August 19, 2024: NashvilleStudying: Three Origin Points

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

On threecommunities that together helped create Tennessee’s capital city.

1)     Mississippian mound builders: One of the moststriking areas about which we’ve collectively learned a great deal in recentdecades—it seems to me, at least; I know specific scholars and disciplines havelong known more—is the details of the indigenous communities that existed in Americabefore those we generally define as “Native American.” Many of those oldercommunities were mound-buildingcultures, 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 Mississippiancultures. One of them, the MiddleCumberland Mississippian culture, occupied the site in the Nashville Basinthat archaeologists have named MountBottom, probably from around 1000 AD to somewhere in the 1400-1450 range. Iwon’t pretend to know too much more than that about that earliest Nashville-areacommunity, but we can’t talk about this city without recognizing such originpoints.

2)     French fur traders: When Europeans firstreached that Mississippi Valley (broadly defined—Memphis is the Tennessee city locatedon the Mississippi River, but the region is generally seen as extending to placeslike Nashville as well), it was mostly in the guise of French fur traders settingup trading posts. A number did so in the vicinity of modern-day Nashvilleacross the late 17th and much of the 18th century, from MartinChartier in 1689 to Jeandu Charleville in 1710 to TimothyDeMonbreun in 1769. Each of those individuals is specific and unique, asare the particular trading posts and homes they built; but taken together theyreflect the seemingly haphazard but unmistakably cumulative ways in which acommunity can grow. By the time of the American Revolution, such a communityhad indeed sprouted in this area, but without any single name—the region wasalternately known as FrenchLick, Sulphur Spring Bottom, and Sulphur Dell among other designations.

3)     Scotch-Irish settlers: It was the Scotch-Irishfamilies who began settling the area in the Revolution’s early years who coinedthe name that would stick, one based directly on a Revolutionary hero. Between1778 and 1780 a number of expeditions from Western North Carolina (particularlythat state’s Wataugasettlement) arrived in the area, led by individuals like JohnBuchanan Sr., John Donelson, and James Robertson.It was Robertson’s party that apparently came up with the idea of naming theexpanding settlement after GeneralFrancis Nash, an early leader of Revolutionary forces in Western North Carolinawho had been killed in action in 1777; at first the community was known as Nashborough,which gradually changed into Nashville. When other significant changes tookplace over the next couple decades—with Tennessee becominga state in 1796 and Nashville receiving a citycharter in 1806—it was with this new name for a community at least 800years old by that time.

NextNashville context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Nashville connections you’d highlight?