(uplifting music) - [Narrator] This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- I am Mike Galligan with the Law Offices of Galligan and Newman in Mendel, Tennessee.

I support WCTE, the Upper Cumberlands' own PBS station, because I believe it is important to create entertaining TV programs that also promote lifelong learning and understanding.

When I support WCTE, I know that I am helping our Upper Cumberland community for generations to come.

The law offices of Galligan and Newman provide clients with large firm expertise and small firm personalized care and service.

(mysterious music) - I'm Avery Hutchins, your host for "Where Stories Live."

In this series, we explore the characters, homes, and monuments around Central Tennessee to learn how people shaped the history of our region.

In this episode of "Where Stories Live," we travel to Smithville, Tennessee.

Join me as we explore the rural culture of this small town during the turn of this century and how it became the scene of a true crime story that still weighs on this small town today.

Starting with the Atwell House, Sarah Cripps, a local attorney with a passion for history, dives deep into her personal connection with the home.

The land was purchased and a home was built In 1921 by her great, great grandparents, Felly and Susan Atwell.

The home, now over a hundred years old, has been transformed back to its original state.

Sarah, the owner, shares her family's connections to the home and how she describes the home as a part of her own inner history.

- My great great grandparents were the ones who built the home.

Of course, being a lawyer, I went back and did the title, ran it back to the 1800s.

And so the first family to live here would've been Will Atwell and his wife, Nanny Mai, and then they had a daughter, Calysta.

She was born before the home was built.

The home was built in 1926.

Mr. Atwell was county Judge.

Judge Atwell would do marriage ceremonies here and he would do those on the large front porch.

Then he would go and attend to duties as judge.

I know my mom has recounted many times that he would pray at night about certain decisions that he would have to make.

He was a very mild-mannered fellow.

As far as Nanny Mai, she would host tea parties and people would come here.

I think it was mainly a time to get together and exchange news, especially with letter writing prevailing at that time.

The home was quite a bit as it is today.

There was a sleeping porch that was here then, because of course we had no air conditioning.

There were two wells on the property, one fairly proximal to the house right adjacent to the back of the home.

Then there was one further down front.

These rooms are exactly like they were, you know, they may have had different uses at that time.

Then in 1997, I had just graduated law school and of course had no money.

I was starting my first job, and before I ever had a job, one day I was staying at home on a weekend and my parents had gone on an antique hunting trip.

The chandelier in the kitchen, they brought home to me and they said, "Look what we've bought you for your new home."

I said, "Guys, I don't have a house.

I'm still in school."

My mom said, "No, but you're going to."

But she was determined that as soon as I got out, we needed to have plans where I would have a separate address.

It was just her dream to have this back in the family.

This is a Tudor style home, with the stucco.

The stucco was all done by hand at that time and it's very textured, and as someone who cannot see, I enjoy feeling of all that.

It's not smooth in any way.

It's three-dimensional.

There would be wire wrapped around the entirety of the home and then that stucco mixture plaster would be daubed into the holes in the wire.

And we found a very old man when we were redoing the house that had been taught how to do stucco before all these modern things came along and he was able to do it.

Now, it took him awhile, but he was able to patch it where it needed to be patched and rehabilitate it.

When I first moved here and for a long time thereafter, I had the windows with the weights on them.

All this is poplar and I love the deep set windows and the trim, the high baseboards, and the crown molding at the top and the wide deep door facings and the big front window in here would've given you quite a view of what was happening downtown.

There was not a lot of news, but what news there was, you'd wanna sit outside on the front porch and you have a pretty commanding view of what's going on down in front of you in the town, and they would've spent a lot of time on the porch.

I mean, that's where a lot of the marriages occurred would be up there.

I can certainly imagine that Miss Atwell and her friends would've sat out there and sort of kind of kept an eye on.

The staircase is unique, I think.

It's not for the faint of heart.

I do not fall on it, but several of my friends have fallen.

It reminds me of the staircases I've seen in other older homes.

It's certainly not a big broad main stair like you would think of in the antebellum homes, you know, with the big broad front stair.

I mean, it's a twisty, windy thing with some triangular steps, and there's a few steps at the top that are a lower height than some at the bottom, which are higher.

And we've preserved that original staircase.

Right after I moved in, I had a really odd experience.

When I was getting the chime, the doorbell that I would have, I didn't want it to be a modern doorbell that wouldn't have existed at the time.

So there's just a plate that protects the electrical wiring and it's perfectly affixed.

Well, one night I was asleep and I heard something fall.

I heard the chimes and then something just kept going down the steps.

And the covering plate had come off those chimes.

Fallen, hit the chimes, then bounced down the steps.

That never happened before that and it has never happened since.

And it is so strange, because it's hung by two metal things at the top, you know, on either side of it.

There was no reason why that should have occurred.

Judge Atwell died here.

One night, we actually, at Halloween, we held a sort of a seance.

And my grandmother was hamming it up.

So she dressed up as though she were Miss Nanny Mai, complete with Miss Atwell's cane and everything.

The thing that I noted during that time was that there was a super cold, just a stream of air that flowed kind of, I was sitting at the head of the table, but it, you know, kind of around on this side of the room and it was odd, but you know, we were having a good time, but finally somebody said, "Do you all feel that really cold air?"

Of course I had the heat on, it was in October.

So I don't, again, you know, these things can have multiple explanations.

I do not know.

But that did happen during our time to have a seance, and my grandmother dressed in period dress and stomping around with her cane and calling for Will Atwell.

So we had a lot of fun, but that was the one oddity that I noted during that.

The more you can do to fill in gaps and preserve things in the way that the originals meant for them to look, it just feels right.

Homes were statements.

Where you lived and the type of home you constructed was as much a statement as anything.

Before we had motorized transport, you know, you would make a statement with the conveyance you drove, just as we do now.

Just as situating your home on top of a rise at the end of a major street makes a statement.

It shows you what they valued at the time.

You know, when you're sitting at my office and you look north, I mean this is what you see.

You can see it far down College Street as you're driving up College Street.

It's like she was determined that she wanted, quote, the finest home in town.

And it needed to be seen from afar.

- On Main Street, just down the way from Sarah's home are two other famous historic homes titled The Twin Homes.

Brothers from Wilson County, John and Will Smith, came to Smithville to teach before opening the general store downtown they purchased a property on which these homes were constructed and they hired contractors, also brothers, to build the homes.

As the name implies, they were built to be mirrored images of one another down to the very last detail.

While operating the general store, they caught the eye of the Hayes sisters.

John Smith married Lawrence aka Lolly Hayes, and William Smith married Cannie Hayes.

The homes have maintained their original feature all these years and are now architectural icons.

Tecia Puckett Pryor and Carolyn Ervin, the current owners of the Twin Homes and across the street neighbors, share why it's important to preserve history for generations to come.

But first, let's hear from Sarah Cripps as she gives a more in-depth history lesson about the community and what makes these homes so unique.

- John and Will Smith were a couple of brothers outta Wilson County.

Then subsequently they opened a general store downtown.

They caught the eye of the Hayes sisters, Cannie Hayes and her younger sister Lawrence, or as her family and friends called her, Lolly Hayes.

By 1896, the brothers decide to acquire property directly across the street from one another.

The brothers, after buying the land in 1896, began construction on houses that are virtually mirror images of one another.

Down to the trim, same trim, same fret work, same type of baseboards, transoms in the same locations.

The fireplaces in the kitchen, the fireplace in here.

Brothers from Liberty that were contractors were the builders of these houses, the Butterball brothers.

Building homes for brothers who had married sisters.

And so Cannie moved into this house and Lolly and her husband John moved in across the way.

The husbands continued to own and operate the general store downtown, but then died fairly young.

So Cannie lived a long time.

She had a son named Aubrey, four grandchildren, one that was named William and was the namesake of her husband.

She operated the general store.

She was an entrepreneur, a business owner, very intelligent, very savvy in finances, in business.

She also dressed to the nines, extremely interested in what would've been haute couture for the time in the 1920s and before.

She lived by herself, very independent.

- We have been here 20 years this month.

What I liked about the house is it was old and it was pretty.

I wanted to see inside and it was for sale.

I went around the yard and peeped in the window, and then we called the realtor and she came and we looked through and I had no idea of purchasing the home, because we were happy where we were.

And we went through the house and as we turned to come down the steps, James said, "Would you like to make an offer on the house?"

And I said, "Absolutely not."

And as we went home, he talked about it all the time.

And we came back the next night, spent the night, and bought it that afternoon.

When we first came through the door, it was a Sunday afternoon and the sun was coming through the side of the house.

I knew Smithville was a small town.

The house was just wonderful.

In fact, it's prettier without furniture than it is with furniture.

I was very excited about moving.

- I live at 309 West Main Street, Smithville, Tennessee.

John and Lolly Smith were the original owners of the house.

However, he died soon after it was built.

The house was sold in the twenties to a Tyree family.

That's when I think a lot of the property was dispensed with.

The cupula on my house was cut off and sold to a church is what Mr. Webb told me.

So if you look at the two houses, you'll wonder why I don't have a steeple-looking feature.

That's what I understand happened to it.

The floors are very uneven where they've settled over the years.

That's very different than new construction.

You deal with a lot of eccentricities when you live in an old house like this.

The door facings are a little bit askew.

It has transom windows in it, which of course is not in modern construction.

And just this spacious open feeling when you walk in my front door.

It's just very open and it has a really neat feel.

My house also has a butler's pantry in it, which, you know some modern construction has that, but it's a really neat feature and I enjoy having that.

Has a little tiny closet under the stairs, kind of a like you have a timeout closet.

It's the cleaning closet.

But it actually, if you look all the way to the bottom, you can see the different layers of wood that have been in that house.

If you were walking by my house, you wouldn't realize how large it is when you walk into it.

And when we were looking to buy the house, I walked to the front door and I thought, "I'm gonna have to own this."

Our lot goes back pretty far, and so we have a really neat backyard with a couple of very old trees.

It's very relaxing back there and it feels like you're out in the country even though you're right here in the middle of town.

Another neat thing about my house is that the front door is the original door and it has an old doorbell that you twist, and that's pretty neat, and it does still work.

One of the things I really love about my house is my front porch.

It's like having an extra room.

And the porches on both houses I think are identical.

I can look over and see the Ervins' house and how pretty it is.

It's just, it's very scenic.

'Cause I don't know that I ever thought I would live in a historic home.

I grew up here in Smithville and always knew about this house.

And sometimes in my mind it's still yellow.

It was yellow when I was a kid.

- Imagine your home, historical and beautiful, but with a lingering ghost story.

On the night of May 2nd in 1929, Cannie Hayes Smith, well known by the locals as an independent, savvy woman, was found dead in the living room of her home.

The news shocked this small Smithville community and caused whispers among the town when the death went unsolved.

After Cannie's death, her son and daughter-in-law moved into the home.

But it wasn't long before her daughter-in-law, Artie Smith, was also found dead.

Two unsolved deaths only four years apart caused much unease among the locals.

These mysterious deaths remain unsolved, but not without speculation.

To this day, some consider Cannie's son to be the prime suspect to both murders.

Sarah Cripps, a local attorney and historian, will take us through both cases and how it affected local morale even generations later.

- Miss Cannie had been in considerable danger before and almost lost her life in 1920.

She was, of course, working downtown at the store.

We had a large fire downtown that engulfed several of our buildings.

So the fire engulfed her store and Miss Cannie sustained a loss of consciousness at that time, almost suffocated from smoke inhalation, collapsed on the store counter where you would check out, and was rescued.

The other thing that is well known is that her son, Aubrey, and his son, William, were constantly in need of money.

And they regularly came with asks, you know, for a loan.

By 1929, she was pretty fed up.

Right before Miss Cannie died, both of them had come separately and had asked Miss Cannie to advance funds.

She refused both of them.

Aubrey, who was living in Memphis at the time, drove from Memphis to Smithville to celebrate his mother's 77th birthday on May 2nd, 1929, which was a Thursday.

They had a birthday celebration, a Miss Razi Hodge stayed overnight to assist Miss Cannie at her home.

Apparently she had a very lovely birthday.

Now, on the morning of May 3rd is when we started having some difficulty.

Ms. Cannie did not collect her milk bottles.

Even more alarmingly, that afternoon, although she always met the Banner boy, she did not meet him either to collect her newspaper.

This was just not usual for her.

Her body was found with her head and shoulders in the fireplace between the end irons, and her shoulders and upper torso, her clothing, her arms were badly burned.

She had a large skull fracture that was higher up in this area.

So a coroner's inquest was called for.

Coroner's jury took evidence from physicians as well as other people who had relevant evidence to give, and they returned the verdict that Ms. Cannie Smith was murdered by blunt force trauma with an object to the head, delivered by a person or persons unknown to the jury.

A lot of people have always, I guess, suspected Aubrey or William because they were regular supplicants for money here at the home.

Today, I think the town's opinions are divided on this, that Miss Cannie was was up in years.

They said she regularly went outside to collect her own kindling and some wood and that, you know, she went out to collect that wood, came in, was in the process of placing the wood on the hearth.

I have problems with that for a lot of reasons.

One, this was in May.

I'm not sure why a fire would have been burning in a fireplace in rather temperate weather.

We have another extremely suspicious death in this same home just four years later.

After Miss Cannie's death on May 3rd, 1929, we have some new residents, but they're still members of the family.

So William, her grandson, moves into the home with his wife, Artie.

They live here for a time, a very young couple.

On the outside, I think it appeared that they had a good relationship, honestly.

William worked in Nashville and would regularly send his wife, Artie, the most delectable cakes from a bakery in Nashville.

Artie's friends were suspicious of this and they told Artie, "Artie, if you eat those cakes, you'll never live to tell about it."

And then on April the 8th, 1933, Artie passed in this house and was found dead here.

No known health conditions before then.

It is very much suspected that she succumbed to arsenic poisoning from her husband.

So what we're left with then is that her husband, William, may well have killed his wife and his grandmother in the same home.

The whole goal was to not only kill Miss Cannie, but destroy the home and therefore destroy the evidence.

But it is very hard to burn the human body without an incinerator.

- Despite the tragedy that struck the Twin Homes on Main Street in the late 1920s, the home and the town have lived on.

Besides the grueling history, the current owners have nothing but good things to say.

You can't help but feel a warm and inviting feeling upon entering.

However, the locals and friends of the owners who used to visit the home may have a different perspective.

- I have always loved old houses.

And I had lived until I was eight years old on the square where the city hall is now.

And that had been a hotel, though I guess that's where I first got my taste for old houses.

And so I just loved living here.

The story of Miss Cannie was always, for a kid, it was just a good story.

You know, we didn't think of the tragedy about it or anything.

I think one of the things that always appealed to me was the architecture and the lives, people who had lived in the houses.

It was just such a rich history with old houses that you just don't get in a new house.

Every house has its own story to tell.

- I love older homes.

I bought the one across the street, what's been called the twin to this one.

They were not identical twins, but very close.

My grandparents lived one block behind this house.

When my grandparents passed, my father was an only child, he inherited that house and restored it.

The family moved there when I was about 12 years old, and now my daughter lives there.

Of course, it hadn't changed any in all these years.

- Some of the interesting features that you probably would would not find in a modern home would be because the costliness, the price of having to use wood.

And I mean, the wood at that time was a much finer quality.

The construction was just exemplary.

The trim, the molding, the high ceilings, the cupula, and the little room that's up there.

I always thought it would be a wonderful place just to go up and curl up and read a book or take a nap.

It's such an unusual feature.

There was a fireplace in each of the kitchens.

There is a basement to each of these houses.

Miss Cannie would recognize this house today if she walked in.

A home like this makes a statement.

- I have not felt anything except sweetness and love.

We've had a lot of happy times in this house.

- It's important to preserve old homes, I think, because they just have a feel that new houses can't even begin to replicate.

Just, as I say, all the eccentricities and the different things.

Sometimes when I go into a new house, I think, "Boy, this might be nice."

But then I return home and I wouldn't wanna live anywhere else.

And you think about all the people that have lived there and have enjoyed it.

You feel a responsibility of keeping it up.

And we've just, this year, in fact, we have repainted the whole white picket fence.

It took us many months to get everything painted, but it's looking good and preserving, and it's high maintenance.

You have to really love these houses because you're keeping the house going for future generations.

- Although some homes have happier times than others, houses as old as the Atwell House and the Twin Homes are sure to have their ups and downs.

But the locals in Smithville do all they can to keep the history of their community alive.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of "Where Stories Live."

If you liked what you saw, please visit our website at wcte.org.

Thank you for watching and please join us next time when we go where stories live.

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Thank you.

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