Typhoid fever
William Hicks Jackson died in 1903, and his adult son, William Harding Jackson, died later the same year from Typhoid fever. Due to financial problems since the Panic of 1893 combined with the advent of baseball, which meant that horse racing was no longer the top American sport, and the temperance movement against horse racing and associated gambling, the trustee of the estate decided to sell Belle Meade in 1906.