The Grantland House was a large house built in the mid-1880s at 610 Woodland St.
Henry Wesley Grantland (1832-1926) and Elizabeth P. “Lizzie” Edwards Grantland built the home. They wed in 1860. (Henry’s first wife was Marie F. Owens, wed 1957.) Grantland came from Alabama to Nashville in the early 1870s. Henry started H. W. Grantland Wholesale Grocer and Cotton Factory Co. in East Nashville about 1876 and later was a director of the Nashville Cotton Mills Co. Later, he became president and cashier of the First National Bank of Nashville.
The Grantland family had a farm further north in the country as well as an inherited plantation (part of Hughey Smith’s Oakendale Plantation in Redstone Arsenal through his wife’s inheritance) near Huntsville, AL of at least 360 acres. Henry and Lizzie got their daughter and her husband, Beulah Grantland Rice (1861-1941) and Bolling H. Rice (1854-1917), to move to downtown Nashville on Spring St.
Their son, (Henry) Grantland “Granny” Rice, spent much time at the Woodland St. home of his grandparents. In the 1890s, Henry became director of T.B. Dallas’ new cotton mill in Huntsville. Grantland Rice went to Vanderbilt Univ. and enjoyed sports and football. After college, he started as a reporter for Nashville News. He eventually became a famed sports reporter - he of “The Four Horsemen” fame. After Henry and Lizzie died, the Woodland St. house was razed. The property is now the southern part of East Park.
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