In 1968, Johnny Cash bought a lakefront lot on Caudill Drive in Hendersonville, Tennessee, from his next-door neighbor, Roy Orbison. The sale came with a promise from Cash: nothing would ever be built on that ground again. It was the spot where Orbison’s house had burned that September, taking the lives of two of his young sons.
Two Friends on Old Hickory Lake
Cash and Orbison went back to the mid-1950s. Cash met the young Texan while touring and pointed him toward Sun Records in Memphis, where both men made their first records. Orbison settled in Hendersonville, north of Nashville, in 1963, in a home on Old Hickory Lake. In 1968, newly married to June Carter, Cash moved into the house next door, a sprawling place of stone and timber designed by builder Braxton Dixon.
Cash later summed up the friendship in a few words.
We became like brothers right from the start.
September 14, 1968
That fall, Orbison was touring England. He was still carrying the loss of his wife, Claudette, who had died in a motorcycle accident in June 1966. His three boys were staying at the lake house with his parents, Orbie Lee and Nadine Orbison.
On Saturday, September 14, word reached him that the house had burned. Roy DeWayne, 10, and Anthony, 6, did not survive. His parents saved the youngest, three-year-old Wesley. Accounts of how the fire started have varied over the years, and no single explanation appears in every source. By the time Orbison got home, the house was gone.
Barbara Orbison, who married Roy the following year, later recalled that Johnny and June came straight off the road to be with him.
A Lot No One Could Live On
Orbison could not face building a home again on the place where his sons had died. He sold the lot to the man next door. According to the Tennessee Historical Commission, Cash promised Orbison he would never build on it.
Instead of a house, the Cash family planted fruit trees and grapevines on the ground overlooking the lake. The state’s marker notes that the trees and vines were maintained personally by the Cash family. In time the lot became known simply as the Orchard.
Life Went On Around It
Orbison married Barbara Jakobs, a young German woman he had met in England only weeks before the fire. They had two sons, Roy Kelton Jr. in 1970 and Alex in 1974, and Johnny and June were the boys’ godparents. Orbison appeared on The Johnny Cash Show three times between 1969 and 1971, and the two friends wrote “See Ruby Fall” together, a song Cash took to No. 4 on the country chart in 1969.
Orbison died of a heart attack on December 6, 1988, at 52. Cash outlived him by nearly fifteen years, and through all of them the lot stayed empty of any building.
The Neighbors Who Kept the Promise
June Carter Cash died in May 2003, and Johnny followed that September. With both of them gone, the orchard began to slip. A second marker at the site describes what was left: withering fruit trees, rotting railroad ties and damaged turf.
Marty Stuart, who had played in Cash’s band and was once married to his daughter Cindy, lived along Caudill Drive with his wife, Connie Smith, in a house that had once belonged to Orbison. Stuart knew about the promise. The couple bought the orchard from John Carter Cash and brought the trees back. Stuart moved the fence line, designed a new gate himself and added a cross that marks the ground as sacred. Like Cash, they built nothing there.
Some retellings say the Cashes later gave the lot to Orbison’s son Wesley. The state’s own marker tells it differently, describing the sale from John Carter Cash to Stuart and Smith after 2003.
What the Markers Say Today
The story might have stayed a neighborhood memory if not for Jennifer Bruce, a Vanderbilt student who had moved to Hendersonville from Hawaii and grew curious about the ruins along Caudill Drive. Her research, which included reaching out to people close to both families, led the Tennessee Historical Commission to approve two markers, one for the Cash home and one for the Orchard. Cash’s sister Joanne Cash Yates attended the dedication in 2019, and so did Marty Stuart and Connie Smith.
The Orchard marker, number 3A 243, stands at the fence on Caudill Drive. Its account is short. It says Orbison sold Cash the land after the fire, and that Cash promised never to build on the site. When the marker went up, that promise had already held for more than fifty years.