On May 10, 1957, Rogers Caldwell signed over the deed to Brentwood Hall — his 207-acre estate on Edmondson Pike, modeled after Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, with 23 rooms, European marble fireplaces, gilt mirrors, and a Thoroughbred exercise track — to the State of Tennessee.
It was the last act of a settlement that took 27 years to reach. The state had been trying to take the house since 1930. Caldwell and his wife Margaret had been living there the whole time, eventually paying rent to the government that was seizing their property. After the signing, they moved to a house in Franklin. He died there in 1968.
The mansion is now called the Ellington Agricultural Center. The horse barn is the Tennessee Agricultural Museum. The exercise track is a lawn. The Tennessee Department of Agriculture runs the state’s farming programs from the rooms where Rogers Caldwell once entertained Nashville’s elite. If you drive past it on Edmondson Pike, you’d never know what it was.
But the story of how the state came to own this building is one of the most important Nashville moments there is — because for a brief, dazzling stretch of the 1920s, Rogers Caldwell turned Nashville into the financial capital of the South.
They called him the “J.P. Morgan of the South.” He was the son of James E. Caldwell, a prominent Nashville banker. Montgomery Bell Academy. Vanderbilt, though he dropped out after two years. He started selling surety bonds for his father’s insurance company around 1910 and discovered something: southern municipal bonds attracted fewer bidders than northern ones, which meant higher margins for anyone willing to underwrite them.
In September 1917 he founded Caldwell and Company. The timing was perfect. After World War I, the federal government stopped monopolizing the bond market, and the South was booming for the first time since before the Civil War. Agricultural prices rose every year from 1920 to 1927. Infrastructure that hadn’t been touched in sixty years suddenly needed rebuilding. Caldwell was there with the money.
By the mid-1920s, Nashville’s Union Street was called the “Wall Street of the South,” and Caldwell and Company was its most powerful firm — doing $100 million a year in securities sales, underwriting highways, schools, and public works across the region. Their slogan was “We Bank on the South.”
In 1919, Caldwell founded the Bank of Tennessee, which functioned as a depository for bond proceeds. The money sat there earning no interest for the issuers, giving Caldwell an enormous pool of investment capital. He used it to buy insurance companies, banks, textile mills, oil companies, department stores, a Nashville baseball team, and two newspapers — the Memphis Commercial Appeal and the Knoxville Journal.
His partner in much of this was Colonel Luke Lea, who owned the Nashville Tennessean and had once led an unauthorized attempt to kidnap Kaiser Wilhelm from exile in the Netherlands. Lea was a former U.S. Senator with deep political connections, and through Governor Henry Horton — Lea’s friend and business associate — they secured no-bid state highway contracts for their company, Kentucky Rock Asphalt (Kyrock). The state road commissioner refused to award contracts without bidding; Lea had the governor replace him with someone more cooperative.
Caldwell got himself appointed to the State Funding Board, which then awarded a no-bid contract to his own Bank of Tennessee to sell millions in state bonds. State deposits poured into his bank. The arrangement was circular and corrupt: Caldwell’s political connections generated state money, which funded his empire, which funded his lifestyle, which funded his political connections.
The whole thing was already insolvent by 1925. The accounting department hadn’t run a trial balance in years. Customers complained of missing bonds and payments. But the deposits kept coming, and so did the deals.
The stock market crashed in October 1929. Persistent rumors about Caldwell’s finances forced state banking examiners to audit the Bank of Tennessee. On November 7, 1930, they declared it insolvent. Caldwell and Company went into receivership days later.
The Tennessee General Assembly called it “the greatest financial disaster which Tennessee has ever experienced.”
Nearly 100 banks failed across the South — ten in Tennessee, fifteen in North Carolina, seventy in Arkansas. The state lost roughly $6 million in deposited funds, about $72 million in today’s money. Municipalities across the region lost deposits. Individual depositors, in the days before FDIC insurance, lost everything.
The Tennessee House threatened to impeach Governor Horton for conspiring with Lea and Caldwell. The effort failed, but Horton never sought office again. Luke Lea was jailed for fraud in North Carolina, though he was pardoned in 1937. Caldwell himself was convicted of “fraudulent breach of trust” for swapping out valuable securities held as collateral for worthless ones — but the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the conviction. He was never extradited to Kentucky, which also wanted him. He never served a day.
In 1932, he started a new investment firm with $1,000. A headline in the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern read: “Rogers Caldwell, Once Vastly Rich and Leader in Financial World, Sets Out With $1,000 to Regain Fortune.”
Two novels were inspired by his story: Robert Penn Warren’s At Heaven’s Gate and Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis. Taylor’s father, Hillsman Taylor, had been a Caldwell and Company executive.
The property you see today on Edmondson Pike — the Greek Revival mansion, the rolling grounds, the museum in the old horse barn — is the receipt. It’s what the State of Tennessee got back for $6 million in stolen deposits, nearly a hundred collapsed banks, a governor’s career, and the financial ruin of thousands of people across the South.
It took 27 years to get the house. It took another decade to sort out the rest of the wreckage. The whole process of liquidating Caldwell and Company and the Bank of Tennessee wasn’t complete for nearly 20 years after the collapse.
Nashville moved on. Union Street stopped being the Wall Street of the South. The financial industry Caldwell built didn’t survive him — but the infrastructure he funded did. The highways, the schools, the public works. The bonds were real, even if everything behind them wasn’t.
The Ellington Agricultural Center is open to the public. You can walk the grounds. You can visit the museum. There are three relocated log cabins and a cemetery from the Ewing family, who owned the land before Caldwell. The mansion is now called the Moss Administration Building. Tennessee was the first state to house its agriculture department on a working farm.
Nobody tells you it was built by a fraud.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons