Two Armies Once Shared a Meal on This Lawn. On Sept. 26 the Rule Is Simple: No Ticket at 3:01, No Beer.
Start with the part that will actually ruin someone's Saturday, because it is the one detail people skip.
There are no tickets at the gate. None. The online window for the 12th Annual Oktoberfest at Oaklands Mansion closes at 3 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 26 — one hour before the event opens — and after that the only people getting in are the ones who bought ahead. Every year a few carloads find this out in the parking lot.
The details
The festival runs 4 to 8 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 26, outdoors on the mansion grounds at 900 North Maney Ave.
- $55 — craft beer tasting admission, 21 and up
- $25 — designated driver, 17 and up
- Free — children and students 16 and under
The beer side is tastings from local breweries. There is live music, several local food vendors on site, and a hydration station handing out free water, which in late September in Middle Tennessee is not a courtesy so much as a necessity. Some seating is provided but not enough — bring a chair or a blanket. Leashed dogs are welcome. It runs rain or shine, and there are no refunds, so read the forecast before you commit rather than after.
That free-under-16 line is worth noticing. It is what makes this a family evening on a lawn rather than a beer event you need a sitter for, and it is why the crowd skews wider than an Oktoberfest usually does.
The lawn has done this before
Here is the thing about buying a beer and sitting down on that particular grass.
Oaklands began around 1818 as a two-room brick house on land that became a 1,500-acre plantation held by the Maney family — Dr. James Maney and his wife, Sally Hardy Murfree Maney, who inherited the property after Colonel Murfree's death in 1809. The house grew by stages into the Italianate mansion standing today. Like every plantation house in Middle Tennessee, the wealth that built it was extracted from enslaved people, and the museum's history does not begin and end with the architecture.
On July 13, 1862, the First Battle of Murfreesboro came through the front yard. Confederate cavalry under Nathan Bedford Forrest caught Federal troops camped on that lawn and defeated them there. And then — this is the detail that sticks — once the surrender was signed, the two armies sat down together on the grounds and ate a meal of black-eyed peas and sweet potatoes.
One hundred and sixty-four years later, people will set folding chairs on the same lawn and eat from a food truck. It is difficult to think of a more complete outcome.
The building is only here because somebody fought for it
Oaklands nearly did not survive the twentieth century. By the late 1950s it was headed for demolition. In April 1959 a group of local women organized as the Oaklands Association, Inc. specifically to stop that, and the city agreed to convey the house and three-tenths of an acre to them to be run as a museum. It opened for tours in the early 1960s and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
That lineage is the reason the ticket price matters: Oktoberfest is a fundraiser for a nonprofit house museum, not a promoter's event. The $55 is buying beer and also helping keep a 200-year-old house standing.
If you go
Buy early — this event has sold out in past years and the hard 3 p.m. cutoff means a sellout is final. Bring a chair, bring cash for the food vendors, and get there near 4 rather than near 6 if you want to walk the grounds in daylight. Tickets and the full policy are on the mansion's own Oktoberfest page.
And if late September is too long to wait, the mansion's Fall Art & Craft Fair is on the same grounds this Saturday, Sept. 5.
