Drouillard House
The
Past
James Robertson, the"Father of Tennessee," also founded an industry when he discovered the rich iron ore deposits in the rocks of the Western Highland Rim. He opened Cumberland Iron Works with a furnace and forge in 1796.
Montgomery Bell worked for Robertson and bought Cumberland Iron Works from him in 1804, improving it and expanding his other operations in the area as well. He became Tennessee's first industrialist.
Anthony Van Leer operated
a furnace near Bell's beginning in 1815. He purchased Cumberland Furnace
from him in 1825, introduced further improvements and increased the iron
plantation to 20,000 acres. He owned 
manufacturing
outlets in Nashville, where he maintained palatial residences and business
offices for himself and his family. A leading Nashville citizen during
Andrew Jackson's presidency, he was 79 by the time the Civil War shut
down furnace operations in 1862 after 76 years of production. He died
in 1863.
Mary Florence Kirkman and her younger brother inherited the Cumberland Furnace Plantation from their grandfather in 1863, but at the time the productive and wealth-generating iron ore furnaces for which is was named were cold and silent.
The story of the Drouillard House begins in 1849 when Mary Florence Kirkman, age five, lost her mother. Mary's grieving father closed the family's palatial home and sent her to boarding school in New York to receive a proper education and "finishing."
She
returned home for her father's funeral and opened the family mansion in
Nashville just as Southern 
gentlemen
were donning gray uniforms and Northern officers were parading in military
blue. Seventeen--year-old Mary was well acquainted with both. In 1862
Union forces occupied Nashville. In 1863 Mary's grandfather died. The
pretty heiress was attentively courted by a handsome officer of the occupation:
Captain James P. Drouillard, a West Point graduate.
They married September 21, 1864, a marriage that was not popular in the upper-crust social circles. Nashville was occupied by Union troops, and Captain Drouillard was one of them. Mary was a young and very wealthy Confederate heiress. Traditional Southern Society shunned the couple for the audacity of their marriage and they soon retreated to her grandfather's iron plantation fifty miles away. When the war ended, James resigned his military commission to become the master of Cumberland Furnace Plantation.
Soon the couple began to plan a house where they would not feel vulnerable; a place esteemed friends could visit in comfort; a place to nurture their growing family; a place that joined and healed the fractures between North and South, black and white, families and friends.
The house they built between 1868-70 was designed to express their love and lifestyle, the heritage of a wealthy Southern belle and an honorable Northern officer. It was the centerpiece of Cumberland Furnace, and nothing else like it was ever built in the area.
The Drouillard family eventually moved back to a forgiving Nashville and built an ornate Victorian mansion there in 1886, where they continued their varied business and social pursuits, dividing their time between Nashville and Europe. James died in 1892 and Mary in 1905. They are buried in the Vanleer lot in Mt. Olivet Cemetery, Nashville. The iron furnace for which the Plantation was named was dismantled in 1938, but the house had a destiny of its own -- and it has endured.