The Gilliland House: How a Black Stonemason Built One of Shelbyville's Most Extraordinary Structures

Stone on Stone

Some pieces weighed hundreds of pounds. James Gilliland moved them alone, or nearly so, across the fields of Bedford County , limestone pulled from the same bedrock that underlies the rolling terrain between Shelbyville and the Duck River. He had no crane. No power equipment. He had quarrying tools, a mule, and an absolute conviction that the log house he had grown up in deserved to become something that would last centuries.

It took him six years.

When he was finished, the Gilliland House stood with walls fifteen inches thick, laid in a coursed ashlar pattern , precisely cut limestone faces, fitted so tightly that the structure barely needed mortar. The hipped roof. The single dormer. The solidity of it. A building that looks like it grew from the ground rather than being placed on it, because in a very real sense, it was.

Who James Gilliland Was

James S. Gilliland was born in 1858, near Shelbyville, into the generation of Black Tennesseans who came of age in the years immediately following the Civil War. His was the generation that built lives in the ruins of what emancipation had not actually repaired , legally free, economically hemmed in, socially navigating a landscape of hostility that required both extraordinary skill and extraordinary patience to survive.

He taught himself stonemasonry. Or rather, he learned it the way most self-taught craftsmen learn: by doing, by failing, by looking at how other people had done it and then doing it better. By the time he was building his own house, he had already established a reputation in Bedford County for masonry work of unusual precision and durability.

The National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Gilliland House describes it as significant "as an outstanding example of the craftsmanship of a Black stonemason" , careful, bureaucratic language that nonetheless points toward something genuinely extraordinary. In a county where Black residents were systematically excluded from economic opportunity and professional recognition, Gilliland built a monument to his own skill with his own hands, from his own land, using stone he quarried himself.

The Stone and the Method

Bedford County's bedrock is predominantly limestone , the same carbonate rock that underlies much of Middle Tennessee and gives the region its characteristic topography of rolling hills, sinkholes, and spring-fed streams. Limestone is beautiful when cut and finished. It is also brutally hard to work without power tools. The coursed ashlar pattern Gilliland used requires that each stone be cut to a precise rectangular shape, its faces smooth and flat, its edges true.

He quarried the stone from deposits on or near his property, cutting and shaping each piece by hand with chisels and hammers before moving it to the building site. The largest pieces weighed hundreds of pounds. The precision of the finished walls suggests that Gilliland worked with the methodical patience of someone who understood that every stone set wrong would compound into structural problems that could not easily be corrected. He set them right.

The walls he built are fifteen inches thick. That is not architectural extravagance , it is structural logic. Thick walls carry loads efficiently, resist settling, provide thermal mass that moderates interior temperature, and are essentially impervious to the kind of deterioration that destroys frame buildings over decades. Buildings made this way are meant to outlast their builders by generations. The Gilliland House has.

The Gilliland Historical Resource Center

The Gilliland House today operates as the Gilliland Historical Resource Center, dedicated to preserving and presenting the history of James Gilliland and the broader context of African American life in Bedford County across two centuries. The center has faced challenges , including a vandalism incident that was reported by Nashville's WKRN , but has continued its work of collecting materials, maintaining the historic structure, and honoring the legacy of a craftsman who deserves far more recognition than he has typically received.

The center is a resource for genealogical research, local history, and the specific history of African American communities in Shelbyville and Bedford County. Fredia Lusk, the historian whose work on "African Americans Living in Bedford County from 1820 to 2020" has been central to recovering and documenting this history, has been associated with the center's mission. The work of preservation here is also the work of identity , making sure that the full story of Bedford County includes the people who built it and were then written out of its official history.

What the House Means Now

The Gilliland House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places , not as an architectural curiosity, but as a site of genuine historical significance. The listing recognizes both the building's exceptional craftsmanship and its meaning as evidence of what Black Tennesseans accomplished in the post-Reconstruction South under conditions designed to limit their possibilities.

Stand in front of those walls and think about what it meant to build them. Eighteen ninety-eight. Tennessee. A Black man with hand tools and a vision, quarrying stone from his own land, building walls that would outlast every critic, every obstacle, every attempt by circumstance to reduce his ambitions to something more "realistic." The walls are still there. Still fifteen inches thick. Still precisely fitted. Still announcing, in the most durable language available, that James S. Gilliland built something worth building.

The house is located in the Shelbyville area; contact the Gilliland Historical Resource Center for visiting information and hours. It is worth the trip , one of those sites where the history and the physical reality align so precisely that the past becomes, briefly, present.