Franklin Masonic Hall

Franklin’s oldest public building, a Gothic Revival Masonic hall one block off Main Street and a National Historic Landmark since 1973. Hiram Lodge No. 7 still meets here.

The lodge, chartered in 1809, raised this hall in 1823 and has met in it ever since: the oldest Masonic hall in continuous use in Tennessee.

Andrew Jackson negotiated the Treaty of Franklin with Chickasaw leaders here in 1830, the first treaty under the Indian Removal Act. No other sitting president has traveled to an Indian council to negotiate.

The town’s first three-story building was pressed into Federal service from 1862 to 1865: hospital, quartermaster offices, and Michigan cavalry barracks, taking in wounded after the Battle of Franklin.

Staff of the hall’s preservation foundation and their visitors report men in blue uniforms in the downstairs foyer, and a disembodied pair of legs crossing the main room.

The foundation’s Rachael Finch and Grace Abernethy told the Nashville Scene of an unknown male voice singing along on a recording of a girl, made when no men were in the building.

The stories draw their own crowd: the foundation runs Haunted Hall Tours, about $5, proceeds toward restoration. US Ghost Adventures covers the hall, and the Southern Gothic podcast devoted episode 37 to it.

You can see the exterior anytime from the downtown sidewalk. The interior opens only for scheduled events, the foundation’s October ghost tours among them, and there are no daily public hours.