Adelicia Hayes Franklin
*Adelicia Hayes Franklin Acklen Cheatham was born on this date in 1817. She was a white-American planter and slave trader.
Adelicia Hayes was born in Nashville, Tennessee. Her parents were Northerners: her father was Oliver Bliss Hayes, a lawyer and later Presbyterian minister from South Hadley, Massachusetts. Her mother was Sarah Clements (Hightower) Hayes. They lived at Rokeby in Nashville, now the name of a neighborhood. 1839, at age 22, Hayes married Isaac Franklin, a wealthy, prominent 50-year-old slave trader and planter. He started fully concentrating on his plantations by 1841, mainly in Louisiana. The couple had four children together, none of whom survived early childhood.
In 1846, Franklin died, and she inherited the Fairvue Plantation in Gallatin, Tennessee; 8,700 acres (35 km2) in four cotton plantations in Louisiana; more than 50,000 acres (200 km2) of undeveloped land in Texas; stocks and bonds, and 750 African slaves, who had high value in the South. In 1849, the widow Franklin married Joseph Alexander Smith Acklen. Together, they built the Belmont Mansion outside Nashville as a summer estate with gardens and a zoo. They had six children; her husband died in 1863.
Later, Adelicia Acklen married Dr. William Archer Cheatham, a physician and head of the Tennessee State Insane Asylum. But Acklen soon grew dissatisfied with this marriage and moved to Washington, D.C. In 1887, Acklen Cheatham sold the Belmont Mansion in Nashville. It was later used as a girls' academy, eventually developing into Belmont University. Acklen had also leased and then sold the plantations in Louisiana in 1880. In 1901, the state bought four of them, including the one known as Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. At seventy, Adelicia Acklen died on a shopping trip in New York City on May 4, 1887. She was buried at the Mount Olivet Cemetery in Nashville, Tennessee.
