Two Hundred Years on East Main
The bookstore in my novel is a real bookstore, and the building it sits in is more than two hundred years old. Landmark Booksellers occupies the Old Factory Store at 114 East Main Street in Franklin, Tennessee—the oldest commercial building still standing in the historic district. Two names, one structure, one address; people are forever asking whether they are the same place, and they are.
Here is what happened in it before it sold books. Most of it comes from Landmark’s own history of the building; the rest from the county historical marker on the sidewalk out front and from the architects who restored it.
Lot 20
Abram Maury established Franklin in 1799. Among the first lots he sold was Lot 20, which went to Joseph McBride of Nashville. That is the ground.
When the building went up is the one thing the sources do not agree on. The store’s own history says between 1806 and 1808, which would make it perhaps the earliest Greek Revival structure in Middle Tennessee. The county’s marker says the store was built by the people who ran the cotton and grist mill on East Margin, and puts them there by 1825. I am not going to referee that. Either way it is the oldest commercial building standing in Franklin, and either way somebody decided a store on Lot 20 should have a temple front—four Doric columns and a pediment, which is a strange thing to find on a county-seat main street.
It has been called the Old Factory Store for most of its life, after the cotton and grist operation it served. Early visitors, by the store’s own account, included Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, and Davy Crockett.
It is worth pausing on that. A Greek Revival storefront in early Middle Tennessee is a statement. Franklin was a young county seat, and whoever built on Lot 20 decided the store should have columns—not because a store needs columns, but because columns say permanent. Two centuries later the store is a bookstore and the columns are still there, so the argument holds up.
A bank, a juke joint, an officers club
Over two centuries the building has housed banks, shops, restaurants, a juke joint, an officers club, and residents on the second floor.
I want to sit with that list a moment, because it is the whole argument for old buildings. The same walls have held a teller’s cage, a dance floor, and somebody’s supper. Nobody planned that. It accumulated.
It is believed Andrew Jackson’s troops were paid here in 1816, on their way back from the Battle of New Orleans. I am repeating that the way the store repeats it—as tradition rather than documented fact, because that is how it comes down. The building’s early visitors, again by the store’s own account, ran to Jackson, Sam Houston, and Davy Crockett, which is either remarkable or simply what happens to the only substantial commercial building in a young county seat on a main road.
The detail I keep returning to is the residents on the second floor. For long stretches of those two centuries, people lived up there—above the teller’s cage, above the juke joint, above whatever the ground floor happened to be that decade. Somebody’s ordinary evening, directly over the commerce. That is a very old way for a building to work and we have mostly stopped doing it.
Brown, and then Shea
The building changed hands the way buildings do. In 1869 Enoch Brown bought it from M. G. L. Claiborne for thirteen hundred dollars, and that sale cut the store loose from the mill on East Margin that it had been built to serve. In 1884 Jeremiah Shea bought the Factory Store, and it stayed in the Shea family until 1940—fifty-six years, one family, one address.
Thirteen hundred dollars. That is the number I cannot get past. Four years after the war, the oldest commercial building in town went for about the price of a used car.
November 30, 1864
The Battle of Franklin was fought just south of downtown on the afternoon and evening of November 30, 1864. The Union army spared the factory store. Afterward, like other buildings in town, it served as a hospital for the wounded.
That is the line in the building’s history that stopped me. A store, then a hospital, then a store again. Whatever this town has needed the building to be, it has been.
1972, and then 2005
Before the bookstore, the building got a rescue. A Nashville architecture firm, Kline Swinney Associates, restored it in partnership with the Heritage Foundation and the owner, turned it into the head office of a local bank, and helped get it onto the National Register. Which is worth noticing: the thing that saved this building was somebody finding it a job. Not preservation for its own sake. A bank needed a head office, the head office needed a building, and the building needed a reason to be maintained for another fifty years.
The Factory Store was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. In early 2005 Joel and Carol Tomlin bought it, and that July they opened Landmark Booksellers inside it. They are native Tennesseans with Franklin roots going back to 1802, which means their family and this building have been in the same county for the same two hundred years.
Today it holds more than thirty-five thousand new, pre-owned, and rare titles, over two thousand signed first editions, and prices from ten dollars to ten thousand. The specialty is Southern Americana and Tennessee history. There is a wall—the Great Wall—holding the finest books ever written, shelved in chronological order from antiquity forward, which is the reading list of a lifetime standing up in one place.
If you go
It is at 114 East Main Street, open every day from nine to seven, and closed only three days a year: Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. They buy pre-owned books from neighbors, so if you are cleaning out a house in Williamson County, take the boxes there before you take them anywhere else.
Go in without a title in mind. The building rewards wandering more than it rewards searching, which is the opposite of how most of us buy books now.
Why a novelist cares about a building
I gave Landmark Booksellers its real name in a work of fiction, which meant asking permission, which the Tomlins gave. I did that instead of inventing a bookstore because an invented one would have had no floor under it. Fiction can furnish a room. It cannot give a room two hundred years.
If you have read the novel, you know what the store ends up doing in it. If you have not, go stand in it first.
There is one more thing I did not expect when I started reading about the place. A building that has been a bank and a factory store and a dance hall and a hospital and a bookshop has no single identity to be faithful to. It has only ever been useful. That is a better standard than authenticity, and it is roughly what the novel is about, so I suppose the building got there first. Landmark’s own site says the floors creak the way old floors should. They do.
Landmark Booksellers · 114 East Main Street, Franklin, Tennessee · open daily 9–7
If you want the novel’s side of this building, there is the walking tour of Franklin and the post on the real bookstore and the café I invented inside it.
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