Long before Elvis Presley ever saw it, the big house on the hill was full of harp music.
The girl playing it was Ruth Marie Moore. She grew up in that house, and her harp stood in the room that’s now Graceland’s living room. She went on to play for the Memphis Symphony Orchestra.
Her family gave the house its name, and that name came from a woman Elvis never met.
A Memphis businessman named S.C. Toof started a printing company in the city in 1864. His family owned a big farm south of town, and it came to be called Graceland, after his daughter, Grace.
Grace Toof eventually left the farm to her sister. That sister’s daughter, Ruth Brown, married a doctor named Thomas Moore, a surgeon who taught at the University of Tennessee’s medical school.
In 1939, Ruth and Dr. Moore built a grand Southern colonial home on the family land, with tall white columns out front. They kept the old name to honor Aunt Grace.
Dr. Moore taught young Ruth Marie to shoot and to fish in the lake behind the house.
One YouTube storyteller pieced the family’s story together from old Memphis sources.
Graceland Before Elvis!
Things changed after Ruth and Dr. Moore divorced. Mrs. Moore stayed on in the house, but it was a lot to look after. She asked her daughter and son-in-law if they wanted it, and they didn’t. “It cost $1,000 a month to keep it up,” Ruth Marie’s husband, Charles Cobb, said years later.
She let a church group meet on the grounds until it could build a church of its own next door. So when she finally decided to sell, the church turned into a sticking point.
Three buyers came calling. One was Sears, Roebuck and Company, and another wanted to turn the place into a fancy restaurant. Neither one would let the church have the five acres it hoped to build on.
The third buyer was a 22-year-old former truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, who had become the most famous singer in the world.
In early 1957, Elvis was out in Hollywood making his second movie, “Loving You.” Back in Memphis, a real estate agent named Virginia Grant showed the house to his parents, Vernon and Gladys. They loved it, and when Elvis got home and saw it for himself, he did too.
Elvis said he’d be glad to have a church next door. According to Ruth Marie, that helped seal the deal.
On March 19, 1957, Elvis put down a $1,000 deposit. The final price was $102,500 for the house and almost 14 acres, and he kept the name.
Ruth Marie never did meet Elvis, though Charles met him at the closing.
Elvis, Vernon and Gladys moved in that spring. That June, a family named Davidson caught him on their home movie camera, goofing around on his tractor in the mud at Graceland.
Elvis At Graceland (June, 1957)
Years later, Ruth Marie went back to tour her old home with her grandchildren. She noticed what Elvis had changed. “We did not have a jungle room growing up,” she said. Even the dining room chandelier was different, since Elvis didn’t care for the one her family had brought up from New Orleans.
“I thoroughly enjoyed it,” she said, “but it didn’t feel like home.”