Nathaniel IV had married girls by the name of “Sarah.” His father wanted him to carry on that tradition and find someone else to wed. Nathaniel IV wanted his father’s blessing on the marriage and persisted about marrying Susan. His father even offered his son a sum of gold worth $5,000 to find another bride, but Nathaniel IV would not accept. Then, Susan’s father made an offer that Nathaniel IV could not refuse. Being the owner of the brickyard in Spring Hill, Master McKissack offered to supply all of the free bricks and free slave labor needed to construct a house once Nathaniel and Susan were married. Being the wise businessman that he was, Nathaniel III saw that offer and gave his blessing upon his son’s marriage. Nathaniel Frances Cheairs IV and Susan Peters McKissack were wed on September 2, 1841. As a wedding gift, Nathaniel III gave his son the $5,000 in gold that he had previously offered his son.
For ten years, Nathaniel and Susan made their home in a two-story log cabin located at the back of the property. Susan gave birth to three of their four children while living in the cabin. In 1851, the smokehouse and kitchen house were completed. The Cheairs would reside in the upstairs of the kitchen before and during the construction of the mansion. Construction on the mansion commenced in 1852 and was completed in 1855. Completion of the mansion was delayed for three years because of Nathaniel’s own vision of the home. He stated that he wished the house to stand for over 100 years. Construction of the home was halted three separate times. The mansion was ov ...More...
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (TN -- Spring Hill -- Rippavilla) directly related to this one:
[Display ALL photos on one page]:
2014_TN_Rippavilla: TN -- Spring Hill -- Rippavilla (46 photos from 2014)
2010_TN_Rippavilla: TN -- Spring Hill -- Rippavilla (103 photos from 2010)
2006_TN_Rippavilla: TN -- Spring Hill -- Rippavilla (5 photos from 2006)
Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject:
[Civil War][Structures]
1997 photos: Since 1984, I've lived in Silver Spring, Maryland.
From 1981 to 2002, photos were taken using a Pentax ME Super camera.
From 1989 to 2002, I was doing all pictures as prints (instead of slides which I had grown up on).
In 1997, at the age of 40, my photo obsession began and I started taking thousands of photos per year.
In September, 2002, I switched to digital cameras and the number of photos exploded.
Image quality is going to be variable because these are scans of slides and/or prints.
The images shown here were scanned in two phases. In the early years of the website, I rescanned a selection of pre-digital images, all at fairly low quality settings. During the COVID pandemic, I launched the Great Rescanning Effort, rescanning ALL of my pre-digital images from various media (prints, slides, negatives, etc) at higher resolution and quality settings. Mutilple versions of images -- some from the initial scannning phase, some from prints, some from slides/negatives -- were posted so there are frequently duplicate images on the same page. At some point, I hope to have time to do a final review and get rid of the duplicates but that'll have to wait until all of the pre-digital images are finally posted.
Trips this year: North Carolina (Dad), Florida (Mom), using a time share in Arkansas to visit Civil War sites in Missouri, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Civil War became my excuse to see places I'd never been to in my life and it was a great motivator for 20 years or so.
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