As you pass along busy streets and quiet neighborhoods throughout Forest Hills, keep your eyes peeled for historic stone fences. Those old dry-stack stone walls probably hold a hint to the history of the area you are crossing.

For centuries, dry-stack stone has been used in this area to indicate property lines, restrain livestock, and protect family cemeteries from animal intruders, as well as to define the path of turnpikes. Abundant limestone deposits in Middle Tennessee provided ample material to use for fence construction.

“Forest Hills’ history evolves organically from a rural area on the southwest side of early Nashville, and its roadways have ties to buffalo and Indian trails,” Hillsboro Pike resident Clay Jackson said.

“The demarcation of properties was achieved with what was most readily at hand—stone, and lots of it.”

While stone walls no doubt have been used in the region for as long as it has had human inhabitants, most of the dry-stack stone fences seen today are constructed using techniques brought to this area by Irish and Scottish stone masons who immigrated in the early 1800s. They passed the tradition of their craft down through families, and many of the skilled masons taught the slaves who labored for them.

The slaves, in turn, passed the techniques down through families after they were freed. The Adams family, for example, maintained much of stonework along Hillsboro Pike from the late 1800s to around 1930.

Some of the rock walls and fences standing today date back to the early 1800s.

Much of Forest Hills belonged to the Compton family and their descendants who settled on the land where you see many of the stone walls along Hillsboro Pike. The rest of the Forest Hills area essentially was divided into smaller farms where stone walls lined the pikes and divided the fields between property owners.

Henry Compton and his bride Sarah Cox started with 325 acres when they came to the Forest Hills area in 1815. Over the generations, the Compton family’s holdings grew by 1871 to cover the span from William Harding’s Belle Meade Plantation on the west to John M. Lea’s Lealand on the east.

A few other big farms filled the boundaries of present-day Forest Hills. William Scruggs owned about 700 acres along Hillsboro Pike in the 1830s, and Green Simmons had about 190 acres on what is now Old Hickory Boulevard in the 1840s.

Besides providing fences for farms, the other frequent use of rock walls in Forest Hills was to denote turnpikes and roadways. Many of the stone fences still standing today marked the roadways along Hillsboro Pike and Granny White Pike.

Coincidentally Edward Scruggs, who inherited his uncle William’s farm, became a key figure in the Hillsboro Turnpike Company, and Thomas Herrin, who bought Green Simmons’ farm in 1857, was president of the Granny White Turnpike and a director of the Harding Turnpike Company.

Stone Walls

Stone Fences of Forest Hills

What’s ‘dry’ about stacked stones

Stone Fence Mapping

Protecting old stone walls in the hands of owners