Episode 3914

- [Announcer] "Tennessee Crossroads" is brought to you in part by.

- [Representative] Some of our biggest checks have also made the biggest difference. The Tennessee Lottery, proud to have raised more than $7.5 billion for education. Now that's some game-changing, life-changing fun.

- [Representative] Discover Tennessee trails and byways, where adventure, cuisine and history come together. With 16 scenic driving trails, you can discover why Tennessee sounds perfect. Trips can be planned at tntrailsandbyways.com.

- [Representative] The Co-op system in Tennessee consists of independently owned Co-ops, driven to serve farmer owners, rural lifestyle customers and their communities throughout Tennessee and in five neighboring states. More at ourcoop.com.

- [Representative] Middle Tennessee State University College of Liberal Arts helps students explore the world, engage minds, enrich lives and earn a living. More at mtsu.edu/cla.

- This week, we'll dine in a Gallatin mansion, sample fresh donuts in Fairview, tour a natural history museum in the Borough, and meet an artist who takes ceramics to another level. Thanks for dropping by. I'm Ketch Secor, welcoming you to "Tennessee Crossroads." First we'll visit an 1869 Italianate mansion that's had four owners in its lifetime. Laura Faber and our crew spent the day at what is now South Water Manor in Gallatin to hear about its past, present and future.

- [Laura] Five blocks from downtown Gallatin sits an historic home that has become a cozy gathering place for locals and tourists alike. South Water Manor is home to Bistro 562 and Coffee House, which serves breakfast and lunch. It partners with 30 local retailers, has two short-term rental properties and is an event space.

- We tell people a lot of times that we didn't start one business, we started five when we started here.

- [Laura] Running a business like this was never on the radar for owners Heather and Jeff Brigstock. Their journey started years ago with mission work in Scotland. Heather and Jeff eventually landed here.

- We started refurbishing furniture, and she would do the paint side, I would do the structural side, and selling to the public kind of on the side. And we found out that we love doing it.

- [Laura] And were good at it. The name of that business Inside Out even gets a nod on the walls here with the IO as a reminder of where they started. But then COVID caused Heather and Jeff to pivot. Plus, Jeff had a thing for coffee.

- [Jeff] My dream, my passion, was to have a coffee shop because we love coffee, but we also know coffee is a way to connect with people. We looked at several buildings, and then landed upon the Fitzgerald Manor. In July of 2020, it was for sale. It was big, really big for us. It was a huge dream to even have a place like this.

- So we were looking for something, what was next? "Do we keep going or do we not?" And when we walked into this building, something just felt right. We went through the whole thing, from the front, to the back, to the top, to the bottom. I remember sitting in the window, so there was glass missing out there, and just looking and praying and knowing that it was right. It doesn't make sense, but I could see it. Jeff could see it. I'm very blessed to be able to do business with my best friend. And we did it, and it was a miracle.

- [Laura] Fitzgerald Manor was built in 1869 by Italian immigrant Henry Fitzgerald. Bricks were made on site. The walls three bricks thick. This is the old Fitzgerald house. The last time "Tennessee Crossroads" was inside this building was way back in 2013 when Monells operated its restaurant here. Though Heather and Jeff renovated, they kept much of the building's Italianate architecture intact, from the bricks to the molding. Today, customers come to shop from local vendors, everything from clothing, to gifts, to pottery and art. They come to eat. Bistro 562 is a scratch kitchen.

- [Sydney] This is our chicken salad.

- Head Chef Sydney and Miss Debbie work from original recipes. And of course, folks come to get South Water's signature blend of coffee.

- Life is too short to drink bad coffee. And we've had a lot of different coffee. Middle Tennessee is a great place for coffee roasting. There are many good roasters. So we kind of searched high and low, and we decided to go with Honest because of their meticulous detail and the way that they actually do this. We got to go down to Honest Coffee Roasters and actually make the Bistro 562 house blend. It was called a cupping, and they take it very serious, and we're glad they did. So we got to actually pick out our blend that's only served here. You're gonna know that we're chocolate lovers, so you'll have a hint of that in there as well. Yeah, and a little brown sugar.

- [Laura] As for the food, favorites include the hot honey chicken wrap. And there is the South Water burger with homemade mustard aioli sauce.

- It's not frozen, it's hand packed. It's our special sauces and ingredients that go into every burger. It really is secret sauces. We also have a Hawaiian burger, if you like the pineapple flavor and that type of thing. Our chicken salad is pretty amazing. We call it the Gallatin goddess. So people love that as well.

- You can shop, you can eat and you can stay at South Water Manor. They've renovated two historic buildings on the property, an old summer kitchen in the old servants' quarters, and they are now beautiful luxury Airbnb rentals. The Brigstocks have completely transformed these buildings.

- [Heather] There was a gopher living in one. We had squirrels living in the other. And now they're very high end, feel like a boutique hotel. Each one sleeps too, they each have a king bed. But going along with the hospitality perspective, we want people to be able to come here and retreat. So we named them the Retreats at South Water Manor. They're very beautiful.

- [Laura] Of all the things the Brigstocks have done in their lives, this is by far their favorite. They created a place for people to gather, to grow their own small businesses, a place to celebrate milestone events, all while shining a positive light on their city of Gallatin.

- [Heather] We want people to come in and know that they're loved and valued and seen. These folks are our family.

- Excellent food is part of the plan, excellent coffee's part of the plan, but we love people. We absolutely do. And we know that that's the internal investment.

- Our goal is to work hard, to be a voice of good, to affect change in a positive way. And then we're gonna go to bed and do the same thing tomorrow.

- Thanks, Laura. Well, we all know barbecue is a hot topic of debate here in the Southland. Now it seems donuts may also be stirring up a lot of strong opinions. Whether they're fried or baked, yeast or flour, everyone has a favorite. Well, in our next story, Miranda Cohen finds a popular place where everyone agrees that the donuts are delicious.

- [Miranda] Mr. Kitley Tang is the keeper of a secret family recipe. And luckily, he is abundantly sharing it with everyone in Fairview. In fact, people are driving from miles away to try the treats at Fairview Fresh Deli Donuts. But the closely guarded secret is not mixed up in the sugar and flour. It is the little something extra that the Tang family puts into everything.

- The secret, we make the donut by own family. We create a recipe by a family.

- [Miranda] Originally from Cambodia, Mr. Tang and his family started making donuts nearly 20 years ago. He has been in this Fairview location for almost 15 years. And the name Fairview Fresh Deli Donuts says it all.

- [Kitley] Day by day, fresh. That's why my sign is fresh, because we make day by day. Croissant, today, we make everything, roll it, everything. Tomorrow, bake it.

- [Miranda] Mr. Tang sold the donut shop as a way to keep his family all together, working in the community that they love. They then perfected a technique to make a fluffy, light and delicately sweet donut, but without a hint of grease.

- [Kitley] Nothing included in, but we have a technique how to make, especially dough, really important. Whenever you make a dough good, then donut is good. First of all, no grease in the donut. Everybody can make a donut, but they don't know about the secret. Some people heavy, some people floppy, like these are floppy. No grease in there.

- At Fairview Fresh Deli Donuts, you know you're gonna get a great donut, right? But what might surprise you, they also make delicious handmade croissants. The family has a secret recipe. They are buttery, they are flaky, and they are delicious all on their own, but you can also get lots of add-ons. You can add many savory breakfast options to the light and airy croissant, like bacon, egg, sausage and cheese. But perhaps the biggest surprise on the menu hails from the Lone Star State. That's right, a big Texas kolache, handmade right here in Tennessee.

- This with the jalapeno flavor. It's not that hot, but you taste it, you're gonna know what it is. We sell a lot of those.

- [Miranda] The sweet or savory yeast bread creation can also be filled with cream cheese or meats. But it is the plain and simple donuts in dozens of flavors that keep the loyal customers coming in.

- Some people come here every morning. They just come to get donut. I have a apple fritter. I have a cream cheese, strawberry cream cheese, and I have a chocolate cream cheese. And the donut, we create all kind of like sprinkle, something, Solomon, Solomon twist, and a Long John.

- [Miranda] And about that apple fritter. It is one of their best sellers. Like everything, handmade fresh every single day.

- The best one, the most is applefritter, glaze and chocolate. It's kind of like every customer is different, they love all kind. But the most, glaze and chocolate, the chocolate maple, we make my own.

- [Miranda] The fresh baked-onsite goodies will sell out nearly every day. So go early. Simple ingredients with a simple concept, their family baking for your family, and the community that has embraced them.

- Tennessee, the first year, my wife and I scary. But now, now we love Tennessee.

- Of course.

- Tennessee is the best place to live.

- Good morning. I'm good, how are you?

- [Miranda] Some of 17-year-old Angelina Tang's very first memories are watching her parents bake and create for others.

- They both are very outgoing and like they will get the job done. They will. I've seen like the amount of potential that my parents had. And even if they've been here for multiple years, I just never really understood the popularity, until I actually saw it for myself when I started working here.

- [Miranda] And as the next generation, she is making her own kind of donuts. She created the Fairview Fresh Deli logo.

- I made created the donuts myself, like the base, the icing, the sprinkles. I did all that by myself. And I thought maybe adding a little arch would make it like artistic. And that's kind of how I made it.

- [Miranda] But even more than the donuts and the big breakfast croissants, or even those fritters, the customers keep coming to see the Tangs themselves, enjoy a moment of their morning and share in their joy.

- When you come here working with your family, it's a fun time to have, and getting to spend time with your family, even at work, is such a blessing, in my opinion, yeah.

- They like the product first. The second, they like the service. So we apply not just lip to talk, we inside, we good family, come from Cambodia, but we good, good family.

- Thanks, Miranda. When you hear the term Museum of Natural History, you might think of Washington, DC, New York, or even London. But what about Murfreesboro? That's right, Middle Tennessee has had its very own Museum of Natural History since 2014. Cindy Carter uncovered this hidden gem and brings us the story.

- [Cindy] If it's true we are known by the company we keep-

- [Alan] Mastodons and mammoths, which were running around in Tennessee.

- [Cindy] then Alan Brown is one ferocious and fascinating guy.

- So this is a Edmontosaurus femur that I dug up.

- [Cindy] Alan spends his days hanging out with his prehistoric pals, like T. rex, velociraptor, and lots of others who are harder to pronounce.

- So this slightly reddish-colored dinosaur is called a Struthiomimus, possibly one of the fastest dinosaurs. If you look, he's got really long legs, he's really lightly built.

- [Cindy] This savvy science guy, passionate paleontologist is also the executive director of Earth Experience.

- I have always been absolutely in love with natural history museums, and it was a natural history museum that got me interested in science in the first place.

- [Cindy] And in 2014, that love affair led Alan to open this natural history museum in Murfreesboro, Middle Tennessee's very first.

- [Alan] Tennessee has a huge natural history component to it. We have lots of minerals especially from Tennessee. There's giant calcite crystals and purple fluorite crystals. Mineral collectors just love it.

- Wow.

- [Alan] We have things from the Ice Age, saber-tooth cats, like the one that was found in Nashville that the Predators hockey team is based off of.

- [Cindy] You can add red pandas, mosasaurs and giant sea turtles to that Tennessee list. But this experience also includes gemstones and fossils from all over. Inside the museum's paleo lab, patrons can watch Alan carefully chip debris away from one of the numerous bones he's dug up over the years in places like Montana.

- [Alan] Picking and brushing away small bits at a time, it's a very slow process. It can take years of work to clean an individual bone.

- [Cindy] Thanks to Alan's annual summer dinosaur digs, much of what you see on display is the real deal. But the museum also molds and casts replicas. Really good ones. Right down to the smallest details.

- This has been a passion of mine my whole life.

- [Cindy] Volunteer Jim Kelsey shows us how he recreates a Velociraptor skull from a mold of an original fossil.

- Every detail of the original will be formed when we put the cast in.

- [Cindy] The presto-change-o moment only takes a few minutes. And once it happens, the piece can either be sold to patrons wanting to take some of this experience home or become part of the museum's impressive dino display.

- This is the only copy of these dinosaur tracks in existence anywhere in the world.

- Not for nothing, it is called Earth Experience. It just doesn't feel like a museum. In large part, because of displays like this one, where people can dig in and learn about topography and landscapes and watersheds. They can literally get in there and have a hands-on experience. It's like a drum.

- [Cindy] As impressive as this collection is, Alan says he has four times this in storage, the small museum displays only what it currently has space for.

- [Jeweler] We heat it up, and we gotta get it all hot enough to where it's melting, and still we'll just melt the solder.

- [Cindy] From gemstone jewelry making to guided tours-

- Igneous rocks are rocks from a volcano.

- They look like crystals.

- [Cindy] dedicated volunteers and donations keep this experience alive. No outside funding, no corporate sponsors. Just unbridled enthusiasm for science.

- The world needs more scientists. There's always a shortage of scientists, especially some of the sciences like geology, where there are more jobs than there are geologists to fill them. And so natural history museums, more than anything else, get people interested in science.

- [Cindy] Alan well understands what gets people excited.

- Diamonds.

- Look at this one.

- [Cindy] Books and movies help stimulate a curiosity for specific creatures, like pterodactyls, wooly mammoths, and yes, "Game of Thrones" fans, dire wolves.

- Dire wolves were running around with all of the other things that have been found in Tennessee. There's a pretty good chance dire wolves were in Tennessee.

- [Cindy] But once inside this museum, Alan Brown and his merry band of volunteers hope people discover so much more than they ever expected, a new experience from this Earth Experience.

- Well, thank you, Cindy. A couple of years ago, Joe Elmore introduced us to one of Nashville's most talented and versatile artists. Tamara Gentuso's medium of choice is pottery. And her whimsical works truly run the gamut, from her trademark tiny houses to her giant ceramic masterpiece. ♪ Ooh-whoa ♪

- [Tamara] I grew up with an easel in the dining room. My mother was an oil painter, and so art was strong in our family. But I also had a very practical father, who said, "You can't make a living unless you're really good." And I was 10, 11, 12. So he encouraged me to go the route of getting a nursing degree.

- [Joe] So after putting art on the back burner and Tamara Gentuso became a nurse, got married and lived overseas for a while before returning home to raise a family. Years later, she and her youngest son decided to sign up for a pottery class here at the Clay Lady's Campus in Nashville. And that would change her life forever.

- We finished it and we looked at each other and said, "We've gotta wait two weeks for the next class? That's not gonna work. Danielle said, "Well, I do have studio space." And that was it, I got a studio and been here ever since.

- [Joe] Tammy always had a fascination with folk art, and its innocent way of ignoring the rules. And whether she's sculpting or hand building, there's usually a playful, often amusing spirit in her work.

- [Tamara] I found that I needed to be working on hopeful things, whimsical things, things that would bring about a smile. And folk art has an appeal to me. I like just the groundedness of the folk art. And so I tried to apply the whimsy with folk art and come up with a lot of what I do.

- [Joe] And no matter what she's working on, there are always more ideas and inspiration than minutes in the day.

- [Tamara] I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, and it's like, "Don't go there," 'cause once I start thinking about it, I might as well get up and sketch something out, so.

- [Joe] Also woven into much of Tammy's work is the idea of home, often portrayed in that whimsical, folksy style of hers.

- [Tamara] If you look through a lot of my work, you'll see architectural elements. I've got a number of things to do with iconic Nashville, but even just the idea of home. I do a line of little tiny ceramic houses, they're called Wee Littles. They're powerful to me because they represent home. And I find that the people who collect them have that same feeling. It's home, it's home. It's good, it's safe. The work that I'm doing right now is children's literature based. I'm taking children's literature favorites and I'm making these little sculptures for them. And I'm having so much fun. Well, that obviously comes from my five-year-old granddaughter that I'm raising.

- [Joe] In 2017, Tammy began work on what would become her magnum opus, a ceramic map of Nashville measuring 25 feet long by eight feet tall. It was three years in the making, including six months of research.

- I really had fun with the research, the computer, Google Images, Google Street View. These were things that became really important. Now, some things, I did a drive-by, I did photos, but most of 'em I ended up leaning on what I could find on the internet for how I would do these particular buildings on each tile.

- [Joe] So using images, sketches, a template was made for each of the 192 one-foot-square tiles. Then it was time for carving and painting no less than 1,300 iconic buildings and landmarks. It took a week to install the clayscape mural on an outside wall of the Clay Lady Campus building, an appropriate home for Tammy's tribute to the city she calls home.

- [Tamara] To be down there when somebody comes, and either they didn't know it was there or they came to see it but they did not expect what they found. People just stand there. And I get goosebumps with it every time.

- [Joe] Tammy will go on to produce many more whimsical works using her imagination and tools, but chances are none will match the untiring commitment of the Nashville clayscape, a lasting testament to her talent and determination.

- There are things I look back and I wish I had done it differently, but no, I'm proud of it. I'm really happy with it.

- You should be.

- Thank you. ♪ Oh ♪

- Thanks, Joe. Well, that'll do it for this week. You can always catch us online at tennesseecrossroads.org or on the PBS app. And as always, thanks for watching.

- Hey, I'm John Phillips from Phillips Forged Knives in Knoxville, Tennessee. It's such an honor to be part of the canon of "Tennessee Crossroads," that works so hard to help promote the culture in our state that creates the amazing fabric that makes where we live so unique. So thank you, "Tennessee Crossroads."

- [Announcer] "Tennessee Crossroads is brought to you in part by.

- [Representative] Students across Tennessee have benefited from over 7 1/2 billion dollars we've raised for education, providing more than two million scholarships and grants. The Tennessee Lottery, game-changing, life-changing fun.

- [Representative] Discover Tennessee trails and byways, where adventure, cuisine and history come together. With 16 scenic driving trails, you can discover why Tennessee sounds perfect. Trips can be planned at tntrailsandbyways.com.

- [Representative] The Co-op system in Tennessee consists of independently owned Co-ops, driven to serve farmer owners, rural lifestyle customers and their communities throughout Tennessee and in five neighboring states. More at ourcoop.com.

- [Representative] Middle Tennessee State University College of Liberal Arts helps students explore the world, engage minds, enrich lives and earn a living.] More at mtsu.edu/cla.