Lebanon home rich with history

By Bill Lewis For The Tennessean
A 200-year-old home built by slaves is also the setting of a new book

 There may be occasional homes for sale in the Nashville region that were built 200 years ago, but only one of them is a major character in best-selling author Robert Leleux’s new book, The Living End, which recounts how his family coped — and healed — during his grandmother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s.
The poplar-beam house, which once graced his ancestors’ cotton plantation adjacent to Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, was taken apart log-by-log and moved by Leleux’s grandfather to an estate in Wilson County to make way for Summit Medical Center and an Interstate 40 interchange. His grandparents, Alfred and JoAnn Wilson, lived there for about 20 years until JoAnn’s death in 2010.
The fully restored home andthe surrounding 78.5 acres are on the market for an asking price of $1.3 million.“It was my grandfather’s life’s work,” Leleux says of the meticulous, historically correct restoration of the house, which included taking off clapboard siding to expose the original poplar beams to view and removing comfortable, but historically incorrect, verandas and porches that had been added over the years.
Today the house looks like it did roughly two centuries ago when it was constructed by the individuals who were held in slavery on the plantation.
As a resident of “liberal New York,” coming to terms with the house’s connection with slavery “was like going from the freezer to the oven,” Leleux says. “The burden of history. This awful system. But that’s the history.”
The irony of that, says Leleux, is that his grandfather was “a progressive, a lefty” whose keen love of history led him to preserve the family homeplace and share it with his other love, JoAnn.
Their daughter, Jessica Wilson — Leleux’s mother — lives there now and has “transformed the yard,” says artist Harriett Hodges, a close family friend who lives nearby. “She had never touched a blade of grass (but) she totally re-landscaped everything. It was her therapy.”
Modern touches inside
The exterior of the house is 1800s-accurate, but the interior décor has been updated by Leleux and his husband, Michael, without detracting from its authenticity. The freestanding wooden spiral staircase — the one Robert’s mother-in-law, Yvella Leleux, and his grandmother JoAnn tumbled down together into a giggling heap, as recounted in The Living End — is unchanged and just as “lethal” as ever, Robert Leluex says. 1 2 Next