Glenraven Plantation

Located near Adams in Robertson County, Glenraven Plantation is the last large-scale, consciously designed tobacco plantation landscape in Tennessee. Its founders were Felix Ewing, a wealthy Nashville businessman and Arkansas Delta plantation owner, and his wife Jane Washington Ewing, who inherited the plantation's initial 865 acres from her prominent Robertson County family, owners of the nearby Wessyngton plantation. After their marriage in 1891, the Ewings began Glenraven's development. By the turn of the century Glenraven contained not only a massive three-story Classical Revival manor house and numerous Arts and Crafts-style residences for foremen and tenants, but also a church, school, post office, power plant, dairy, mill, and store. Taken as a whole, Glenraven functioned as a self-contained economic unit, but was dependent on dark-fired tobacco sales to a broad national and international market.

Felix Ewing was a prominent leader of the planters, farmers, and businessmen allied against the American Tobacco Company in the Black Patch Tobacco War of the early 1900s. In 1904 Ewing and others created the Dark Tobacco District Planters' Protective Association of Kentucky and Tennessee; Ewing became the chairman of the executive committee, gaining the nickname of the “Moses of the Black Patch.” The Ewings owned Glenraven Plantation until 1931, when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company foreclosed on the property. It is still a private farm, with livestock the primary agricultural commodity, owned and operated by the J. S. Moore family of Springfield.