Lost Nashville

book.

INTRODUCTION

Over the last several years, Nashville has been breaking its own tourism records while receiving millions of visitors annually. The sightseers arrive ready to tap their toes to the music while indulging in the city’s culinary pleasures. Historically, the city has provided much to experience. A visitor in 1870 wrote: Nashville is delightfully situated on the great highway of travel, bearing tourists to and from their Southern homes and the seaboard. She is upon the banks of one of the most beautiful streams in the South and possesses unbounded resources of enjoyment to the traveler and sojourner. With a charming climate and scenery, and a temperature neither too warm nor too cold, there is no place affording a more delightful sojourn.¹

How many of the city’s modern visitors are familiar with Nashville’s vibrant history, which includes publishing, education, baseball, bustling warehouses and music (other than the well-known twang of country music)? While pieces of Music City’s landscape may no longer physically remain, the history is remembered in this book. A river city by location, Nashville served as the center for strong businesses throughout most of its history. It has seen armies march and camp along its rolling hills. It has witnessed countless pages printed and distributed from within the city. While evidence on the landscape about the history may be lost, the stories remain.

The buildings that contributed to Nashville’s history and the stories of these places are worth remembering. Buildings helped shape the city. They set the stage for the history that played out over generations. This book contains tales about a variety of places in Nashville’s history. Some of the places are lost entirely—the only evidence left is found on old maps, in photographs or in newspaper descriptions. Some of the physical structures remain and serve different purposes from what they were originally designed to do. And some places explored within this work may still stand, but they stand under the threat of a wrecking ball. The growth of Nashville continually challenges that tension between progress and preservation.

A snapshot of Church Street in the mid-twentieth century. Courtesy of Nashville Metropolitan Government Archives.

Nashville has witnessed population booms in multiple eras of its history. Locals have understood the benefit of living here since the city’s earliest days. As early as 1832, a visitor praised Nashville’s scene, writing, The private residences in the town and neighborhood are generally built of brick, in a neat and tasteful style, and conveniently arranged for domestic comfort. More than this, hospitality—genuine, unaffected hospitality—reigns around the fire-side, and presides at the social board.² Thirty years later, another visitor delighted in his visit to the city, calling the city curiously Philadelphian. He wrote: Pleasant Nashville! Its situation is superb. A[n]…undulating, fertile valley, fifteen or twenty miles across, quite encircled by hills. Through this panoramic vale winds the ever-winding Cumberland, a somewhat swiftlyslowing stream.³

In 1882, a newspaper reveled in the architectural advancement during the post–Civil War years. One thousand new buildings constructed every year was a sign of prosperity!⁴ Nashville continued to feel the impact of growth in the next decade: No organized effort has even been made for the purpose of inducing emigration. It was left from the beginning, as it is now, an open question for each one to decide for himself in regard to becoming a citizen of the Rock City. The advantages of Nashville are too apparent… not to be appreciated by the intelligent visitor who desires to change his home.⁵ These sentiments exist even today, as more intelligent visitors make the move to Nashville. The city rests on resource-laden land. Between the aesthetic landscape and the access of the river and the economic value of combining those two, the city has been attracting population growth for more than two hundred years.

Historically, as well as today, accommodations for growth meant an in with the new and out with the old approach to city development. The city’s past includes a variety of places that no longer physically exist on the landscape because of this growth. While these parts of Nashville’s history may be lost, they are remembered in this book.

However, when contemplating what has been lost to time, there is a temptation to coat these stories in nostalgia and disregard the complexities of Lost Nashville. It is necessary to reflect on some of the unvarnished aspects of Nashville’s history that have been lost. Things like slavery and legal segregation no longer exist on the city’s landscape, although they play major roles in the history. Examining a more complete history loaded with the difficult parts helps reveal other things that have been lost from the landscape, like attitudes and understandings. This approach is my own way of combating nostalgia. This work is more than a reminiscence. This work attempts a more honest glimpse into the past as a means to recognize where this city has been. An understanding of where we have been can help inform us about where we are today and where we can go tomorrow.

One of my favorite aspects of studying Nashville’s history is watching the stories unfold and realizing how much of these seemingly isolated aspects are actually interconnected. A story of a place might seep into another era at that same place or another place during that same era. People connect many places. When studying places lost to Nashville’s landscape, names of individuals emerge as links between places. It is interesting to sit back and think about how often these lives crossed paths, whether or not these individuals knew it. This work by no means serves as a complete collection of what has been lost from Nashville’s landscape, nor does it fully encapsulate Nashville’s history. But I hope in my writing this that I can offer the reader some food for thought regarding what no longer exists in Nashville today and why that matters.

FORT NASHBOROUGH

Historians pan for a narrative in a way miners once panned for gold. Historians must sift through evidence of past events and sort through the historical stories and legends that have been a part of the local dialogue for longer than anyone can remember. Then they try to reveal what happened. In Nashville, the stories about Fort Nashborough seem to resonate from what the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) of 1930 wanted people to know about early settlers, not necessarily entirely from evidence produced in the 1700s. Even the name Fort Nashborough begs debate. Did the earliest settlers actually call the fortification Fort Nashborough? Why did the DAR find it necessary to establish this imagined replica and perpetuate a version of the story that may not be entirely accurate? Nashville’s early history is complex yet lightly documented; historians have to use the little information they have to piece together the story of these settlers to the best of their abilities. Examining the early history as well as the history of the replica of the fort that stood for more than eight decades helps tell a more complete story of early Nashville.

Modern Nashville sprawls over rolling hills that contain an abundance of limestone. The original heart of the city rests at the Cumberland River’s curve that winds through the center of Nashville. The early inhabitants found the natural resources of the area a major benefit to claiming the land. The physical makeup of the region has supplied the humans who have lived in the area access to quality soil for farming and animals for hunting. The geology offered migrating game a natural salt lick. Native tribes set up their settlements following the game trail. Ultimately, white settlers found the location appealing and began permanently settling the area by the 1770s.

Today, the built landscape and some monuments indicate a few of the early players in Nashville’s development, although certainly not all the characters of the story are portrayed in this manner. A short stroll from the newly re-created Fort Nashborough, managed by Nashville Metro Parks and Recreation, brings a visitor past statues of James Robertson and John Donelson, so-called Founding Fathers of Nashville. A little more of a stroll would bring that same visitor to a statue of Jacques Timothé Boucher de Montbrun. He is more often referred to by the Anglicanized version, Timothy Demonbreun. That statue of Demonbreun proudly claims him as Nashville’s First Citizen. However, even considering the populations living in the area before him, changing the title to Nashville’s First White Citizen would not prove a correct way to describe him. A few other French traders passed through the area, spending time in the region. Individuals like Martin Chartier and Jean de Charleville, who arrived in 1690 and 1710, respectively, could be considered Nashville’s first white citizens. Timothy Demonbreun brought a crew of Frenchmen to the area to hunt and trade with the locals. Documented evidence suggests that he passed through the area as early as 1770. By 1775, they set up their hunting posts near a salt lick along the Cumberland River near what is now called Nashville. It is a strong possibility that Demonbreun just used the physical structures abandoned by Charleville for his fur-trading business. The presence of the French traders at this known geographic location known as a salt lick garnered the place its early names, French Lick and Big French Lick. The French Salt Lick area drew the attention of early white immigrants who had already settled parts of the Carolinas. The settlers chose the bluff along the Cumberland River and changed the name again, this time to Big Salt Lick.

Complexities surrounded land ownership during these early years of settlement. In a larger sense, the nation was not yet considered the United States. During these years of migration from the Wautaga settlements in the Carolina territory, England considered itself the authority over the land. Many in the colonies were fighting a revolution that would eventually result in independence (but not until 1783 with the Treaty of Paris). And then, of course, native tribes lived in the region, claiming the land as their own. Richard Henderson with his Transylvania Land Company made an agreement with the Cherokee in 1774. King George III had issued a proclamation that private individuals did not have the right to make land purchases or agreements with the natives. The royal governor of North Carolina also reinforced the king’s proclamation, claiming that Henderson’s treaty with the Cherokee in 1774 was daring, unjust, and…most alarming and dangerous to the peace and welfare of this colony.⁶ In this time of unrest and revolution, colonists found they had the freedom to not comply with royal orders, especially in the untamed lands west of the Appalachians. To add to the confusion, as no white settlers had permanently occupied this region prior to the 1770s, different colonies and territories back east and even overseas laid claim to the land.