byChrisWhite – 2021

Street names are stranger than fiction, and heavier. You don’t name a road without consequence; believe me, I’ve worn too many hats to think otherwise: police officer, real estate developer, county planner, even the guy on the 911 board who votes to decide where the ambulance turns left or right. I’ve been in rooms where we argued over whether “Oak View” and “Oak Vue” could coexist without someone dies, a confused driver behind the wheel of a rescue truck.

See, names matter. Especially when you’re seventy-five and clutching your Life Alert button on James Avenue, praying the ambulance doesn’t end up on James Street, a full six miles and one fate too far from where you’ve just fallen, unable to get up. I’ve seen mistakes born of phonetics. A single syllable misplaced, and the rescue’s lost before it begins.

So I’ve always been fascinated by the names that stick, not the ones we dream up in subdivision meetings over boxed chicken and plat maps, but the ones that predate all of us, carved into the landscape like stubborn roots. For me, it was Granny White Pike.

Growing up in Nashville, every time we crossed the intersection of Harding and Granny White, I felt a peculiar kinship. White was my name too. I figured, maybe, buried somewhere in that road sign was a story I hadn’t been told yet. Eventually, I asked my grandfather Frank White, affectionately known as Papaw. Who was Granny White? Some grand matron of our lineage?

He told it with all the gravity of a fireside gospel. Claimed she ran the best boarding house between here and Natchez, Mississippi. That she’d been widowed in the early days—her husband taken by native raiders—and that she’d later married a local Chickasaw Chief, a stoic man known as Chief She-She. Papaw said the chief would sit smoking a cob pipe on her porch and point wordlessly toward the door when guests arrived: “She, she,” he’d mutter, meaning, don’t ask me—Granny’s inside.

Even then, the story had the burnished shine of handed-down invention. And like every amateur genealogist eventually does, I started digging, looking for bones beneath the family folklore.

Turns out, the real woman was no less interesting.

Her name was Lucinda White—Lucy to some. And if she didn’t ride into Nashville on a painted horse, she still rode in hard. According to the DAR ladies who catalogued her trail in 1934, Lucinda arrived sometime before 1803, long before women were meant to own land or speak their minds, and she did both. She bought acreage, not from a benevolent Irishman as some legends suggest, but from a man named Wolsey Warrington. Her deed, neat and final, was recorded on the second day of January, 1803, in Williamson County.

The Congressional Record—of all places—holds the more romantic version, courtesy of the famed southern Senator Thomas Hart Benton. He spun her life into campaign gold, painting Granny White as a dirt-poor widow marching across the Appalachians with two grandchildren and an old slave named Zachery. Said she made the journey to the Cumberland frontier because the courts back home wouldn’t grant her custody on account of her poverty. That she baked biscuits along the roadside, traded them for coins, and built a life from crumbs, crust, heat and grit.

Nice story. But like most stories told by politicians, it’s not all true.

Lucinda wasn’t wandering. If records are to be trusted, she was the widow of a Revolutionary War soldier, Zechariah White, likely of Pasquotank County, North Carolina. He died in the defense of what would become Davidson County. For his service, the family was granted land, and Lucinda arrived in Middle Tennessee not empty-handed, but with something of an inheritance.

Her will, dated 1816, reads like a pioneer’s ledger and a matriarch’s prayer. Fifteen dollars to each child—John, Benjamin, and Kesiah. To a grandson, a bounty: pigs and pewter, beds and bureaus, vinegar and whiskey, dog irons and dinnerware, even “all my pork that is salted for this present year.” A life’s worth of stuff passed down like bounded scripture, right down to the tub of lard and all her wearing apparel.

And her house? Built by hand at the foot of a hill on the south road out of Nashville, it wasn’t just a home—it was an enterprise. A tavern, they say. By 1812, it was famed from Louisville to New Orleans. It had no neon sign, no grand opening. Just good food, strong drink, and the kind of quiet reputation that travels far.

One tale has it that a guest slipped a frog into a buttermilk crock to get a rise out of her. Instead, she served it right back to him, grinning from the shadows as he licked the last of it from his spoon. Granny White didn’t rattle easily.

She died in 1816. Not rich, maybe, but respected. Her grave sits near the road that bears her name, the stones around her worn smooth by time and memory. No great monument marks the spot, only a whisper of her life in the soil—and the silence of the other names buried beside her: a child, two unknown adults. One might be her daughter Kesiah. The others, who knows?

Decades later, when the Beasley family came into possession of the land, they tried to resurrect her legacy. Hauled a log house from North Carolina, rebuilt it on the spot where her inn once stood. Used it for meetings and memories until time did what time does. It rotted. The beams sagged. The doors grew crooked. Eventually, it was shut to the public, then sold, then parceled like so many pioneer dreams.

Now there’s nothing left but the cemetery. No tavern. No buttermilk. Just that little green road sign and a mystery.

As for Chief She-She? I’ve found no trace of him. Maybe he existed. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was born whole in the imagination of my grandfather on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

And maybe that’s what stories are for—not to be verified, but to be lived again in the telling.

What’s true is this: Lucinda White built a life when women weren’t supposed to. She fed strangers, raised children, carved a name into clay and timber, and buried her people with dignity on a hill overlooking what would become Nashville.

Whatever we call her—Lucy, Lucinda, Granny—she left a mark. Not just in stone, but in the silence that falls when we pass that road sign and wonder, even now, who she was.

Some say it’s just a name.

But I say roads remember.