Nashville has had three distinct names, each corresponding to a different era of the place’s history: French Lick, Fort Nashborough, and Nashville. They are not interchangeable. They describe fundamentally different settlements, different populations, and different purposes.
French Lick (pre-1779)
Before European settlers arrived, the area now occupied by downtown Nashville was called French Lick by the French traders who established a post there around 1714 under Charles Charleville. The name came from the salt springs in the area, which attracted animals looking for mineral deposits, creating natural salt licks. The site made for productive trading with Native Americans, who had been using the area for hunting and salt extraction for centuries.
The French Lick settlement never became substantial. By the 1740s it had been largely abandoned, though French-Canadian trader Martin Chartier had established an earlier trading post on the Cumberland River as far back as 1689. The site retained the French Lick name among traders and hunters, and that was still what frontiersmen were calling it when James Robertson and John Donelson arrived in 1779.
The area was not empty before the French. The Middle Cumberland Mississippian culture had built settlements near those same salt springs around AD 1000. The location of what is now First Horizon Park, where the Nashville Sounds baseball team plays, sits on what was once a major Native American salt manufacturing and distribution center. The Shawnee had a city on the banks of the Cumberland River. By the late 18th century, Cherokee and Chickasaw used the area as hunting ground and fiercely contested European encroachment on it.
Fort Nashborough (1779-1784)
When Robertson’s party arrived on Christmas Day 1779 and began building a log stockade on the bluffs above the Cumberland River, the settlement was called Nashborough, named in honor of General Francis Nash. Nash was a North Carolina brigadier general who had been killed at the Battle of Germantown in Pennsylvania on October 4, 1777, during the Revolutionary War. Robertson had connections to Nash through North Carolina frontier networks.
There is actually some historical dispute about whether the settlers themselves called it Fort Nashborough at all. Research by historian Paul Clements, published in his book “Chronicles of the Cumberland Settlements,” suggests that the name “Fort Nashborough” may have been a retroactive designation invented by land speculator Richard Henderson, who organized the Cumberland expedition. The settlers actually built several different forts in the area, and the main stockade near the present Davidson County Courthouse may originally have been called Bluff Station, according to records from the Cultural Landscape Foundation.
Whatever the settlers called it among themselves, the fort was a fortified log stockade measuring roughly 247 by 123 feet, with two-story blockhouses at each corner. It was built primarily as a defensive structure. The Cherokee, led by war leader Dragging Canoe, attacked it in April 1781 in what became known as the Battle of the Bluffs. That attack failed, but raids on the surrounding settlements continued until Dragging Canoe’s death in 1792.
A replica of the fort was built in the 1930s by the Daughters of the American Revolution on the original bluff site in downtown Nashville, rebuilt again in 1962, demolished in 2015, and reopened as the Fort Nashborough Interpretive Center in Riverfront Park in 2017. It is currently open for free self-guided tours Tuesday through Sunday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Nashville (1784 onward)
In 1784, the North Carolina legislature formally incorporated the settlement as a town and changed the name from Nashborough to Nashville. This was a common pattern in American place names of the period: the -borough suffix was dropped in favor of the softer -ville, following French naming conventions that were fashionable in the early Republic.
The name Nashville itself still honors Francis Nash. Nashville, North Carolina; Nashville, Georgia; and Nash County, North Carolina were all named for the same general. He has no grave in Tennessee. He was buried in Pennsylvania where he died.
Nashville was incorporated as a city in 1806. It became the permanent capital of Tennessee in 1843. In 1963, it consolidated its government with Davidson County to form Metro Nashville, the first major American city to adopt a metropolitan government structure.
The French Lick name survived in one form: the French Lick Springs Hotel in West Baden Springs, Indiana, more than 200 miles away, which was named after the same type of mineral springs and became one of the most famous resort hotels in the early 20th century.
Sources
- Wikipedia: “Nashville, Tennessee” (en.wikipedia.org)
- Wikipedia: “History of Nashville, Tennessee” (en.wikipedia.org)
- TCLF: “Fort Nashborough” (tclf.org)
- HMDB: “Fort Nashborough Historical Marker” (hmdb.org)
- The Tennessee Magazine: “Fort Nashborough doesn’t really exist, and maybe it never did” (tnmagazine.org)
- NASHtoday: “History of Fort Nashborough in Nashville, TN” (nashtoday.6amcity.com)
- Nashville.gov: “Fort Nashborough” (nashville.gov)
- Nashville.com: “History of Nashville” (nashville.com)