LET'S CELEBRATE A Tennessee Thanksgiving

For Keith Smythe Meacham and her family, there's nothing more meaningful than spending the holiday in the mountains 

- ELIZABETH HUTCHISON HICKLIN

“SEWANEE: THE UNIVERSITY of the South has been a central part of my life for as long as I can remember,’ says Keith Smythe Meacham, cofounder of Reed Smythe Company, the Nashville-based home-andgarden shop she started with the late author Julia Reed. It’s where my parents met in the 1960s, so my sister and I grew up visiting all our lives.” Following family tradition, Keith met her husband, Jon, there in 1988 when she was a high school senior and he was assigned to show her around the campus.

“To make a very long story short, he gave me this lovely tour of Sewanee, but I ended up deciding to go to the University of Virginia,” she says. And while she didn't fall for the school, she did for the guide. The two became pen pals, exchanging long-distance letters for the next five years until they both ended up in Washington, D.C. They married a few years later and moved to New York City, but it wasn’t until they had their second child that Sewanee reentered their lives in a meaningful way.

 

“I had this itch to move back to the South,” she says. But Jon was working at Newsweek, so it wasn’t in the cards right away.’ Summers in Sewanee proved to be a happy compromise. They later bought a handsome Georgian Revival home on campus. The five-bedroom brick stunner was built in the early 1930s and once belonged to the headmaster at the old Sewanee Military Academy. We’ve now had the house for 16 years and love to pack it full of our friends and family,” she says. This is really the home where our children have grown up. In addition to summers, we spent every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and spring break of our kids’ young lives here.”