COLONEL
Photo courtesy Marshall County Historical Society
The Adams Inn and Tavern, above, is believed to have served as a resting place for Andrew Jackson on his way to the Battle of New Orleans. In 2014, Colonel Garry Littleton of Lynnville, Tenn. purchased the structure and moved it to Lynnville for professional preservation.
History preserved just in the nick of time
Fern Greenbank
Community Storyteller
When you see an historic gem of a building, do you watch it
fall down or do you step in to save it? Sometimes the answer to that
question is more questions: Can it be saved? How much do you value
preservation? Does it have enough historic value to warrant the effort? How much money do you want to spend? Do you have patience?
Do you really really love the building and its story?
Yes. A lot. Yes. A lot. Yes. Yes.
Those are the answers of Colonel Garry Littleton, the owner of
a wildly successful handmade leather goods company just over the
county line in Lynnville. He had to ask those questions of himself because he felt called to rescue a piece of American history on Finley
Beech Road in Belfast.
The colonel is known to love good old-fashioned stories and,
well, anything old. This is one of those good old-fashioned stories.
Man falls in love with old things. A little remnant of the Adams Inn
and Tavern, believed to have served as a resting spot for Andrew
Jackson on his way to the Battle of New Orleans, was sad and neglected. Man goes to the aid of the forlorn structure, scoops it up in
his arms and carries it home to nurse it back to health. You could call
it a love story.
On May 8, 2014, Col. Garry Littleton and a small army of
specialists gingerly raised the historic tavern and traveled slowly
over the winding road to Lynnville, setting down the fragile building on the colonel’s bucolic farm named Foxfire. There. it sits next
to other orphaned historic buildings adopted by the colonel.
“Some people collect glass or saddles or guns,” said Col. Littleton. “I collect buildings.”
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If truth be told, the colonel actually collects lots of things
but they all have something in common. They are old. He also restores cars and machinery and an odd assortment of interesting
items.
“Restoring cars is different,” he says. “You derive a different
pleasure because they are movable and can be shared that way
with more people. Cars are more personal to folks. They often associate them with their youth.”
The colonel has to resist the urge to rescue every interesting
abandoned building he hears about. He says he forces himself to
follow self-imposed criteria to determine if he can step in and get
involved in its preservation.
The Adams Inn and Tavern passed the colonel’s criteria test.
The 200-year-old building was the last remaining vestige of a fully
operational inn and tavern that originally sat at the intersection of
Old Farmington Road and Finley Beech Road in the picturesque
village of Belfast. The remaining structure once served as the
kitchen and slave quarters and was connected to the main building by a dogtrot. The other building, torn down years ago, was used
as the inn.
In 1829, the Adams Inn and Tavern was sold to William Williams, the patriach of a prominent family that helped settle Belfast. There, Julia and Robert Williams had two children, Daisy and
Julia. Not long after that, the Williams family followed the other
residents of Old Belfast up the road to start a new Belfast next to
the railroad. The other structures that made up Old Belfast have
long since fallen down and disappeared, totalling more than 12