Episode 57: How Poor Estate Planning Cost a First Lady Her Home

Episode 57

Host: Jill Mastroianni

How Poor Estate Planning Cost a First Lady Her Home

What happens if you forget to list something in your will, or if two people end up entitled to the same item, like a piece of jewelry? In this episode, Jill takes on two smart questions from her daughter, April, and unpacks the legal rules around tangible personal property, specific bequests, and residuary estates. Along the way, she shares practical takeaways to help you keep your family out of conflict.

What really happened to the home of President James K. Polk? Jill revisits the fate of Polk Place in Nashville and walks through original deeds, wills, and trust language to explain how a presidential estate plan unraveled over decades. The result is a cautionary tale about life estates, unclear ownership, failed trusts, and how even “well-documented” plans can quietly erase a legacy.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

Having documents isn’t the same as having an effective estate plan. James Polk had a will, and a trust but unrealistic assumptions and expectation still led to a will contest.

A life estate is not ownership. Sarah Polk had the right to live in Polk Place for her lifetime, but she did not own it. That distinction determined everything that happened next.

How property is titled controls what happens at death. The deed to Polk Place showed sole ownership in James Polk’s name, which gave him the power to dictate what happened at his death.

Trusts fail when trustees never agreed to serve. Polk assumed the State of Tennessee would act as trustee without evidence the state ever accepted that role.

Poor estate planning risks more than money. The real loss wasn’t just a house; it was history, continuity, and the ability to honor lived relationships.

Resources & Links

The Preamble Podcast, hosted by Sharon McMahon: Sarah Polk’s Power Behind the Presidency

Lady First: The World of First Lady Sarah Polk by Amy S. Greenberg

The Death Readiness Playbook. A practical guide to understanding what you have, how estate planning actually works, and where plans commonly fall apart: https://www.deathreadiness.com/playbook

Connect with Jill:

· Website: DeathReadiness.com

· Email: jill@deathreadiness.com

· Learn more about Jill’s solutions

· Subscribe to the Death Readiness Dispatch!

· Submit a question for Tuesday Triage

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  Today, I’m going to tell you the story of how a President’s architecturally significant home ended up as a parking lot, all because of a bad estate plan. Using original deeds and James Polk’s own will, I walk through how Polk Place went from a presidential home to the subject of a will contest. This episode demonstrates how unclear estate planning can erase legacies, even if you’re the President of the United States.

  Welcome to the Death Readiness Podcast. This is not your dad’s estate planning podcast. I’m Jill Mastroianni, former estate attorney, current realist, and your guide to wills, trusts, probate and the conversations no one wants to have. If your Google search history includes, “Do I need a trust?” “What exactly is probate?” and “Am I supposed to do something with mom’s Will?” you’re in the right place.

  The story of President Polk’s residence, Polk Place, is an important reminder that having documents isn’t the same as having clarity. A will, a trust, or a deed can look solid on paper—and still fall apart in real life. If you want to make sure your wishes don’t get lost in confusion, court fights, or bad assumptions, The Death Readiness Playbook is a practical place to start. It helps you understand what you have, how estate planning actually works, and what questions to ask before it becomes someone else’s problem. You can find it at deathreadiness.com/playbook. That’s deathreadiness.com/playbook.

  Over the holidays, my daughter and I traveled from my dad’s house in the Adirondacks to visit my cousins and my aunt in New Jersey. My aunt was staying at a rehab facility—actually a lovely one—and one of the small but thoughtful touches they offered was a daily chronicle filled with fun facts tied to that date in history.

  One of those facts mentioned a historical figure who wore a prosthetic nose—this was long before photography—and apparently he owned different noses for different occasions: bronze, gold, and others. I couldn’t picture how that even worked, so I started asking my cousin Doug how a prosthetic nose might be attached. As you might imagine, Doug had exactly the same information I did, which is to say, everything he knew came from the same rehab-center handout.

  Then the conversation shifted to saffron. My aunt Eileen mentioned that it’s expensive but doesn’t taste like much. I pushed back—surely it must taste like something if it costs that much—and once again turned to Doug to help settle the matter. Later, I was reading a People magazine article that quoted the housekeeper of a convicted murderer describing his preference for freshly pressed sheets. Naturally, this raised new questions. Why press sheets at all? And if you do, do you press them before they go on the bed, or after, when they’re already stretched out and flat? The latter seemed more efficient to me.

  At this point, Doug was Googling answers—and finally said, completely exasperated, “Jill, I feel like I’m being interrogated.”

  I love details. I love facts. Probably more than the average person. So when I was listening to The Preamble Podcast and heard a reference to a will contest involving a former first lady in Nashville, Tennessee, where I lived and practiced law for more than a decade before moving here to Michigan, I knew I needed to learn more. I’ve always appreciated The Preamble for its attention to detail and careful research, especially in a media landscape I often find difficult to trust.

  So I want to start by sharing, in my voice, the words that Sharon McMahon, host of The Preamble Podcast, used at the very end of her recent episode, Sarah Polk’s Power Behind the Presidency. This excerpt describes what happened to Polk Place in Nashville after Sarah Polk’s death. And for context, Sarah Polk survived her husband, President James K. Polk, by more than forty years.

  After she died, Sarah left Polk Place to her niece. But eventually, other Polk relatives began to dispute Sarah’s will in the courts.

  Those relatives argued that it was President Polk’s will—not Sarah’s—that should control, reflecting the reality that women had few legal rights independent of their husbands at that time.

  James Polk’s nephew believed he should inherit the property, rather than Sarah’s great-niece, Sallie.
  In President Polk’s will, he stated that his home should be run like Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, as a perpetual monument to his career.

  Eventually, the family infighting led a judge to order that the property be sold, and the remains of both  Sarah and James Polk were relocated.

  The home was sold to a developer and torn down to make way for an apartment building. Over the decades, the site changed hands multiple times—at one point becoming a YMCA—and today it is the small, relatively unremarkable Capitol Hotel on Union Street.

  As I said, once I heard Sharon McMahon refer to a dispute over Sarah Polk’s will, I was on high alert. I needed more detail, so I got to work. And what I found offers quite a bit more nuance to the story of James and Sarah’s respective wills.

  Today, I want to set the record straight about what actually happened in Nashville in 1891 after Sarah Polk’s death.

  And to do that, we need to rewind a bit. Because as it turns out, the legal trouble surrounding the property known as Polk Place didn’t begin after Sarah died. It started decades earlier.

  So first, a bit of necessary background on President James K. Polk and how he came to be rooted in Nashville.

  James K. Polk was born in North Carolina on November 2, 1795, and moved with his family to Tennessee as a child in 1806. He graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1818 and then studied law in middle Tennessee, in the offices of Felix Grundy. That name—Felix Grundy—is going to matter, so keep it in mind. I’ll come back to him shortly.

  At the time, in the early to mid-1800s, attending law school wasn’t required to become an attorney. Many lawyers, including Polk, trained through apprenticeships and then sat for the bar exam. In most states, the exam was oral and far more informal than what lawyers face today.

  Polk eventually established a law practice in middle Tennessee. His first client was reportedly his father. We all have to start somewhere.

  James was 18 or 19 when he first met Sarah, who was only 10 or 11 years old at the time. Both studied at Samuel Black’s Murfreesboro Academy in Tennessee. The school was open to white men only, but Sarah’s father arranged for Sarah and her sister to take lessons from Mr. Black after instruction for the boys was completed. James Polk and Sarah became reacquainted when he returned to Tennessee after graduating from the University of North Carolina. They married in a large country wedding at Sarah’s home on New Year’s Day in 1824.

  James’ political career accelerated quickly. He served in the Tennessee House of Representatives from 1823 to 1825, then in the United States House of Representatives from 1825 to 1839, including four years as Speaker of the House. He left Congress to serve as governor of Tennessee for a single term and lost two subsequent re-election bids. But despite those losses, Polk went on to win the presidency, serving one term before returning to Tennessee in 1849.

  President Polk died just a few months after coming home, at the age of fifty-three.

  And that home, James Polk’s home, was the residence he purchased from the estate of Felix Grundy, the same man he had once apprenticed under as a young lawyer. That property sat at the southwest corner of Union Street and Seventh Avenue in Nashville. It would later become known as Polk Place.

  But before we move forward, we need to step back. Because Polk’s ownership of that property was not as straightforward as it might sound.

  To answer the question of who owned Polk Place, I went looking for the deed.

  Here’s what we know. Polk agreed to purchase what was then known as Grundy Place for $7,000—either directly from Felix Grundy while he was still alive, or from Grundy’s estate after his death. During the administration of Grundy’s estate, a dispute arose over the scope of that purchase. The question was whether Polk had agreed to buy the entire property, or only a right-of-way that provided access to certain portions of it.

  I want to flag here that I don’t have the original pleadings in that case, so I’m relying on secondary sources to piece this together. But the outcome is clear. The Nashville Chancery Court ruled that title to the entire property should vest in James Polk. That ruling was appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court, but before the court issued a decision, the parties reached a settlement.

  As part of that settlement, the Clerk and Master of the Tennessee Supreme Court conveyed the Grundy family residence to Polk, including the portions of the property that had been disputed.

  And whenever real estate is conveyed, especially after litigation, there is a deed. That deed is typically recorded, and it becomes the answer to the ownership question.

  The deed doesn’t just tell us that Polk owned the property. It tells us how he owned it. And that distinction—sole ownership versus joint ownership—is exactly what determines what happens to the property at death.

  So once again, the question became: who owned Polk Place?

  And that answer lives in the deed.

  Now, you might be wondering how you even go about getting a deed from the 1800s. Here’s how it works. You need the book and page number where the deed was recorded. So I called the Register of Deeds for Davidson County, Tennessee, and very casually requested Book 17, page 457.

  How did I know that was the right book and page number? That part took some digging. But I got there. I found an article re-published by the Tennessee Historical Society. The original source was the Tennessee Historical Quarterly June 1956 issue. It included the book and page number of the deed in a footnote.

  I assumed that once I had the deed in hand, everything would be crystal clear. Instead, what I received was a handwritten document, in cursive, dated May 26, 1849.

  Reading a handwritten deed from the mid-1800s is not easy with a modern eye. But one thing was clear: the land was conveyed to James Polk, not to James and Sarah Polk together.

  And that matters. Because if you don’t own something, you can’t give it away.

  Based on the deed, James Polk had full ownership of the property and therefore the legal authority to decide what would happen to it at his death. And the timing here is striking. The deed conveying clear title to Polk is dated May 26, 1849. James Polk died just a few weeks later, on June 15, 1849.

  He almost didn’t have clear title at the time of his death. But he did. And that allows us to keep moving forward.

  James Polk executed his Last Will and Testament earlier that same year, on February 28, 1849, while he was still in Washington, D.C.

  So the next step in this story is to look at that will. Once Polk finally had clear title to this newly acquired property—what we now call Polk Place—what did he do with it?

  I was able to obtain a copy of James Polk’s will online. Like the deed, it was handwritten. But thankfully, there’s also a typed version available, which makes this next part a lot easier to follow.

  Right at the beginning of the will, Polk explains why he’s making it. He says he is executing his will quote “considering the uncertainty of life and the certainty of death.” Even though he made the will in the same year that he died, he wasn’t ill at the time. He was simply being deliberate—and realistic.

  Now let’s get to the portion of the will that deals with Polk Place. And fair warning: this is where things start to get messy.

  I’m going to read part of the will, but as you listen, I want you to keep one question in mind: is Polk giving Sarah something she can pass on after her death?

  Here’s what he says.

  “I devise and bequeath to my beloved wife, Sarah Polk, to be held, used and enjoyed by her, during the period of her natural life, the dwelling house and lots and all the grounds…” of Polk Place.

  I’m going to skip over some of the more flowery legal language and get back to the substance. Polk clarifies that Polk Place is the house and property he purchased from the estate of Felix Grundy. Then he adds that it is his “will and desire” that Sarah “shall have the full right, as long as she may live, to the exclusive possession, occupation and enjoyment” of the property, including the “right to add to, alter, or change the improvements as she sees fit.”

  There are two phrases I want you to really hear. First, that Sarah’s interest lasts “during the period of her natural life.” And second, that she has these rights “as long as she may live.”

  Those words matter.

  James Polk did not give Sarah full ownership of the home outright. He gave her the right to live in it for the rest of her life. In legal terms, that’s called a life estate.

  When someone has a life estate, they have the legal right to live in and use the property for the rest of their life. But they do not own it. The underlying ownership belongs to someone else. And when the person with the life estate dies, the owner is free to do whatever they want with the property—sell it, keep it, or rent it.

  And Polk makes that next step explicit. In his will, he states that “from and after the death of my said wife,” he gives the house, the lots, and all related property interests to the State of Tennessee.

  So James Polk was very clear about one thing: Sarah did not receive full ownership of their home. She received a life estate.

  Now, before we move on, I want to pause—because if you’re listening, you might be thinking, Wait. How is that possible? Sarah was his wife.

  There are two big questions I imagine you might have at this point.

  First: Didn’t Sarah automatically have an ownership interest because they were married?
  Not in Tennessee. Tennessee is not a community property state today, and it wasn’t one in the 1800s either. In a community property state, there’s a basic presumption that property acquired during the marriage belongs to both spouses equally. Tennessee doesn’t work that way. So if title was in James’s name, that didn’t automatically mean Sarah had half.

  Second: Even if she didn’t own it, wasn’t James required to leave it to her?
  Today, Tennessee has something called an elective share, which is basically a safety net for surviving spouses. Depending on the length of the marriage, a surviving spouse can claim a required portion of the deceased spouse’s probate estate, even if the will says otherwise.

  But in 1849, when Polk died, that kind of protection wasn’t operating the way we’d think of it today, especially for women. As best as I can tell from the historical timeline, the legal landscape for married women’s property rights in Tennessee was still shifting right around that period.

  For example, Tennessee didn’t pass its Married Women’s Property Act until January 10, 1850—after Polk died. And laws like that mattered because they began to draw a clearer line between what a wife owned versus what her husband could control, sell, or expose to his debts.

  So zooming back out: Sarah’s position in Polk Place was not “owner.” It was “life tenant,” meaning she could live there for the rest of her life, but she wasn’t the one who ultimately controlled where the property went next.

  And that brings us to the next part of Polk’s plan—because Sarah wasn’t the only one who received something less than full ownership.

  The State of Tennessee didn’t receive Polk Place outright either. Instead, Polk directed that the state would hold the property in trust, and he spelled out terms for how it should be used and by whom.

  And this is where, from an estate-planning perspective, the alarm bells really start to go off.

  One of the most basic rules of trust creation is that your trustee actually has to agree to serve. There’s no indication that Polk ever asked the State of Tennessee whether it was willing, or even able, to act as trustee under the terms he laid out.

  James Polk died in Nashville on June 15, 1849.

  But his widow, Sarah Polk, continued to live at Polk Place for more than forty years, until her death in 1891. To this day, she holds the record for the longest widowhood of any first lady.

  So what did life look like during those decades when Sarah held a life estate in Polk Place?

  Remember, James Polk specifically granted her the power to “add to, alter, or change” the premises. But think about this for a moment. If you had the right to live in a home for the rest of your life—but couldn’t sell it, couldn’t pass it on to your loved ones, how much money would you invest in maintaining it?

  In 1886, a prominent businessman and philanthropist named Harlow Higinbotham visited Nashville and made a point of visiting Mrs. Polk at what he described as “the President Polk mansion.” He observed that Sarah was “quite frail,” and that the home itself was “very old and quite out of repair.”

  He went on to note that because quote “her life hangs by a silken thread” and there was “no arrangement to reimburse the family for money spent in repairing,” the property had been allowed to deteriorate.

  Under the terms of the trust outlined in James Polk’s will, after Sarah’s death the property was to be “occupied, used, and enjoyed by such one of my blood relations, having the name of Polk.”

  Sarah Polk was eighty-seven years old when she died on August 14, 1891. She and James had no biological children, and they did not adopt any children.

  That requirement—that the future occupant be a blood relative of James Polk—automatically excluded Sarah Polk Jetton, known as Sallie Fall. Sarah had raised Sallie, her great-niece, at Polk Place as her own. When Sallie married, she and her husband remained in the home and raised their daughter there.

  James Polk, however, had nine siblings. And according to Sarah Polk’s biography, fifty-five of his blood relatives ultimately joined forces to contest his will.

  As we know, will contests don’t resolve quickly. During the years of litigation, Sallie Fall refused to leave Polk Place. The house continued to deteriorate. At one point, James Polk’s heirs even attempted to evict her, though those efforts appear to have failed.

  After years of court proceedings, the trust created under James Polk’s will as it related to Polk Place was declared invalid. As a result, James Polk’s heirs-at-law were determined to be the rightful owners of the property.

  I don’t have the court’s written opinion, so I can’t walk you through the judges’ reasoning. But based on the language of James Polk’s will, I’ll tell you what I would have expected to happen.

  If the trust failed, the property should have passed under the residuary clause of James Polk’s will. The residuary clause is the catch-all—the junk drawer of your estate. It’s where everything ends up if it’s not otherwise effectively disposed of.

  And in James Polk’s will, he states that quote “all the balance of my estate” goes to his quote “beloved wife, Sarah Polk.”

  If that had been the outcome, Polk Place would then have passed under Sarah Polk’s will. And the beneficiary under Sarah’s will was Sarah’s great niece, Sallie Fall.

  But that is not what happened.

  James and Sarah Polk were originally entombed at Polk Place. Although James’s heirs agreed not to sell the property until the former president and first lady were reinterred, they claimed they lacked the funds to do so. Ultimately, the Tennessee state legislature stepped in and paid to move their remains to the Tennessee State Capitol.

  The property was divided and sold. It became an apartment building, and by 1950, it was a parking lot. Today, a hotel stands on the site of what was once Polk Place.

  Sallie Fall and her husband, George Fall, moved into a home just down the street.

  Sarah Polk lived in the house at Polk Place for more than forty years, knowing it wasn’t really hers. She was unable to protect the house or the family she raised there from what would come next.

  The risk of poor planning is not just that people fight, but that legacies and meaning get lost.

  Death readiness isn’t about controlling the future. It’s about giving the people you love fewer questions, fewer conflicts, and a clearer path forward when you’re no longer there to explain.

  If this episode has you thinking, “I have documents, but I’m not sure they would actually work,” you’re not alone. President James Polk had a will, a trust, and what he thought were clear intentions—and still ended with a contested Will and a legacy in some ways erased. The Death Readiness Playbook is designed to help you spot gaps like unclear ownership, unrealistic assumptions, and plans that don’t match real family life—before history repeats itself in your family. Learn more at deathreadiness.com/playbook. That’s deathreadiness.com/playbook.

  Thanks for listening today.

  This is Death Readiness, real, messy and yours to own. I’m Jill Mastroianni and I’m here to help you sort through it, especially when you don’t know where to start.

  Hi, I'm April, Jill's daughter. Thanks for listening to The Death Readiness Podcast.  While my mom is an attorney, she’s not your attorney.  The Death Readiness Podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only.   It does not provide legal advice.  For legal guidance tailored to your unique situation, consult with a licensed attorney in your state.  To learn more about the services my mom offers, visit DeathReadiness.com.