Mansker's Station Historic Site preserves the location of a fortified pioneer settlement established in 1779 to 1780 by longhunter and frontiersman Kasper Mansker on Mansker's Creek, one of the earliest stockaded stations built as part of the Cumberland settlements that grew into Nashville. The original station functioned as a communal refuge for a cluster of pioneer families who built cabins inside its palisade walls for protection from Native American raids during the volatile early years of Euro-American settlement in Middle Tennessee; when nearby Asher's Station was attacked in 1780, its residents fled to Mansker's for safety. Mansker himself operated the station as an inn and tavern, one of the first in the Cumberland country, with court-set rates for lodging, meals, and whiskey, and the site's proximity to Mansker's Lick made it a hub for salt production, an essential frontier commodity. The first stockade was abandoned in 1781 after Mansker and other settlers withdrew to Fort Nashborough for greater safety, and it subsequently burned; Mansker rebuilt on the opposite creek bank in 1783, living there until his death in 1820. Today the historic site combines a reconstruction of the frontier station with the Bowen Plantation House, a brick residence built by early settler William Bowen and worked in part by enslaved laborers, reputed to be the oldest standing brick structure in Middle Tennessee. Operated as a living-history museum by the city of Goodlettsville, the site uses costumed interpreters to demonstrate both frontier stockade life and plantation domestic and agricultural work for school groups and visitors.