CITY LIMITS
Walk a
Mile
OLD HICKORY VILLAGE
In the eighth installment of his column, J.R. Lind ventures deep into the former DuPont territory of Old Hickory BY J.R. LIND | PHOTOS BY ERIC ENGLAND THE ROUTE: From Phillips-
Riverside Drive
Robinson Funeral Home north on Hadley. Right on 11th Street, then right on Riverside Road and right on 14th. Left on Cleves and then right on 17th/Golf Club Lane to the park. ABANDONED SCOOTERS: 0 CRANES: 0
11th Street
14th Street
with J.R. Lind
Cleves Street 17th Street
Rachel’s Walk
Hadley Avenue
Once a month, reporter and resident historian J.R. Lind will pick an area in the city to examine while accompanied by a photographer. With his column Walk a Mile, he’ll walk a one-mile stretch of that area, exploring the neighborhood’s history and character, its developments, its current homes and businesses, and what makes it a unique part of Nashville. If you have a suggestion for a future Walk a Mile, email editor@nashvillescene.com.
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n a city where so many neighborhoods are changing by the moment — with old homes torn down for two new ones, businesses shuffling hither and yon like peripatetic bumblebees, and churches rebranding to web addresses — there is something very centering about stasis. Old Hickory Village is a largely residential early-20th-century section of the broader Old Hickory area, and it looks as if it was dropped from the sky by time travelers and surrounded by a force field to fight off inexorable metamorphosis. It’s not just a neighborhood out of time. It’s almost a neighborhood out of place, looking more like a well-thought-out company town more suited to the Big 10 Midwest or industrial Northeast than to the sleepy agrarian South. Of course, that’s essentially what it is. In January 1918, Delaware’s E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company and the federal government decided to build a massive munitions factory on Hadley’s Bend east of Nashville. DuPont agreed to build a town for the massive number of workers needed to staff the plant, and by November 1918 there were more than 300 homes. They called it Jacksonville to honor Andrew Jackson but changed the name to Old Hickory two years later, in part because mail bound for Jacksonville, Fla., was misdirected to Tennessee and vice versa. They built a self-sufficient and largely self-contained community — note the extant guard houses on the bridge carrying Old Hickory Boulevard over the river — with hospitals, churches, a hotel and
segregated neighborhoods for Black and Mexican workers. By the time of the Armistice in November 1918, there were 56,000 people here on the DuPont payroll. At the time, Davidson County’s population was less than 160,000. The population (and the payroll) dwindled after the war ended and DuPont sold the factory, but the company eventually bought back the plant to manufacture rayon (hence Rayon City, an Old Hickory neighborhood north of the Village), bought back the Village, and ran it as a company town until the end of World War II. DuPont is gone now, but its legacy is still intact. And if DuPont ran Old Hickory for decades, the business at Hadley Avenue and 11th Street ran something much larger for just as long: Davidson County. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about the Phillips-Robinson Funeral Home in the flatiron of OHB, Hadley and 11th. It’s a wellappointed, well-taken-care-of funeral home with capacious parking. It looks like a comfortable, welcoming church, which makes sense: It was an Episcopal church until the late 1980s, when Phillips-Robinson moved from its Rayon City location a couple miles north. Now ubiquitous, particularly in Nashville’s eastern suburbs, the chain of funeral homes started in 1929 to serve the bluecollar families in the Old Hickory area. But here’s a couple things to remember about funeral homes: Everyone needs one at one point or another, and the best funeral directors are deeply empathic — thus it’s a great way to build connections with a broad crosssection of the community. And as the Phillipses and Robinsons proved, it’s a great way to build a political machine. In the years before Nashville’s Metroization in 1963, it was virtually impossible to be elected to Davidson County office without the backing of the mortician machine in Rayon City, as detailed in James Squires’ indispensable chronicle The Secrets of the Hopewell Box. The title of that 1996 book refers to Hopewell, the largely Black com-
munity south of Old Hickory, the ballots from which disappeared in a particularly contentious election. The shift to consolidated government largely destroyed the machine’s power. (Note, however, the number of Robinsons who are or were judges in recent times.) Now the funeral home is more of a literal cornerstone to the neighborhood than a metaphorical one. Hadley is lined with prim homes. Unusually for such an older neighborhood, there is a significant sidewalk network, though visitors quickly notice how much narrower they are than the more social distancingfriendly strips in other parts of town built up after someone in the Codes Administration dreamt up sidewalk standards. Another quirk on Hadley: The power lines run behind the homes rather than along the street. This decision, presumably DuPont’s, allows front yard trees to grow expansive canopies that
stretch over the road and provide nearly complete shade on the sidewalk. Hadley is essentially the backbone of the Village, and due to the way DuPont laid out its town, this means the homes are the median of what was available, likely intended for longtime employees with families or those on the verge of what we’d now call middle management. Farther away from the Cumberland River and closer to the factory itself, the homes are smaller and more modest. These were for the workaday Joes at the bottom of the ladder. Turning toward the river, the houses get bigger for the aforementioned middle management and truly commodious and luxurious along the river’s bluff where the plant’s top brass lived. Though the houses on Hadley do tend to be a bit repetitious in design (DuPont, after all, was cranking out these homes at breakneck pace), modern residents add their own touches of personality — particularly by
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