Pilgrimage
For the past 5 years in earnest, I have been deep in digging up stories of my matrilineal line spanning 7 generations all smack dab here in downtown Nashville. I have a ton of stories that I have accumulated from family sharing over the years, documented information passed down through my Great Grandmother Mercedes, to my Grandma Julia and her sister Aunt Eleanor, to my mama and now to me. No one has really done much with deep documenting and story archiving so that our descendants can have these stories easily accessible though. It has been a long nagging call for me to write our stories in a way that makes them more connective to life today rather than just listing out census data. Because I am a medicinal storyteller who merges data with what stories I have, a deep intuition and channeled knowing that comes simply from opening my personal line up to the guidance of my lineage who want to come through and be remembered, I am gathering these stories and sharing them.
A few years ago, I came upon a newspaper article about my great great grandfather by the name of Michael T. Baine, who in the 1880s and 90s had a lucrative plumping business with a gas lighting and bathroom fixtures gallery on Church Street where the Nashville Public Library stands now. The article I found was so deliciously written that I knew I needed more of these stories of my family.
Five generations all lived and worked in Downtown Nashville from 1859 to the mid 1940s when, as so many middle class white people did in that time, they moved to the suburbs of Belle Meade and West Meade. I knew many of them were fairly well known back in their time and that I might find a treasure trove of delightful articles at the Tennessee State Archives. But over the years, life was busy with children and work, then the new building was being built, a global pandemic that kept us in lock down… Admittedly, I’m a Gemini and very fickle in my obsessions so other shiny objects (aka ideas and projects) caught my gaze so I never got around to exploring more. Until August of 2021, when I finally made my way to the brand new Tennessee State Library and Archives in Germantown and *swoon*!!! It’s an amazing space! If you live in Nashville, go gawk in awe over it! We pay taxes for it to exist so go play!!
But first let me tell you right quick about the witchy spell I did the weekend before popping over to the archives to research my family because it’s important to the storyline. I hold August 8 (8/8-double infinity loops) as a very sacred day, some of y’all may know it as the Lion’s Gate Portal if you are into astrology! It’s a ripe time, some of us believe, to activate long term intentions, possibilities, or dreams. 8/8/2021, for me, was all about preparation for pilgrimage, specifically the Camino De Santiago in Spain, which has been calling for me to walk it for a few years now. I had just read for the first time, Paulo Coelho’s memoir titled The Pilgrimage, about his own journey on the Camino, and then followed it up with a reread of his famous work (and one of my favorite stories) The Alchemist, based on his personal journey from his book, The Pilgrimage. I had set an altar with the Coelho books, some tarot cards connecting to the number 8 and infinity, objects representing the 4 elements, and a written intention activation prayer/spell (same same for me) which I would be reading morning and night for 8 days per the Lion’s Gate ritual. If this is not your spiritual practice and you feel you need to pray for my soul, I never turn down prayers so the more the better!
I had scheduled the trip to the archives the week before, so the trip happened to fall during this portal activation ritual period. I pulled up to the front of the new building which is really quite glorious to behold, walked in and it’s so quiet and new and bright and wonderful! I got a State library card, a tour of the archives, and then set up a little space in their gorgeous reading room to surf their files in search of more family stories. I decided to start with Michael T. Baine and the plumbing business called Mooney and Baine because of the article I had already discovered. Low and behold so many articles about them popped up! One in particular caught my eye. It was a story from 1880 about how Great Great Grandfather Michael spent some time at Beersheba Springs Hotel and Resort, installing indoor plumbing with the finest modern fixtures, as well as a Turkish bath, which apparently were all the rage in the 1880s! Well that got me looking up pictures of the Beersheba Springs resort. Apparently it was quite a hot-spot for well-to-do Nashvillians to get away from the heat and humidity of the Nashville Basin and head up to the Cumberland Plateau for rest and relaxation in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The last photos I found in the archives were of the hotel quite run down in the late 1930s.
Growing up my whole life in Nashville, I have heard of Beersheba Springs and am always intrigued by the name but it's not somewhere that you necessarily make plans to go visit… It's more the kind of place that on your way from Nashville to somewhere fun you may pass through and be like, “Huh… I've always wondered about this place…” as you keep on driving through it. But the article of my great great grandfather from 141 years ago going up there to install his fancy plumbing and bathing equipment had me wanting to see if this hotel still existed and hoping deeply that it did so that I could go there just because I felt it would be such a lovely ancestral connection.
Guess what y'all?! It's still there! It was purchased by the Tennessee Convention of the Methodist Church and converted into a conference and retreat center called The Beersheba Springs Assembly. And guess what else?! As I was looking through their website, I saw a storytellers retreat scheduled for September 17-18, 2021. I immediately signed up right then and there sitting in the Tennessee State Library Archives because what are the chances that this place I stumbled upon, connected to this ancestor, would be hosting a storytelling retreat and me a medicinal storyteller doing research to tell the stories of my lineage! You can not make that up!!
It wasn't until I got home that night and sat down at my Lion’s Gate altar to do my daily prayer to activate intentions for pilgrimage that I realized that I had, indeed just that very day, activated a mini ancestral pilgrimage for myself to Beersheba Springs. It’s no Camino de Santiago but still! Through my family research and love of storytelling, I created part of a lineage story that activated a powerful part of my own personal journey and story. 8/8 portal spell working some ancestral connective magic y’all!
So I will end with this… Despite all the growth, which is quickly making our little city unrecognizable to many of us whose families have imprinted on the history of downtown Nashville for generations, I offer this anecdotal, magical tale to you on the 8/8 portal of 2022.
Whether you are a long time resident of Nashville, brand new to town, somewhere in between, or a connective soul kin from somewhere else, go find your own lineage rabbit hole to jump down! Think of something that you love to learn about or something you find fascinating about your family, your city, an ancestral country, a story that has always been asking for you to seek more, and think about it from a historical lens. We have so much access to information all over the world so it may be that some archival records are just waiting for you to find them and revive an old story tucked away under all the “new” that so many places are becoming, especially Nashville, now-a-days. Bring that story back from history, while weaving it into your present life, even if it’s just to share for 10 minutes or so over a beer or two at a brewery just down the road from where the story all began. I promise that it will bring you insight, joy, delight, and I bet just a tinch of magic too! Tis the season!
Cheers y'all, Sonia
Here’s my Beersheba Springs Ancestral Pilgrimage video!