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In December 1992, Conway Twitty and his wife Dee Henry lit up millions of Christmas bulbs at Twitty City in Hendersonville, Tennessee, for the final holiday season of his life. For more than a decade, the Hendersonville complex had served as both Twitty’s private residence and a welcoming landmark for the community. Rather than locking his gates to rest after another exhausting year of touring, he personally invested in the massive lighting display each winter as a year-end gift to the fans who supported his music. Throughout that December, tens of thousands of visitors walked the paths beneath the glowing trees. Dee worked quietly beside him to help run the seasonal celebration, and after months on the road, Conway stood with his hand in hers, watching families and strangers stroll across the grounds. Neither of them knew that winter would bring the tradition to a close. Six months later, in June 1993, Twitty passed away suddenly, bringing an abrupt end to their six-year marriage. In the aftermath of his loss, the Twitty City estate was eventually sold to another organization. The sale of the property turned that 1992 celebration into the last winter Conway’s kingdom of lights stood whole with its creator still at home. For Dee, every returning winter brought back the ache and comfort of standing beside her husband in Hendersonville, watching crowds smile beneath the millions of bulbs he had lit for them.

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In December 1992, 59-year-old Conway Twitty and his wife, Dolores “Dee” Henry, threw the switches on the eleventh annual “Christmas at Twitty City” display at 1 Country Music Boulevard in Hendersonville, Tennessee, for what became the final holiday season of the singer’s life.

Since opening the nine-acre entertainment complex and family compound just north of Nashville in June 1982, Twitty had turned the grounds into a winter destination every year starting the day after Thanksgiving. When he launched the first “Christmas at Twitty City” on November 26, 1982, he posed for photos sitting on Santa’s lap before climbing onto his tour bus to play a concert in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Twitty built the $3.5 million property because he believed country performers kept too much distance between themselves and the people who bought their records. Inside the brick walls emblazoned with his guitar-strumming Twitty Bird emblem, he constructed a white-columned brick colonial mansion for himself alongside separate houses for his mother, Velma, and his four adult children—Michael, Kathy, Joni Lee, and Jimmy—surrounded by man-made waterfalls, manicured gardens, a gift shop, and a show pavilion.

Each winter, rather than locking the gates to rest after playing nearly 200 road dates across North America, Twitty expanded the holiday celebration. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the walk-through spectacle featured more than 250,000 colored and white lights wrapped around thousands of trees, forty major animated and seasonal displays, a live nativity scene, and carolers singing beside the walkways.

To accompany the Hendersonville light display, Twitty also recorded a seasonal album in 1983 titled *A Merry Twitty Christmas*, featuring an animated version of his Twitty Bird mascot dressed as Santa Claus on the cover.

Having worked for years inside the compound’s offices at Conway Twitty Enterprises before marrying him in 1987, Dee Henry helped oversee the daily operations that kept the winter grounds open to tens of thousands of visitors. In 1991, the couple went a step further by opening rooms of their private colonial mansion to guided fan tours, and throughout December 1992, Twitty walked the illuminated paths with his hand in Dee’s to greet families strolling past the trees.

Six months after those December 1992 lights were taken down, Twitty collapsed aboard his tour bus following a June 4, 1993, performance at the Jim Stafford Theatre in Branson, Missouri, and died the next morning at Cox South Hospital in Springfield from a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm.

Because Twitty had never updated his pre-1987 will to account for his six-year marriage to Henry, a protracted dispute soon arose in Tennessee probate court between his widow—who was legally entitled to a one-third spousal share—and his four adult children over the appraised value of the estate.

Lacking the liquid cash to settle the claims and cover the compound’s maintenance costs, the estate was forced into liquidation in early 1994. That May and June, auctioneers sold off Twitty’s stage suits, vehicles, awards, and household furnishings, while the Trinity Broadcasting Network purchased the Twitty City real estate for roughly $3 million and renamed the complex Trinity Music City.

For the next two decades, the Christian television network kept the Hendersonville mansion open for public tours and continued putting up winter light displays before permanently halting house tours on July 3, 2016.

On December 9, 2023, an EF-2 tornado tore across Hendersonville and severely twisted the roof and framing of the vacant colonial mansion. When the property’s owners initially proposed demolishing Twitty’s former home in January 2024 to make room for an assisted living development, Hendersonville residents and Twitty’s daughter Joni spoke out until the network revised its building blueprint later that month to spare the historic brick house.

More than thirty years after the 1994 auction scattered the estate’s contents, the brick wall and white-columned mansion still stand along the Hendersonville roadway where Conway and Dee walked together beneath the lights in December 1992.

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