How about a little Murfreesboro history today? This Italianate home is a Murfreesboro landmark known as the Women’s Club, but it didn’t start as such.
In 1856, Confederate surgeon Robert Turner Baskette married his sweetheart, Helen Crichlow, and built this home for their new life together. Surviving through the Civil War and the destructive tornadoes of 1913, this home is one of just a few downtown pre-Civil War homes left.
It was later home to James Monroe Haynes, a hotelier, who built one of the finest hotels in Tennessee – the Haynes Hotel. It was built in the 1890s, but was razed in 1958 to make way for a Plaza.
After Haynes’s death in 1910, the Women’s Club of Murfreesboro bought the home from his estate, and his wife Miriam, in 1916 and chartered the club the same year. It’s been active ever since.
