Veteran Pegram Mayor Charles Morehead prepares for 5th term

Charles Morehead, 67, will run unopposed for his fifth term as Pegram’s mayor for the 2024-2028 cycle. 

Morehead was first sworn in to lead Pegram for a two-year stint in August 1998 when then Mayor Aubrey Chambers resigned. He re-ran against Gene Hannah in 2000, but lost, and tried again for a second term in 2004 – this time beating out Hannah. 

When his second term ended in 2008, Morehead “decided not to run to let somebody else with new ideas come in, and I wasn't happy at the end of that term,” so he ran for a third term. 

Morehead served his third and fourth term consecutively from 2012-2020, when he passed the gavel over to current Pegram Mayor John Louallen.

“[Louallen] decided he didn't want to run again, so he talked me into running again this time, and I’m running unopposed again,” Morehead said. “I thought Mayor Louallen has done a great job, and he was trying to talk me into running again, and I was trying to talk him into running again, so it was a battle back and forth until he told me, ‘Absolutely not.’”

Morehead first moved to Nashville from Mississippi in 1989 when he was in his 30s. 

Charles Morehead and his wife, Tina Morehead. / Charles Morehead

“I hated Nashville, so I found a house out here in Pegram that I actually bought just going to remodel and sell it, because I still owned my property in Mississippi at the time,” Morehead said. “My plan was to be here a few years – because my wife was from here – and then maybe go back to Mississippi, but I bought this property in Pegram to redo, and I decided to move into it while I was redoing it, and then we were going to sell it.” 

“But after being here a few months and meeting the people of Pegram, I knew this is where I'd spend my last days,” he continued, “So I sold my property in Mississippi, and I've been here for 32 years.” 

Morehead – who serves as a woodworking teacher and sports coach at Harpeth Middle School – said a major reason he’s running again is to finish critical projects Mayor Louallen “has worked hard on,” like installing a new sewer plant. 

“Like on the reconstruction of the sewer plant, you need to finish those projects, you don't need to spend a bunch of money on them and get halfway and say, ‘You know what, I'm not interested in this anymore,’” Morehead said. “I want to finish this project out, because this is for the town of Pegram. It's not for any individual, it’s for the livelihood of people. So you want to see these projects finished out.”

“When you get new people in office, you get new ideas and sometimes things are dropped and not finished, and that was the main reason for me going back,” he added.

Morehead said he will also spend his next four years focusing on finishing a project he started when he was previously mayor – paving all of Pegram.

“[We need to] finish the paving in the town of Pegram that we started back in my last term,” Morehead said. “We put on a city property tax to raise revenue to be able to pave the streets of Pegram, and we've paved a lot of it to date, but we still have a little bit left to pave. The sewer plant and finishing the paving are my main priorities.” 

“According to the experts, once [the roads] are paved, they'll last 18 to 20 years, and I want to make sure … we would not have that worry for the next 18 to 20 years,” he said. “Because paving is awful expensive, and the sewer plant is expensive. So those are two projects that need to get finished while we're able to finish them, and then the next groups that come in do not have those worries.” 

Once these major projects are tackled, Morehead said he wants to source grants to get some work done on upgrading the Pegram ballpark. During his third term, he said he tried to move the Pegram Public Works crew out of the park and put a new building up behind City Hall, “which would open the door to add more things in the park for the rest of Pegram.” 

Morehead said he would love to see a new grocery store come in at the abandoned property on Highway 70, but noted that “as far as the town of Pegram is concerned, their hands are tied.” 

“The property is privately owned. You can't make people who own property do anything they don't want to do. You can suggest and ask, but that's as far as you can go with it,” he said. 

Morehead said in one of his previous terms they had a property study done to see if the lot was feasible to hold a grocery store. According to Morehead, there was a sole bidder interested in buying the property to build a Save A Lot grocery store, a Whitt’s BBQ, and a Little Caesars Pizza, but the parking lot wouldn’t have been big enough. Plus, the price of the property was too high, Morehead said. 

“That’s the problem we run into today, is the property out here is so expensive. When you're talking about a town around 2,500 people, a business comes in here, they’ve got to be able to survive. And it's awful expensive,” he emphasized. “You can't count on people driving through to stop, and if the people of Pegram don't support it, those businesses will never survive.” 

In his previous 14 years serving as mayor of Pegram, Morehead said he is most proud of “keeping the town with a country atmosphere.” 

“We haven't let it get out of hand with construction going on and things to take away from the beauty,” he added. 

“I'm proud that the town is still today what I saw it as back in ‘92 when I moved here. It’s a community where you can go off and leave your doors unlocked,” he said. “You could live here and feel safe, and there’s things that’s going to happen from time to time – you're not going to prevent everything, but we have very little that goes on here as far as crime or destruction. And that's the thing I'm proud of, we’ve been able to maintain that look for the past [32 years].” 

“When I'm elected by the residents of Pegram, I'm elected to do what I feel is the best for the town of Pegram. If every one of us’ opinion was the same, we wouldn't need but one person in office, and that's the reason you elect people because you have a difference of opinions,” Morehead said. “Your opinion might not match my opinion, but I'm doing what I feel is the best for the town of Pegram, because, like I said, I live here, both my kids live here, my grandkids live here, and I'm assuming they'll be living here when I'm dead and gone. So I want to keep the town moving forward where they can survive here 20 to 30 years from now.”