05/07/2026
The Tennessean • Wed, Jun 15, 1983 • Page 60 • (Nashville, Tennessee)
Story of 'Kingston' Springs Covers Rich Canvas
By ANN BETTS
KINGSTON SPRINGS - With plentiful fish, wildlife and mineral springs, and with a hardwood forest, the Harpeth River Valley near here has been rich in natural blessings since before the memory of man.
About 1,200 years ago people came into the region - perhaps overland, perhaps on the waters that white people would later call Turnbull and Harpeth. The sulphur springs may have drawn them here, as they would draw holiday crowds in much later times.
Indians of the Mississippian era left a silent legacy on the land, which continues to yield evidence of their presence. They hunted, made pottery and buried their dead in slate-lined graves, creating mounds which sculpt the Cheatham County landscape to this day.
According to Sam Smith, archeologist for the state Department of Conservation, a large area of the county has been appropriated for study. Excavations made at Mound Bottoms in the late 1970s are intended for eventual public access.
Kingston Springs native Raymond Mays recalled that in his youth Indian paintings were plainly visible on a nearby bluff.
Since then the paintings have faded out of existence.
Not until the late 1700s did white people settle in the valley.
A man named Samuel Kingston dwelled here for a time before returning to Nashville to live.
The first families known to have established permanent homes here were the Dunns and the Mayses, whose descendants to the sixth generation continue to call Kingston Springs their home.
The Dunn place, a large home built of massive native logs, is still a landmark on Kingston Springs Road. On the town's highest hill the Dunns started a family cemetery which now serves as final resting place for many of the community's families.
"Kingston," as it is most often referred to by natives, has had several reasons for existence over the years, but the most obvious has always been “the springs."
Old-timers remember when the four sulphur springs and one free stone spring were the center of activity in the neighborhood and a drawing card for tourists from Nashville, Memphis and “all over the country."
Each of the springs had a different concentration of minerals, including black sulphur, white sulphur and types called lythia and chalybeate.
Advertised as a cure for indigestion, stomach problems and kidney trouble, the waters bubbled from concrete fountains.
Those "taking the waters" drank from dippers attached to the rock walls, and a shed provided shade for women in Victorian finery.
An 1855 advertisement in the Nashville Union and American announced that E.J. and J. Kreider were "ready to accommodate visitors" at the popular watering place, Kingston Springs.
The inn at which the Kreiders entertained guests was a rambling log structure surrounded by 200 shade trees. Grant's Band of Music provided entertainment, and cottages were avallable for those who preferred privacy.
Many visitors spent whole summers at the spa.
Room and board at the hotel ran to $1.50 a day in 1855, and that included the medicinal benefits of the famous springs.
Just after the turn of the century Matt Allen sold the springs and hotel to Arthur (Ott) Beard and W.C. West.
Beard, as a teenager, had helped Allen build the hotel, a replacement for the original structure which had been destroyed in a fire.
Through the early decades of this century, people continued to flock to Kingston Springs to socialize and take the waters. "Mr. Ott" quickly became one of the town's most memorable characters.
In addition to overseeing operations at the springs, he ran a general store, one of seven such businesses in the village at that time. ("Mr. Ott's" granddaughter, Priscilla Beard Dorris, with help from Raymond Mays, listed the other early mercantile establishments as Page's, Pendergrass', Major Moore's, Lampley's, Richardson's, and Smith & Davis.)
"Mr. Ott" also was the village undertaker, banker and, eventually, car dealer. When horseless carriages were a novelty, he undertook not only to sell them, but to teach each new owner to drive as part of the deal.
Dorris recalled her grandfather's account of a trip to Nashville with a fledgling driver who had a tendency to holler "whoa" rather than hit the brakes in emergencies. The new driver ran down a sow and her piglets, as well as a vegetable cart on West End, and upon returning home drove in the front and right out the back wall of his new garage.
Before autos became the main
of locomotion in Kingston life revolved around the railroad. Every boy in town wanted to be either a conductor or an engineer.
The "accommodation” a commuter train which ran short hops out of Nashville, brought guests to the springs. Trains also handled timber from the mill.
"This was a timber town," Raymond Mays declared. In the early days of this century much of Cheatham County's timber was still virgin. "The stave mill covered four acres," Mays rcalled.
Dorris recalled the names of three country doctors who served the area. Drs. Liles and Harris Grove buggies through the countryside, while Dr. Moore tended later generations, making house calls in a car.
Education in the village began with Vanderbilt Preparatory School, a private academy with no known connection to the Nashville university. It is thought to have been endowed by the Methodist Church.
Youngsters attending the school were governed by strict rules regarding compulsory church attendance and limited contact with students of the opposite s*x. Parents responded to the advertisement for a school in a "healthy place, with good society, and no whiskey sold in the village."
Kingston Springs' first public school, now more than 80 years old, still stands next to the Methodist Church. It has been purchased by the city for restoration as a historical landmark.
The present elementary school serves grades K-4. Residents speak hopefully of location of a high school here in the near future.
The town now boasts what is considered one of the finest volunteer fire departments in the Midstate. Five active church congregations (Baptist, Church of Christ, Methodist, Nazarene and Pentecostal) offer spiritual guidance to the town's population of approximately 1,100.
Kingston has had rural mail delivery since the late 1800s.
Carrier Tom Moss, with his horse Joe, regularly took a buggy full of letters up the hollows and across Turnbull in the years before World War I.
During Prohibition, "Kingston was a pretty rough place," according to Raymond Mays.
Revenuers raided stills throughout the hollows, and on one occasion a complete still was assembled as an example and warning against
manufacturing moonshine. Mays says a small boy walking through the crowd with his father spotted the exhibit and cried out, "Look, daddy, they got out still!
Several new businesses have sprung up in Kingston since completion of Interstate 40. Motels, restaurants and subdivisions continue to thrive in the area.
Today, the fertile valley is still green. The old Beard home still gazes benevolently down from its oak-clad hill, though no one comes to take the waters anymore.
