Around 600,000 people a year walk through the gates of the most famous private home in America. It is the second-most-visited house in the United States, beaten only by the White House. Almost every single one of those visitors assumes the name means something spiritual, or that Elvis chose it himself. He didn’t. The house was already called Graceland when he bought it, and it was named after a woman who died before Elvis Presley was even born.
Her name was Grace Toof. Her father, Stephen C. Toof, was a successful Memphis printer who owned a 500-acre farm on the edge of the city and called the property Graceland Farms after his daughter. When he died in 1894, Grace inherited the land. Decades later, her niece Ruth and Ruth’s husband, a doctor named Thomas Moore, built a Colonial Revival mansion on part of it in 1939 — and named the house after Ruth’s aunt too. Before Elvis, the property wasn’t a rock and roll landmark at all. It was a cattle farm raising Hereford cattle, and the Moores’ daughter played the harp with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, giving classical recitals in the front rooms.
Elvis Presley – The History of Graceland
Elvis wasn’t even the one who found it. In March 1957, his parents Vernon and Gladys went to look at the place while their son was filming in Hollywood. They fell in love with it and rang him to tell him the news. Elvis put down a $1,000 deposit on March 19, and the sale was completed for $102,500 — the house, the barn, and 13.8 acres. He was 22 years old. For comparison, that’s roughly $1.1 million in today’s money, for a mansion.
Then he made it his. He built the pink fieldstone wall in 1957 to keep fans off the lawn, and had the famous musical gates made — guitar-playing Elvis figures against a pattern of notes — for around $2,700. Look closely at the two stone lions guarding the front steps, and you’ll spot something most visitors miss: they don’t match. He expanded the house from 10,266 square feet to 17,552 square feet and 23 rooms.
The inside got stranger as the years went on. The kitchen is carpeted. There’s a button hidden under the dining room table so Elvis could call for another dish without raising his voice. The pool room downstairs is covered wall-to-ceiling in close to 400 yards of pleated fabric. And in the TV room he had three television sets built into one wall so he could watch all three American networks at once — an idea he reportedly borrowed from President Lyndon B. Johnson.
There were rules about the kitchen too. Certain things had to be in the house at all times, and the list is a window straight into the man: banana pudding, the ingredients for meatloaf, fudge cookies, fresh orange juice, ice cream, brownies, shredded coconut, hot dogs, biscuits and gum.
He moved in on June 26, 1957, and lived there for the next twenty years, until he died in 1977. He is buried in the garden alongside his mother, his father, his grandmother and his daughter. And every day, thousands of people file past a name he never chose — a name that belonged to a Memphis printer’s daughter who never met him.