Long before he filled stadiums with chart-topping country anthems, a young Harold Lloyd Jenkins traded a promising professional baseball contract with the Philadelphia Phillies for a six-string guitar and a stint in the United States Army. That pivotal choice ultimately shaped music history, transforming a small-town boy from Friars Point, Mississippi, into the legendary icon known worldwide as Conway Twitty.
At the absolute height of his fame in June 1982, the visionary singer poured millions into opening Twitty City in Hendersonville, Tennessee. This magnificent nine-acre compound was far more than a public tourist attraction showcasing gold records and dazzling Christmas lights. It served as a loving sanctuary where Conway built separate brick residences around his own colonial mansion, ensuring his beloved mother, Velma, and his four children could live right beside him.
For eleven incredible years, family members greeted devoted fans daily and shared a tight-knit community built entirely on love and togetherness.
That peaceful family haven shattered overnight on June 5, 1993. Following a performance at the Jim Stafford Theatre in Branson, Missouri, Conway suddenly collapsed aboard his tour bus from a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm at just fifty-nine years old. His unexpected passing left a devastating void, plunging his grieving family into an immediate nightmare.
Because his final will predated his 1987 marriage to his fourth wife, Dee Henry, an outdated legal technicality triggered a vicious probate battle in Tennessee courts. With his immense assets tied up in ongoing businesses and real estate, the courts determined that the beloved family compound must be sold to satisfy statutory claims.
As lawyers fought over appraisals and estates, the very homes built to keep the family united faced imminent liquidation and auction blocks.
For seventy-eight-year-old Velma, the blow was entirely fatal. Having lost the devoted son who stopped by her porch every single morning, and forced to watch the bitter destruction of her family’s sanctuary, her health deteriorated rapidly. She passed away just sixty days after Conway’s tragic death, slipping away from a broken heart.
By 1994, the Christian television ministry Trinity Broadcasting Network acquired the property, renaming it Trinity Music City and forcing the remaining family members to vacate. Soon after, white-gloved auctioneers pitched a massive tent on the grounds to sell off more than 3,000 personal and professional possessions of the late legend.
Although Conway’s four children successfully banded together to retain control of his precious intellectual property and musical catalog, the physical remnants of his glorious career were scattered forever into private hands. Today, the brick houses stand empty of the Jenkins family, while Conway rests eternally six miles away in Gallatin beneath a simple bronze plaque bearing only the birth name his mother gave him so many decades ago: Harold L. Jenkins.