Walking through the Victorian-era Belmont Mansion's is like stepping through a window to life during the 19th-century mid-South and in particular Nashville. The story of the site is presented by interpreters alongside details of the ongoing restoration. Visitors witness evidence of an estate controlled, enlivened, and energized by a woman. Adelicia Hayes Franklin Acklen Cheatham inherited a fortune from her first husband and used her wealth to construct this house with her second husband. The home was completed in 1853 in the Italian Villa style. The estate included an extensive greenhouse, bear house, water tower, art gallery and the grounds served as Nashville's first public zoo. Over the years it would change appearances, sometimes by her hand and sometimes not. She commissioned a Prussian-born architect to expand and embellish the house six years after completion. The Civil War's Battle of Nashville destroyed many of the estate's outbuildings though the house remained intact. After Adelicia sold her home in 1887, it transformed into a women’s college, and, in 1952, became part of the Belmont University campus.

Today, Belmont Mansion is the largest antebellum home in Tennessee open to the public, inviting visitors to enjoy the iron neoclassical statues in the gardens, the original fountain, the original water tower and remaining gazebos. Stoic marble busts, sculptures, and original furnishings fill the interior alongside more than 120 works of art. And for those bright-eyed visitors captivated by the surroundings, the staff also coordinates weddings, building on a tradition established when Adelicia married her third husband on the grounds in 1867.