August 19, 2024: NashvilleStudying: Three Origin Points

[This past weekend, I dropped off a piece of my heart in Nashville. So instead of my annual Charlottesville series, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Nashville contexts, leading up to a post on the city in 2024!]

On three communities that together helped create Tennessee’s capital city.

1)      Mississippian mound builders: One of the most striking areas about which we’ve collectively learned a great deal in recent decades—it seems to me, at least; I know specific scholars and disciplines have long known more—is the details of the indigenous communities that existed in America before those we generally define as “Native American.” Many of those older communities were mound-building cultures, like those who built and inhabited the ancient city of Cahokia near modern-day St. Louis; that community and others in that region have come to be known as the Mississippian cultures. One of them, the Middle Cumberland Mississippian culture, occupied the site in the Nashville Basin that archaeologists have named Mount Bottom, probably from around 1000 AD to somewhere in the 1400-1450 range. I won’t pretend to know too much more than that about that earliest Nashville-area community, but we can’t talk about this city without recognizing such origin points.

2)      French fur traders: When Europeans first reached that Mississippi Valley (broadly defined—Memphis is the Tennessee city located on the Mississippi River, but the region is generally seen as extending to places like Nashville as well), it was mostly in the guise of French fur traders setting up trading posts. A number did so in the vicinity of modern-day Nashville across the late 17^th and much of the 18^th century, from Martin Chartier in 1689 to Jean du Charleville in 1710 to Timothy DeMonbreun in 1769. Each of those individuals is specific and unique, as are the particular trading posts and homes they built; but taken together they reflect the seemingly haphazard but unmistakably cumulative ways in which a community can grow. By the time of the American Revolution, such a community had indeed sprouted in this area, but without any single name—the region was alternately known as French Lick, Sulphur Spring Bottom, and Sulphur Dell among other designations.

3)      Scotch-Irish settlers: It was the Scotch-Irish families who began settling the area in the Revolution’s early years who coined the name that would stick, one based directly on a Revolutionary hero. Between 1778 and 1780 a number of expeditions from Western North Carolina (particularly that state’s Watauga settlement) arrived in the area, led by individuals like John Buchanan Sr., John Donelson, and James Robertson. It was Robertson’s party that apparently came up with the idea of naming the expanding settlement after General Francis Nash, an early leader of Revolutionary forces in Western North Carolina who had been killed in action in 1777; at first the community was known as Nashborough, which gradually changed into Nashville. When other significant changes took place over the next couple decades—with Tennessee becoming a state in 1796 and Nashville receiving a city charter in 1806—it was with this new name for a community at least 800 years old by that time.

Next Nashville context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Nashville connections you’d highlight?