Nashville

Nashville is the capital of Tennessee. Known by several nicknames—"the Athens of the South," "the Buckle of the Bible Belt," and, most famously, "Music City, USA"—Nashville grew from a humble outpost on the edge of eighteenth-century America's western frontier into one of twenty-first-century America's most economically and culturally vibrant cities. Celebrated for its rich tradition of country and bluegrass music, the city lies at the heart of a multibillion dollar recording industry that has nurtured the rise of American icons such as Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, and Tammy Wynette. Nashville is also a repository of American history, with its well-preserved antebellum architecture and Civil War legacy.

Landscape

Nashville is located in central Tennessee along the Cumberland River. The city is enclosed on three sides by an escarpment (a steep cliff or ridge) rising as high as 400 feet. Sprawling over more than 500 square miles, Nashville ranks as one of America's largest cities in terms of area.

Nashville consists of a patchwork of neighborhoods, some historic in nature and some relatively new. The best-known areas include the District (a section of downtown bounded by Second Avenue, Lower Broadway, and Printer's Alley, where locals and visitors flock to experience the city's musical entertainment scene); East Nashville (the site of several historic neighborhoods featuring an eclectic mixture of antebellum buildings); Germantown (named for the large number of German immigrants who settled there in the mid-nineteenth century); and the Gulch (located at the edge of the Central Business District).

Nashville authorities have undertaken efforts to preserve and restore the original architectural character of some of the city's older districts. The results of their efforts are reflected in places such as the Hillsboro-West End neighborhood, located south of downtown Nashville, which features large numbers of early twentieth-century architecture. The Historic East End neighborhood remains one of best-preserved parts of the city, with its mix of Victorian, Queen Anne, Italianate, Eastlake, four square, and bungalow styles of architecture. The Historic Edgefield neighborhood (Nashville's first urban neighborhood to begin revitalization and one of the city's two locally zoned historic preservation districts) also boasts a large number of antebellum (meaning before the Civil War) homes that survived the great East Nashville Fire of 1916, which destroyed more than 600 structures.

Nashville enjoys a moderate climate in which temperature extremes occur only rarely. The average winter temperature hovers around 39 degrees Fahrenheit and the average summer temperature around 79 degrees Fahrenheit. The city typically receives about 48 inches of precipitation annually, most of it in the form of spring rainfall. Snowfall during January or February is not unheard of, but is generally light. Nashville experiences fairly frequent thunderstorms from March through September. The city is also vulnerable to occasional tornadoes, some of which have caused severe damage in recent years, such as the powerful tornado that hit north and east Nashville on March 3, 2020, killing two people and causing severe damage. December 2023 was one of the deadliest Decembers in history after at least thirteen tornadoes tore through Middle Tennessee in one day, killing six and injuring dozens.

People

The Nashville-Davidson metropolitan area has a population of around 683,622, according to the US Census Bureau's 2022 statistics. Nashville is one of the fastest-growing major cities in the United States, having experienced continuous population growth that began in the 1980s.

According to the US Census Bureau's 2023 estimates, approximately 59.1 percent of residents of the Nashville-Davidson metropolitan area identify themselves as White and about 26.8 percent identify as African American, with Asians numbering 3.6 percent. People who identify as Hispanic or Latino make up 10.8 percent of the population. The capital's population has grown steadily more diverse thanks to systematic efforts by the US government to settle several thousand refugees from all over the globe in Nashville. The government has identified the city as small enough to be manageable to the new arrivals, yet large enough to absorb them and fulfill their social services, affordable housing, and employment needs.

The Nashville-Davidson metropolitan area is a relatively affluent city in which the median annual household income averages around $71,328, as estimated by the US Census Bureau for 2022. Yet, as a large urban center, the city also has pockets of poverty. In 2023, an estimated 14.5 percent of people in the Nashville-Davidson metropolitan area lived below the poverty line.

Nashville's population includes many devout Christians and, at one time, the city was reported to contain the highest ratio of churches to residents of any American city. The fervent, heavily evangelical character of many of the city's churches has led some to dub Nashville "the Buckle of the Bible Belt" or "the Protestant Vatican." The city features hundreds of houses of worship. It is also home to Lifeway Christian Resources, which is the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, as well as Thomas Nelson Publishers, the world's largest publisher of Bibles and other types of religious literature.

Economy

Nashville is a regional commercial and industrial hub. Its economic power stems in large part from its strategic central location and distribution infrastructure. Located at the nexus of three major highways—I-24, I-40, and I-65—Nashville is at the heart of busy trucking routes. The city is also supported by rail links and an international airport. The Cumberland River provides an additional means of moving cargo from Nashville throughout the region.

Major manufacturing activities underpinning Nashville's economy include food processing and the production of electronic equipment, automotive parts, computers, household appliances, and construction materials. Other key industries include health care and social services, retail, tourism, banking, music production, education, finance, and insurance. Printing and publishing, in particular of religious materials, also play an important role in the local economy.

The most famous—although not the largest—sector of Nashville's economy revolves around music and entertainment. The Nashville music industry is reported to contribute billions to the city's economy annually. Related musical industries—booking agencies, music publishing companies, music-related advertising firms, promotional firms, trade publications, and performance rights associations—also pump money into the local economy. Major record labels maintaining offices on Nashville's Music Row include industry giants such as Sony (including RCA and Columbia); Universal Music Group (Mercury Nashville, Capitol, MCA Nashville, and EMI); and Warner Music Group (Warner Bros., Atlantic, and Elektra). The city is also home to hundreds of recording studios. The appeal of the music business accounts for a significant amount of tourist activity in Nashville.

For all its glamour, however, Nashville's recording industry employs far fewer people in the capital than does the city's dominant industry: health care management. According to the Nashville Health Care Council, by 2024, 900 health care companies operated in the metropolitan area, employing 333,000 people. Vanderbilt University and Medical Center alone employed 40,000 people.

Landmarks

One of Nashville's most famous landmarks is The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, housed in a monumental building on the Cumberland River's western bank. Dedicated to preserving the country music tradition, the museum features large collections of recorded music, video clips, as well as live performances and public programs. The museum's permanent exhibit, a multimedia presentation entitled "Sing Me Back Home," documents the history of country music from its pre-commercial nineteenth-century roots through the present day.

Another "Music City" landmark is the Grand Ole Opry House, an internationally acclaimed venue dedicated to showcasing the best in country music. The Opry moved into its current facility in 1974 in conjunction with the opening of Opryland USA, a large amusement park. With a seating capacity of 4,400, the Grand Ole Opry is the largest broadcasting studio in the world.

Nashville's rich political history is on display at the Hermitage, an antebellum plantation restored as a museum dedicated to Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), America's first "common man" president. Jackson purchased the 425 acres of land that would become his estate in 1804 and had his Greek revival-style home built there in 1819. Visitors to the Hermitage can see the rough cabins where Jackson and his wife lived prior to his success as a lawyer and politician, as well as the slave quarters that once housed the enslaved people Jackson used to work his cotton fields. Jackson and his wife are buried in the gardens on the Hermitage grounds.

Another well-known Nashville museum is the Parthenon, a tribute to the city's aspirations to represent itself as the "Athens of the American South." A scaled concrete replica of the famous Greek temple dedicated to the arts, Nashville's Parthenon serves as a museum featuring both classical and contemporary works of art. In the early 1990s, a 42-foot statue of the Greek goddess Athena was added to the structure. More works of art can be seen at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, a nonprofit art-exhibition center, dedicated to presenting the finest visual art from local, state and regional artists, as well as from major US and international exhibitions.

Nashville is also home to the Tennessee State Museum, one of the largest state museums in the nation. The museum's exhibits showcase the history of the Tennessee area beginning in the prehistoric era and continuing up through the frontier era, Age of Jackson, antebellum period, Civil War, and Reconstruction. Its collections include furniture, silver, weapons, quilts, and paintings produced by Tennesseans, as well as an extensive holding of Civil War uniforms, battle flags, and weapons.

Nashville's Civil War history forms a backdrop to the Belle Meade Plantation, also known as "the Queen of Tennessee Plantations." Established in 1807 and sprawling over 5,400 acres, the plantation's mansion, built in 1853, is a majestic example of southern Greek revival antebellum architecture. Besides the mansion, which has been carefully restored to its original elegance, the plantation features a log cabin dating to 1790, one of the oldest surviving structures in Tennessee.

Other Nashville landmarks include the Belmont Mansion (located on the campus of Belmont University), whose Grand Salon is considered by architectural historians to be the most elaborate domestic interior built in antebellum Tennessee. Its gardens contain the largest collection of nineteenth-century cast iron garden ornaments in the United States. The Cheekwood is a 55-acre botanical garden and art museum built on what was once the estate of the Cheek family. The Cheeks were one of Nashville's earliest and most successful entrepreneurial families, having created the Maxwell House coffee brand. They used part of their fortune to build, in 1932, a limestone mansion and formal gardens inspired by the grand English houses of the eighteenth century.

A more contemporary Nashville landmark, the Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park, opened in 1996. Built on land once deemed too swampy for development, this Tennessee state park features a nineteen-acre commemoration of Tennessee's first 200 years. The park includes a 200-foot granite map of the state embedded in a concrete plaza; thirty-one fountains representing each of Tennessee's major rivers; a Walk of Counties with a time capsule from each of the state's ninety-five counties; a Wall of Tennessee History; and an outdoor amphitheater. The State Capitol building stands over the park from atop downtown's tallest hill.

History

Nashville traces its earliest origins to around 1779, when James Robertson and John Donelson led a group of 400 people to the site of the present-day city, where they established, on the western bank of the Cumberland River, a fort made of log cabins clustered together. The settlers called their outpost Fort Nashborough in honor of the Revolutionary War hero General Francis Nash. Within months, all but seventy of the original settlers abandoned Fort Nashborough, driven off by the hostilities of local indigenous tribes, who had allied themselves with British forces. The core group of seventy settlers stood their ground throughout the conflict. In 1784, they incorporated their community and, in a post-Independence gesture designed to Americanize its name, changed its name from Nashborough to Nashville.

Nashville flourished in the period immediately following the American Revolution. Its strategic location and rich land and water resources spurred its commercial development. They also made it a convenient gateway to westward expansion. A rapidly growing Nashville was chartered as a city in 1806.

From 1820 to 1845, Nashville basked in the glory of what became known as the Age of Jackson. It was largely on the popularity of native son Andrew Jackson—a national hero of the War of 1812 and the seventh president, elected in 1829, of the United States—that the city was selected as the state capital of Tennessee in 1843. Shortly thereafter, a new capitol building was commissioned. The capitol, an imposing neoclassic structure that took fourteen years to complete, was constructed atop the city's highest hill. It became the crown jewel in Nashville's transformation from a rough-and-tumble frontier settlement into a prestigious city.

Nashville underwent steady expansion during the early to mid-nineteenth century. Wealth generated by trade along the Cumberland River allowed for a flowering of architectural, civic, and artistic undertakings. The city's elite built elaborate homes and financed the construction of churches, theaters, and institutions of higher learning.

By the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, Nashville's prosperity and strategic value were well established. Confederate commanders soon turned the assets that had led to Nashville's emergence as a commercial center—its central location, rail links, and proximity to the Cumberland River—to military advantage, transforming Nashville into a major supply depot. To cut off those supplies, Union troops invaded Nashville and went on to occupy the city for three years.

During the Battle of Nashville, which took place on December 15 and 16, 1864, Confederate forces, led by Confederate general John Bell Hood, tried but failed to retake the city. Their crushing defeat effectively marked the end of the South's final effort to turn the momentum of the war in their favor.

It took Nashville a decade to rebuild following the South's Civil War defeat, but the city eventually emerged anew as a hub of commerce and industry. Nashville's renewed wealth led to the establishment in town, in 1873, of two prestigious universities, Vanderbilt and Fisk. The construction of a major railway station greatly stimulated both economic and population growth in the city.

During the twentieth century, Nashville continued its steady growth, which accelerated in the period following World War II. Its burgeoning recording industry established Nashville in the national imagination as America's "Music City." Like many urban centers throughout the United States, Nashville experienced a period of decline and neglect in the late twentieth century. The city's efforts at urban revitalization, beginning in the 1990s, have reestablished Nashville's vibrancy and established it as one of twenty-first-century America's most successful cities. During the early twenty-first century, Nashville became a popular destination among soon-to-be-brides, who hosted their bachelorette parties in the city in large numbers, bringing crowds of partiers each year and giving rise to new industries catering to those crowds.

In the mid-to-late 2010s, Nashville faced controversy over its Confederate monuments after racist violence erupted in cities like Charleston, South Carolina, and Charlottesville, Virginia. Several Confederate statues and war memorials, as well as Jackson's tomb, were vandalized. A contentious debate grew around what to do with the capitol's statue of Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest; proposals included relocating it to a museum or adding contextual signage in the capitol. In July 2021, the bust of Forrest was permanently removed and taken to be displayed at the Tennessee State Museum, after years of protests and the support of Tennessee governor Bill Lee. Separately, the city of Nashville renamed a road to honor civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 2018, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of King's assassination in Memphis, Tennessee.

Mayor Megan Barry resigned in 2018 after having pleaded guilty to misappropriating city funds. This marked the first time a Nashville mayor had stepped down without completing his or her term in office.

Trivia

• Nashville's Kurdish community, some 15,000 members strong, according to the Kurdish Project, is the largest of its kind in the United States. Thanks to the size of this refugee community, Nashville was one of five American cities—together with Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, and Detroit—selected as a site for absentee balloting for the 2009 Iraqi elections.
• Nashville was the birthplace of the world's first combination candy bar. In 1912, the Standard Candy Company at Clark & First Avenue turned out the first Goo Goo clusters. Generations of southerners have grown up on the sticky treat made from caramel, marshmallow, roasted peanuts, and milk chocolate.
• Citizens Savings Bank and Trust Company, the oldest African American savings institution in the country, was established in Nashville in 1904.

Bibliography

Allison, Natalie. "The Bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest Is Out of the Tennessee Capitol. Here's How It Happened." Tennessean, 23 July 2021, www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2021/07/23/tennessees-nathan-bedford-forrest-bust-has-been-moved-museum/8064468002/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2021.

Ebert, Joel, and Natalie Allison. "House Speaker Glen Casada Joins Call for Context around Nathan Bedford Forrest Bust in State Capitol." The Tennessean, 28 Feb. 2019, www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2019/02/28/nathan-bedford-forrest-bust-tennessee-capitol-house-speaker-glen-casada-calls-additional-context/3015209002. Accessed 15 May 2019.

"Health Care Industry." Nashville Health Care Council, 2024, healthcarecouncil.com/nashville-health-care-industry. Accessed 21 Feb. 2024.

Lardas, Mark. Nashville 1864: From the Tennessee to the Cumberland. Osprey, 2017.

"Nashville-Davidson Metropolitan Government (Balance), Tennessee." QuickFacts, US Census Bureau, 2023, www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/nashvilledavidsonmetropolitangovernmentbalancetennessee/PST045219. Accessed 21 Feb. 2024.

Orlando, Joyce. "Deadly Tornadoes in Tennessee: A Look at Some of the Worst Storms to Hit the Nashville Area." The Tennessean, 11 Dec. 2023, www.tennessean.com/story/weather/main/2023/12/11/tennessee-tornadoes-some-of-the-deadliest-storms-in-nashville-area/71879118007/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2024.

"Our Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee." Vanderbilt University, www.vanderbilt.edu/nashville. Accessed 6 Mar. 2018.

Pethel, Mary Ellen. Athens of the New South: College Life and the Making of Modern Nashville. U of Tennessee P, 2017.