This depends on what you mean by “major.” If you mean a city with genuine regional economic power, the answer is the mid-nineteenth century, when Nashville’s position on the Cumberland River and its railroad connections made it one of the South’s most important commercial centers. If you mean a city with national recognition and a self-sustaining identity that could attract people from across the country, the answer is closer to the 1990s. If you mean a city that functions as a destination for people seeking lifestyle rather than just jobs or family connections, that happened after 2010.
The River and Railroad Era: Nashville as a Trade Capital
Nashville was incorporated in 1806, but its first real growth surge came with the steamboat. The General Jackson’s arrival in 1819 broke the city’s geographic isolation and connected it to trading ports throughout the Mississippi watershed. The steamboats brought goods, and more importantly, they brought people. From roughly 1820 to 1860, Nashville’s population grew by approximately 9,000 people per decade, several times the growth rate of the previous era.
By the 1850s, the railroads had reinforced what the river had established. Nashville became the capital of Tennessee permanently in 1843, and the completion of the State Capitol building in 1859 marked a physical assertion of the city’s administrative importance. As a manufacturing center, railroad hub, and banking center, Nashville was already calling itself “the Wall Street of the South” based on the concentration of financial institutions on Union Street. When the Civil War arrived, the city’s strategic value was so obvious that Union forces occupied it in February 1862, making it the first Confederate state capital to fall, and subsequently converted it into a massive supply depot for the Union war effort.
Post-Civil War: Education and the Athens of the South
Nashville’s growth after the Civil War moved through education. Fisk University (1866), Vanderbilt University (1873), Peabody College (1875), and Meharry Medical College (1876) were all founded within a decade of the war’s end. The concentration of educational institutions gave Nashville the nickname “Athens of the South” and provided a knowledge-economy base unusual for a Southern city. The 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition attracted nearly 2 million visitors and prompted the construction of a full-scale concrete replica of the Parthenon in Centennial Park, still the only complete facsimile in existence.
By 1880, Nashville’s population had reached approximately 43,000. By 1920, it was around 118,000. The Grand Ole Opry launched in 1925, beginning the process that would eventually make Nashville’s name synonymous with country music internationally.
The Metro Charter and Government Consolidation (1963)
In 1963, Nashville became the first major U.S. city to consolidate its municipal and county governments into a single metropolitan authority, combining the city of Nashville with Davidson County. This metropolitan government structure was administratively significant and later became a model studied by other cities. The consolidation also added 82,000 residents to the city’s official population immediately through annexation.
By 1980, Nashville’s metro population was close to 850,000. The city had professional sports by the late 1990s, with the Predators arriving in 1998 and the Titans moving from Houston for the 1997 season. Mayor Phil Bredesen’s downtown revitalization opened the Nashville Arena (now Bridgestone Arena) in 1996, launched the new Country Music Hall of Fame building in 2001, and rebuilt the 2nd Avenue entertainment district. These projects shifted Nashville from a regional capital into a city with the visible infrastructure of a national-scale urban center.
The Modern Threshold: 2013 and After
The New York Times declared Nashville an “It City” in 2013, formalizing what the data already showed. The metro area’s population hit 1.59 million in the 2010 census. Between 2010 and 2021, it surged another 21.6 percent, nearly triple the national average. Office employment rose 80 percent from 2010 to the early 2020s. Companies like AllianceBernstein, Amazon, and Oracle announced major Nashville presences. The unemployment rate ran consistently at or below 3 percent for years.
By the 2020 census, Nashville-Davidson County’s population was 689,447, and the metro area had crossed 1.98 million. The city was adding an estimated 63 residents per day as of 2024. The Vanderbilt University Medical Center and broader healthcare ecosystem made Nashville the headquarters of more for-profit hospital management companies than any other city in the country, with roughly half of all for-profit U.S. hospital beds administered from Nashville.
The question of when Nashville “became” a major city partly reveals what the question is actually asking. It was always a consequential city within the South. It became nationally legible as a destination city, the kind of place people plan to move to rather than simply find themselves in, somewhere between 2010 and 2015. The city that existed before that transformation was genuinely different from the one that exists now.
Sources
- Britannica, “Nashville, Tennessee” (britannica.com)
- Tennessee Encyclopedia, “Nashville, Metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County” (tennesseeencyclopedia.net)
- Nashville.gov, “History of Metropolitan Nashville Government” (nashville.gov)
- Timeline of Nashville, Tennessee, Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
- Preserve Nashville, “Nashville’s First 150 Years” (preservenashville.com)
- Greater Nashville REALTORS, “Steady Growth Ahead,” February 2025 (greaternashvillerealtors.org)
- Volhawk, “Nashville’s Unfolding Tale of Economic Renaissance and Urban Evolution,” September 2023
- Macrotrends, Nashville Metro Area Population (macrotrends.net)
- Nashville History, NashvilleSMLS (nashvillesmls.com)