Mansker was the first licensed ordinary keeper – tavern or inn owner – in the area of Nashville.  Visitors might stay for one night or even six months inside the protection of the fort.  Small cabins were used by families and singles slept upstairs in one of the two-story blockhouses at the fort’s corners.

This land was hunting ground used by Cherokee, Chickasaw and other tribes.  About a year after Mansker built his fort, Indian attacks became frequent and all the livestock were killed or stolen.  Fearing for their lives, everyone from the fort fled to safety.  Two men came back the next day to retrieve some belongings and the Indians killed them and burned the fort.

A couple of years later, Mansker returned and built a new fort, on the other side of Mansker Creek.  Remains of a letter from 1783 tell of this new structure.  Kasper and his family lived inside the tall, protective walls until the area became peaceful in the late 1700s then abandoned the fort and, it’s believed, moved to a house just outside of it.  During the Civil War in the 1860s, soldiers used the pieces that were left of the old fortress for target practice. 

Bowen Plantation House

In about 1787, a man who’d been an officer in the Revolutionary War moved here on land received for serving his country.  Captain William Bowen built a home made to last with brick walls 15 inches thick, eventually expanding the amount of land it sat on to a total of 4,000 acres.  He and his wife Mary had 10 children one of which became the father of the namesake of Fort Campbell.  William Bowen Campbell is Captain and Mary’s grandson and some believe he was born here.

Bowen Plantation House almost became a footnote in history.  After the Captain and Mrs. Bowen died, the house went to a son who in 1835 sold it and moved to Texas.  Mansker’s Creek flooded the house in the late 1800s and, afterward, it became neglected sharecropper tenant housing with the last tenant moving out in 1960.  The next owner farmed the land, using the house as a barn.  Goodlettsville chose to renovate the house as their project for the 1976 bicentennial celebration.

Visit Mansker’s Station

The fort is recreated near the original location but experts haven’t pinpointed the exact spot it was on.  One mystery: there’s nothing that describes the size of the fort but it’s believed this new one is just 1/3 the size of the original. 

By the Bowen Plantation House, there’s a small family cemetery with a stone wall around it; experts believe that the Captain and Mrs. Bowen are buried here.  Visiting the plantation during the summer, you’ll see flax growing and see how it’s spun into fabric, the most common type of fabric in this part of the country when the Bowen’s built their home.  If you visit at the right time, they’ll be using the outside bake oven and giving a cooking demonstration.  At Mansker’s Station, foods from the era such as corn, squash, pumpkins and, sometimes, tobacco are grown.  Spring, summer or fall, it’s always a good time to step back into early Tennessee history.