Music City that grew from a 1779 frontier fort
Nashville, Tennessee’s capital on the Cumberland River, counted 689,447 residents in 2020 and ranks twentieth among American cities. Settlers built Fort Nashborough there in 1779, when the land still belonged to North Carolina, and a radio announcer’s ad-lib in 1950 gave it the name Music City.
Long before American settlers arrived, French traders worked this bend of the Cumberland. Martin Chartier opened a post nearby in 1689, and in 1714 Charles Charleville’s party set up a station on today’s downtown site, known as French Lick, which traded furs with Native peoples until it was mostly abandoned by the 1740s. In 1779 James Robertson and John Donelson led a party organized by Judge Richard Henderson to the spot and raised Fort Nashborough. The North Carolina General Assembly chartered the town on April 19, 1784, naming it for Continental Army general Francis Nash.
River shipping and later railways made Nashville rich, and its prosperity rested heavily on slavery. The city government itself held 24 enslaved people by 1831 and 60 before the Civil War, using them to build the first working water system and keep up the streets, while auction blocks stood at the heart of town. In February 1862, after the Confederate defeat at Fort Donelson, no Confederate state capital had fallen to Union forces before Nashville, and it stayed occupied until the war ended.
Peace brought both terror and renewal. A local Ku Klux Klan chapter formed in 1868, and in 1892 Ephraim Grizzard was lynched before a mob of 10,000. Meanwhile the Fisk Jubilee Singers were touring America and Europe by 1871, singing spirituals to fund their university, and a replica of the Parthenon rose in Centennial Park.
The Grand Ole Opry began in 1925, recording studios followed in the late 1940s, and WSM announcer David Cobb’s 1950 remark fixed the Music City label. Since 1963 a consolidated city-county government with a 40-member council has run the metro area.
Source: Nashville, Tennessee
