Seven historical markers stand in Fairview. Most people drive past all of them. Between them they carry an iron furnace, a roadside tavern, a planned town that failed twice, a schoolhouse, a graveyard, two Confederate units, and the woman who planted the park.

Here is where each one is and what it records, with a map under each so you can find it rather than take our word for where it stands. The wording quoted below is the markers' own.

1. The last of Williamson County's iron

Caney Fork Furnace sits on Caney Fork Road, out past 7544, and was put up by the Williamson County Historical Society. What it marks is a stone stack left over from the iron trade that once ran the length of the Western Highland Rim. Moses Speer was working the site by 1832, on two thousand acres near the creek. The marker does not soften who did the work: "skilled and unskilled laborers including enslaved peoples" under an ironmaster. Speer lost money, the land passed to a minister named Thomas L. Douglass, and the furnace had gone cold by 1848. A coal and lumber company bought the property for timber in the 1920s; the Harrison family farmed it from the 1930s. The stack is the last piece of that industry left anywhere in Williamson County and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Caney Fork FurnaceOpen in Maps

2. A tavern saved by its sign, and a town that never was

Horn Tavern Springs and Pasadena share a marker on Horn Tavern Road, near 7353, erected by the city in 2006. Two stories. Around 1809 a young man opened a tavern here on the road between Franklin and Charlotte, and hung a sign that gave the place its name: animals painted either side of the door, crowned with horns from elk, deer, ram, buffalo and oxen. The marker says the tavern was reportedly spared from burning during an attack because of that odd sign. The springs behind it, at the top of Brush Creek, were the city's main water supply from 1963 to 1991, good for a hundred thousand gallons a day. The second story is stranger. In 1889 a Franklin lawyer, P.E. Cox, and a partner named Morris set out to build one of Middle Tennessee's first planned towns on land carved from a four-thousand-acre grant. Pasadena was to have 1,391 acres of square blocks, avenues, parks and a town square, and it got as far as a hotel, a school, a post office, a blacksmith, a doctor and a tobacco warehouse before it collapsed. In 1915 the survivors of the scheme carved it into thirty-seven big lots at two hundred dollars each and sold them to Russian-Jewish immigrant families in Chicago. Thirteen families came. All had left by the mid-1920s.