If you drove past 412 McLemore Avenue on a recent Saturday, you saw something downtown Spring Hill hasn't had in a while: a line. The historic Kissing House — the yellow gingerbread-trimmed cottage just off Main Street — reopened in August with two tenants: Babylon Beer Garden, back pouring after starting its life at the house in 2023, and LooseWheels, the Columbia food truck whose "squashed" burgers built a cult following at Loosewheels Alley. At the first full Saturday, the truck sold out of burgers by 5:45 PM.
This is the story of how a 148-year-old house became Spring Hill's newest hangout — and why the house itself is the best part of the story.
The Kissing House — officially the Ritter-Morton House — at 412 McLemore Ave in downtown Spring Hill. Photo: Skye Marthaler, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The house that kisses bought
The Kissing House is one of the few genuinely storied buildings Spring Hill has left. Officially the Ritter-Morton House, it was built in 1878 for Peter Ritter and his wife Elizabeth, and it's a textbook piece of Carpenter Gothic Revival: vertical clapboard, steep gables, decorative brackets under the eaves. It's listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The name comes from a lawsuit. In the late 1800s, per the house's own history page, a young woman named Sara discovered that her fiancé, Hugh Brown — fifteen years her senior — had secretly married another woman. She sued him for breach of promise, and won about $2,800, roughly $60,000 in today's money. She used the judgment to buy the house. The town, delighted, gave the place its name, and a play — The House that Kisses Bought — was later written about the whole affair. Local lore adds one more chapter: the 1963 tornado reportedly lifted the house off its foundation and set it back down.
In recent years the house cycled through food tenants — I Love Juice Bar, then The Brunch Collective — without any of them quite sticking. That churn matters for understanding what's happening now, because the man behind the current chapter has been here before.
Babylon returns
Babylon Beer Garden is the project of William Andrew "Billy" Benedict, who announced his plans for the house in July 2023 and soft-opened the beer garden that August 11. In the team's own telling, Babylon "began in a garage with a dream" — Benedict, his partner Angela "Angie" Street, and friend Damon Roberts, all Tennessee natives, built it into a backyard-style beer garden: rotating taps weighted toward independent Tennessee breweries, a firepit, cornhole, family- and pet-friendly.
The 2023 version of the Kissing House experiment — Babylon plus the Brunch Collective — didn't last. But this summer Benedict brought Babylon back, and the flyer for the August 8 soft opening said it plainly: "Babylon Returns!" The difference this time is the food partner.
The burger guy from Columbia
LooseWheels is Marcus Malone, a Columbia restaurateur and musician whose résumé runs through some of that downtown's best-known rooms — he owned Lucille's at 822 S. Main before it became Marco's and then Bistro 822. When he came back to the food business, it was as a food truck, and the truck became a fixture at Loosewheels Alley, the food-truck-and-live-music yard at Columbia's old pipe factory.
The menu is why people line up. The signature "Loosewheel" is a double squashed patty with house pimento cheese, caramelized onions, and bacon on a buttered grilled bun. The "Alley Melt" puts a double squashed burger between two Texas-toast grilled cheeses. The onion rings marinate for 24 hours before they're hand-battered. Since arriving at the Kissing House, the Wednesday dinner menu has added things like a third-generation-recipe Meatloaf Melt with apricot glaze and a "Marry Me Chicken" sandwich. Malone runs the grill; Katie, his right hand, runs everything else.
And this isn't a food-truck cameo. Per the Kissing House's announcement, LooseWheels is serving from the truck "while they prepare for their permanent home at the Kissing House" — the truck's own Facebook page already lists 412 McLemore as its address, and recent posts describe "slowly making our transition inside the building." Spring Hill is, quietly, gaining a permanent restaurant out of this.
Three brands, one old house
The plan, laid out in a July 14 announcement that drew over a thousand reactions, is "three local brands under one historic roof": the Kissing House as the venue and the story, LooseWheels as the kitchen, Babylon as the taps. The pitch is deliberately modest — not a concept restaurant, but "a place to gather... a place that feels like home."
For downtown Spring Hill, that's a bigger deal than it sounds. The city has spent years talking about wanting a walkable downtown with places worth lingering in; nearly everything new gets built along the Highway 31 corridor instead. A beer garden and burger kitchen inside a National Register home, with picnic tables and a firepit, is exactly the kind of thing residents keep saying they want more of — and it took two local operators and an old house to do it, not a master plan.
When to go
Hours are still settling as the operation moves from soft opening into a rhythm, so check the Kissing House on Facebook before you drive over. As of late August, the pattern looks like this:
- Wednesday: LooseWheels dinner, 5–8 PM
- Friday: Babylon Beer Garden evenings (the website says 6–10 PM)
- Saturday: Babylon pours roughly 12–10 PM; LooseWheels serves lunch 12–2 PM and dinner starting at 5
One practical tip from the early weeks: come early. The burgers have been selling out — on the first full Saturday the truck was out of food with hours still left on the clock. That's a good problem for them, and a planning problem for you.
The Kissing House is at 412 McLemore Ave, a block off Main Street in downtown Spring Hill. Come for the beer, stay for the history — and if you want the full version of the lawsuit that named the house, the court transcripts are posted on thekissinghouse.com.