Judge Thomas McKissack Jones Law Office

The Judge Thomas McKissack Jones law office has gained notoriety as the founding site of the hate group the Ku Klux Klan. This cream-colored brick building with dark red trim hosted the founding meeting of the KKK in December of 1865. At other times it has served as law offices for many other local lawyers including Tennessee Governor John C. Brown, and as the site of the first Giles County Museum, organized by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

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On Christmas Eve of 1865, seven young Confederate veterans gathered here to start a social club they called the Ku Klux Klan. This "club" was birthed out of the chaos of post-Civil War Tennessee, as the founding young men grappled with a new social order meaning the end of a slave society and a badly broken planter class. Soon other "dens" of the Ku Klux Klan spread across middle Tennessee and to other former Confederate states, and their activities escalated into domestic terrorism as they committed acts of violence and murder against newly freed African-Americans and their property.

The owner of the building at the time was Judge Thomas McKissack Jones, whose home Hawthorne Villa was the headquarters for U.S. General Dodge during the U.S. occupation of Pulaski and the execution of Sam Davis.

The Klan officially disbanded in 1872, though it was re-founded in 1915 at Stone Mountain, Georgia.

This site was later the law office of Tennessee Governor John C. Brown.

In 1917, the United Daughters of the Confederacy installed a plaque on this building commemorating it as the founding site of the KKK. For many years, members and followers of the KKK would make pilgrimages to this site.

In 1989, in response to this distasteful attention, the building's owners (the Massey family) turned the UDC plaque around and re-mounted it to the building showing only the blank back face of the plaque. That year, during the KKK's planned pilgrimage to Pulaski, more than 180 Pulaski businesses closed to deny services to these unwanted visitors.

Giles County Historical Society