Sally Thomas Boarding House

Look for the Doubletree Hotel on your right. This building is very near the spot where Sally Thomas’s business stood. Continue walking down Fourth Avenue North while you listen or read the narrative. Sally Thomas was born in Virginia in 1790, the child of an enslaved woman and a white man. In 1817, Thomas and her two sons migrated with their master to Nashville. Nashville’s slave codes provided strict rules for what slaves in the city could do and could not do, but some were allowed to earn additional money in their free time. Thomas did just that. She found employment as a maid and used her earnings to rent out a two-story home on the corner of Deaderick and Cherry Streets, today Fourth Avenue, where she made her own special soaps and established a laundry business. According to one historian, Sally specialized in silk, velvet, and cashmere and had more business than she could handle.

She also established a boarding house, renting rooms in the house out to people who had extended stays in Nashville. Future United States Supreme Court Justice John Catron was one of her boarders. In 1827, at the age of 36, Sally Thomas gave birth to a third son, named James. James’s father was Justice Catron.

All of Sally’s sons had white fathers, and Sally’s biological father was also white. It is important to note that during the antebellum era many white men had children with enslaved Black women—most often the result of physical assault and/or economic coercion. These occurrences, and the children they produced, were termed “open secrets,” described in 1861 by white Southerner Mary Chesnut as “the thing we cannot name.” The circumstances of Thomas’s relationships with the fathers of her children are unknown, but we know that none of the men sought to emancipate their children.

When Sally Thomas’s owner died he left behind an estate ridden with debts, and she feared her second son, Henry Thomas, who had become a barber, would be sold. Henry escaped and eventually ended up in Buffalo, New York. Then he fled New York to Buxton, Canada after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Sally Thomas then borrowed money from Nashville lawyer Ephraim Foster, a customer of her laundry and member of the United States Senate, so that she could buy the freedom of her youngest son, James Thomas. Geoffrey Fogg, another Nashville lawyer, then loaned Sally enough money to buy her own freedom. Tragically, Sally Thomas died in 1850 of cholera during an epidemic and was buried in the Nashville City Cemetery. Sally Thomas embodied the sacrifice of a mother and a woman determined to provide a better life for her children and for her community.

Continue walking down Fourth Avenue North until you reach Union Street. Stay on this corner and look diagonally across the intersection to 333 Union Street. This was the former site of Andrew Jackson’s Law Office. You may cross over to see the wall mounted historical marker, or continue listening to the narration here.