What Was Nashville Called Before It Became a City?
- 3 sections
- 1 table
- 2 sources cited
Before it was Nashville, the site was French Lick, and the first settlement was Fort Nashborough. French Lick came from French traders. Wikipedia’s history of Nashville says Jean du Charleville, also known as Charles Charleville, set up a trading post in 1710 at a natural sulfur and saline spring. The spring was near what is now Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park. The salt lick drew animals, the animals drew Native American hunters, and the area “became known as ‘French Lick'” (Wikipedia). Wikipedia’s Fort Nashborough article dates that post to 1714 instead and says the settlement was largely abandoned by the 1740s. The second name came with the American settlers of 1779 and 1780. The fort was named for General Francis Nash, and Wikipedia says it was also known as Fort Bluff, Bluff Station, French Lick Fort, and Cumberland River Fort (Wikipedia). The name Nashville became official when North Carolina incorporated the settlement as a town in 1784.
Nashville’s Names in Order
| Name | When | What it was |
|---|---|---|
| French Lick | from about 1710 (or 1714) | French trading post at a salt and sulfur spring |
| Fort Nashborough, also Fort Bluff or Bluff Station | from 1779 | log stockade of about 2 acres with 20 log cabins, named for Gen. Francis Nash |
| Nashville | from 1784 | town incorporated by North Carolina |
| City of Nashville | from 1806 | chartered as a city |
Sources: Wikipedia, History of Nashville, Tennessee, and Fort Nashborough. The 1710 and 1714 dates for the French post come from these two articles and do not agree.
What Was Here First
- Native Americans: the first known settlers arrived by at least 13,000 BC, and the area was a center of the Mississippian culture around 1300.
- A hunting ground: the Shawnee occupied the area in the later 1600s, and by 1700 the Cherokee and Chickasaw were challenging them.
- An earlier trader: French-Canadian Martin Chartier set up a trading post on the Cumberland in 1689.
Seeing the Fort Today
A small replica of the fort on First Avenue North, built in the 1930s, was demolished in 2015. A renovated Fort Nashborough History Center opened with a ribbon-cutting on July 13, 2017, per Wikipedia; check with Metro Parks for current hours. The founding story and its dates are in when Nashville was founded.