Past Internet Articles About Amy Grant

Can you tell me anything about the history of the land that became the A.M. Burton farm and later the Burton Hills development? I know it covered a huge expanse of land, but what were the boundaries?

My parents bought a house on Lone Oak Road in 1940 where I now live. It was their belief it was once a tenant house on the A.M. Burton farm. � Margie Corlew, Nashville

Singer Amy Grant's great-grandfather bought the pre-Civil War farm of about 450 acres in 1929 for a reported $90,000, using it for horse breeding and even raising foxhounds to hunt.

A.M. and wife Lillie Burton's 1961 deed of what was then known as "Seven Hills" to the current Lipscomb University included only slightly more than 190 acres. Lipscomb sold the property in the early 1980s for what was estimated at the time to be $12 million to enrich its endowment.

With the acreage difference, it seems likely a tenant house could have been on land developed earlier than the massive Burton Hills. Its offices, houses and condos lie among Hillsboro Pike, Harding Place and Castleman Drive. Lone Oak Road was slightly outside its eastern boundary.

Grant has fond memories of the Burton family farm where she visited as a child.

"We were just excited that they named it Burton Hills because we grew up riding horses and our whole family had a street on the back of the farm that my great-grandparents gave us," she told biographer Bob Millard. "It was all cousins. It was fun."

The nationally recognized vocalist was 5 when her great-grandfather, Andrew Mizell Burton (known by his middle name to the family), died in 1966 at age 87. But her great-grandmother, Lillie May Armstrong Burton, continued to live on the farm. Lillie Burton died in 1981.

The main house, with its six white columns, dated to about 1829. It survived the Civil War attack by federal troops on nearby Shy's Hill as part of the Battle of Nashville. A bullet from the war reportedly was lodged in the staircase.

A.M. Burton, a self-made multimillionaire and philanthropist, was president emeritus of Life & Casualty Insurance Co. He founded the company � builder of the 1957 L&C Tower, which remains on today's Nashville skyline � in 1903. The next year he married.

The company got its start selling low-cost burial insurance policies to African-Americans, something that Burton never forgot as he later doled out money to help the community.

An ardent supporter of the Church of Christ, he gave funds to build Central Church of Christ downtown, money to found the Nashville Christian Institute to educate blacks and yet more to help Lipscomb over the years. Estimates of his little-publicized generosity over his lifetime have ranged up to the equivalent of $100 million.

Whatever the exact figure, it was quite a feat for a determined boy who had walked to Nashville at age 16 from his native Trousdale County, leading a family cow.

His first job after arriving here in 1895 was as a laborer helping excavate for the Chinese building at the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition where Centennial Park is today. He was paid 50 cents a day initially, raised later to $1.50. Burton walked to work from his home in east Nashville to save the 10-cent trolley fare.

"Money was, to him, something to put to work," Tennessean writer Louise Davis observed in a Burton profile. "� To get money to work for you, he said, you had to save it."

At the same time, during the last 12 years of his life, he gave away 90% of his income, she noted.

Burton Hills, which grew out of one of his donations, didn't come about easily.

Neighbors were worried about property values and the traffic such a massive undertaking would generate, particularly if retail space were included. Lipscomb amended its plan in 1982 before selling the tract to a joint venture of three developers in 1983.

Jerry Caroll's Caroll Properties Inc. of Nashville, which had built Vantage Place in MetroCenter, joined with two Kentucky companies to bring the project about.

By 1985, the first of the development's office buildings was under construction. Today it also includes hundreds of residences, from condominiums to premium single-family homes.

The original two-story Burton home wasn't demolished but was moved in September 1984 to make way for the development. Its destination was a Dickson County bluff 50 miles away between Charlotte and Dickson.

Tim Jackson, to whom it was given, faced a moving and relocation fee estimated at the time at $100,000.

By the time Jackson died in 2004 after a six-year illness, the house had collapsed, and it lies today in pieces, according to his mother, Roberta Jackson of Dickson County.

"Vandals threw bricks at it, and finally a big ice storm brought down a lot of trees that fell around it," she said yesterday. "It was his dream to make it into a showplace, and we're all real sorry that it didn't happen." �