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“I take to the open road. . . . O public road. . . . O highway. . . . Allons! The road is before us!”

Walt Whitman, The Song of the Open Road, 1882

Walt Whitman’s poetic “highway” anticipated Americans’ eagerness for the motorized future, when the Cheek family became enthusiastic patrons of the Age of the Automobile. Their impeccable Cheekwood garage boasted a fleet of fine autos, present-day brands as well as models dispatched to history. The sedan and the wood-paneled (“Woody”) Ford station wagon, the sturdy Buick, the luxurious Packard, the elegant Lincoln town car with wire wheels and whitewall tires, together with the convertible Ford roadster—all filled the inventory of the Cheek family’s vehicles over two generations.

As a country estate completed in 1932, Cheekwood relied on prior decades of automotive modernization and roadway construction. A Good Roads move­ment had promoted pavement as early as the late 1870s, and a trans­continental highway—the Lincoln Highway—was dedicated in 1913 to inaugurate coast-to-coast travel. (The map that smoothly routed autos from New York City to San Francisco bore little relation to motor­ists’ realities, for deep ruts, mud, perilous bridges, and unwonted detours deterred all but the hardiest motorists.) By post-WWI, nonetheless, US automobile ownership had reached nearly 6.7 million vehicles, and rubber met the road with tires from Goodyear, Goodrich, Firestone, and other Akron, Ohio, manufacturers. The now-legendary U.S. Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles, was inaugurated in 1926, and one year later, the completed U.S. 1 stretched from Maine to Florida.

Wealthy early adopters of the motor car, such as Leslie Cheek, Sr., often opted for chauffeurs, just as their predecessors relied on coachmen to drive harnessed purebred teams. For Mr. Cheek, the onus of steering, manual gear shifting, and synchronizing the brake, clutch, and accelerator pedals (and mastering the fuel-enriching choke) was best left to the chauffeur, who was also charged with maintenance of the vehicles. For convenience, if not necessity, the Cheeks installed a gasoline pump beside the garage. Prior to Leslie Cheek’s death in 1935, the family letters mention his fishing trips to Reelfoot Lake in northwest Tennessee, where he was doubtless driven on two-lane blacktop roadways by Ed Drake, his stalwart chauffeur.

Travels by automobile punctuated the Cheeks’ letters. Mabel proposed a two-week visit to son Leslie, Jr., hoping her daughter might join her. (“I will go in the Buick.”)  For his part, Leslie, Jr., had long enjoyed his green Ford convertible roadster, a graduation gift, but his sister, Huldah, perhaps outdid her brother and mother with a 1940 drive to the summit of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington on the former carriage road that now took automobiles up the mountain to the height of 6,288 feet above sea level.

In July 1951, Huldah repeated the drive. “I hadn’t done this since 1940,” she recalled, “and the road is not a bit better than it was then.” Her Ford station wagon engine overheated, but nearby streams provided water for the car’s radiator. (“On the top we walked the dogs, admired the view, and had a late lunch in the Summit House, which is just as unattractive as I remember it.”)

The freedom offered by the automobile inevitably came with chores and costly repairs. With her car just washed, Huldah lamented, “It will get dirty on that [dusty] road whatever the weather.” Worse, in 1943 a repair to the Lincoln cost her mother $100 when its driver, John Reid, seriously damaged one of the doors. “I hope the accident will make him more careful,” Mabel Cheek wrote. “He is the best horseman I ever saw, but not much of a driver.”

Horsemanship flourished in the twentieth century when men and women exercised on the bridle paths, as did Huldah and Leslie, Jr., and some hobbyists relished taking the reins of a horse-drawn coach or light trap. To drive, however, now meant to take the wheel in the new era that one American spelled in four capital letters:
“A-U-T-O.”

Learn more about the incredible machines that moved America and join car enthusiasts from across the southeast on June 18-19, 2022 at the Exposition of Elegance: Classic Cars at Cheekwood. Elegant cars from a bygone era will shine against the backdrop of Cheekwood’s gardens before the weekend culminates with an 11-mile Tour d’Elegance through the streets of the City of Belle Meade.

Blog post provided by Cheekwood’s Writer-in-Residence, Cecelia Tichi, Ph.D.

Cecelia Tichi is an award-winning author and Professor of English and American Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University. Her books span American literature and culture from colonial days to modern times, but her recent work draws upon the Gilded Age (post-1870) that prompted her book on Jack London and another on seven activists in that tumultuous era.

Cecelia’s research and teaching inspired What Would Mrs. Astor Do? The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age, followed by Gilded Age Cocktails and Jazz Age Cocktails , which set the stage for her mystery crime novels that boast “Gilded” in each title.

Cecelia can be followed on her website: https://cecebooks.com/

Extraordinary creature! So close a friend…
Thomas Mann, “A Man and His Dog,” 1919, 1930

Of all God’s creatures, there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the leash.
That is the cat.
Mark Twain, Notebook, 1894

The Cheekwood estate offered ample opportunity for four-footed, furry companions to patrol the one hundred acres or reside in the mansion’s original thirty-six rooms. Indoors or out, the Cheekwood dogs and a cat became a topic of the family members’ letters, both in brief and in extensive accounts of the pets’ antics, veterinary care, and sad passings too. Aside from accounts of the family’s horses (and Mabel Cheek’s brief foray into poultry with Rhode Island Red chickens), the letters offer glimpses of family life with canine and feline allies.

In time, the Cheeks’ spaniels and terriers were named Bruce and Laddie, Daniel and Cinder, but early-on, two of the family’s hound dogs were named for figures in Greek mythology and history.  A mythical priestess, Hero, shared kennel space with Sappho, a famed poet considered to be the author of some ten thousand lines of verse. Most likely, it was Huldah or Leslie, Jr. who bequeathed such names, for their classical schooling familiarized brother and sister with Greek and Roman myths and ancient history. “Sapho [sic] and Hero are fine ‘coondogs,’” their mother reported to Huldah, who understood these were hunting dogs, released at night to hunt raccoons. (Mother Mabel need not have known of the one night when, as Huldah wrote, “I collected my dogs and took a walk all over Cheekwood…. the gardens were so serene and lovely, the silence so dense with the tiny noises of darkness.”)

Caroline the cat hunted too, her nocturnal escapades reported regularly at Mabel Cheek’s bedside. “Caroline presents me with some tribute almost every morning,” Mrs. Cheek admitted with some dismay. “She meows by the bed until I wake up and look. Lizards, moles, and mice were bad enough,” she continued, “but yesterday her offering was a baby Cardinal, today—oh horrors—a baby rabbit.”

If Caroline had free range at Cheekwood, she was nonetheless outdone on one occasion by a favorite housedog, Daniel, possibly a West Highland white terrier. Daniel had avoided the occasional dogfights within the pack, hastening “up the kitchen stairs” at the first sign of trouble between Laddie and Bruce. However, Daniel suffered an injury to his paw so severe that he spent a night at the veterinary clinic and came home with a front paw in a splint. Huldah’s name for this purebred— “Daniel-Darling-Sweetheart-Pie”—points to the care and cosseting he would receive during his recovery. His place at the family dinner table crowns Daniel as top dog at Cheekwood. No other family canine or feline was reported to have a seat at the table.

On passing, the pets were interred in wood box coffins and laid to rest in a pet cemetery on the Cheekwood grounds, all with headstones bearing their names. The headstones have been moved from the original pet cemetery but remain on the property today and can be found at the back of the Frist Learning Center, down the hill from the Swan Lawn. Statues of Hero and Aristotle have been erected and are displayed in the PNC Living Library in the Children’s Garden.

Blog post provided by Cheekwood’s Writer-in-Residence, Cecelia Tichi, Ph.D.

Cecelia Tichi is an award-winning author and Professor of English and American Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University. Her books span American literature and culture from colonial days to modern times, but her recent work draws upon the Gilded Age (post-1870) that prompted her book on Jack London and another on seven activists in that tumultuous era.

Cecelia’s research and teaching inspired What Would Mrs. Astor Do? The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age, followed by Gilded Age Cocktails and Jazz Age Cocktails , which set the stage for her mystery crime novels that boast “Gilded” in each title.

Cecelia can be followed on her website: https://cecebooks.com/