Nashville was founded in late 1779 or early 1780, when James Robertson led a party of frontiersmen to the bluffs above the Cumberland River and began building a log stockade they called Fort Nashborough. The North Carolina legislature officially named it Nashville in 1784. It was incorporated as a city in 1806. It became the permanent state capital in 1843.
The exact founding date is contested, which matters more than it might seem. The City of Nashville’s official parks website gives January 1, 1780, as the date Robertson crossed the frozen Cumberland with his livestock and began building. City Cast Nashville and the Wikipedia entry for Nashville’s history cite Christmas Day, 1779, as Robertson’s arrival at the bluffs. A third source, Revolutionary War and Beyond, gives January 28, 1779, based on the fort’s construction. Nashville celebrates Christmas Eve as its birthday. Historians use all three dates depending on what they’re counting: arrival, construction, or formal establishment. This guide uses the Christmas 1779 convention while acknowledging the ambiguity.
Those dates matter because people conflate them constantly. The founding is 1779-1780. Everything else is administrative.
The Two Men Who Built It
Robertson did not do this alone. The settlement was a coordinated two-pronged operation, one of the more logistically ambitious things attempted on the American frontier at the time.
Robertson came overland with the men. He left Fort Patrick Henry in what is now east Tennessee, cut through Kentucky, and arrived at the Great Salt Lick on the Cumberland River on Christmas Day. His job was to build a fort and prepare the ground before winter fully set in.
John Donelson came by water. He led a flotilla of roughly 30 flatboats carrying the settlers’ wives, children, and supplies on a thousand-mile river journey from Fort Patrick Henry. The trip took nearly four months. The boats were attacked by Cherokee forces loyal to war leader Dragging Canoe. People died on the river. Donelson’s party finally arrived on April 24, 1780, when he and Robertson shook hands at the riverbank in what is now downtown Nashville. A historical marker at the intersection of 1st Avenue North and Church Street commemorates that moment.
The settlement was named Fort Nashborough in honor of General Francis Nash, a North Carolina brigadier general who had been killed at the Battle of Germantown, Pennsylvania in October 1777. The name was shortened to Nashville when the North Carolina legislature formally incorporated the town in 1784.
What Was Here Before
The framing of Nashville as a 1779 founding erases several thousand years of prior habitation, which is worth stating plainly.
Native Americans had lived along the Cumberland River for at least 13,000 years. The most recent pre-European culture was the Middle Cumberland Mississippian, active around AD 1000 to 1400. That culture built earthen mounds, produced sophisticated ceramics, and ran salt-lick-based trade networks. The site of First Horizon Park, where the Nashville Sounds now play baseball, sits on top of what was once a significant Native American salt manufacturing and distribution center.
By the time Robertson arrived, the Cherokee and Chickasaw used Middle Tennessee as hunting ground. The Cherokee, led by Dragging Canoe, opposed white settlement of the region fiercely and attacked Fort Nashborough in 1781 in what became known as the Battle of the Bluffs. That resistance continued until Dragging Canoe’s death in 1792.
French fur traders had also preceded Robertson. In 1714, a group of French traders under Charles Charleville established a post at the present location of downtown Nashville they called French Lick, named for the salt deposits that attracted animals and trade. By the 1740s that settlement had been largely abandoned.
From Fort to City
The trajectory from fort to city took less than 30 years. By 1800, Nashville had 345 permanent residents, including 136 enslaved Black residents and 14 free Black residents. It already had a post office, a newspaper, stores, and taverns. Its position as the northern terminus of the Natchez Trace, a trading route connecting the Cumberland River system to the Mississippi, made commercial growth inevitable.
Incorporation as a city came in 1806. The city consolidated its government with Davidson County in 1963, becoming the first major American city to form a metropolitan government, a structural move that has shaped its politics and growth ever since.
The founding date of 1779 is clean and memorable. The actual story is considerably messier and more violent than the Christmas Day origin suggests, involving displaced indigenous people, enslaved workers who were part of the founding party from the start, and a four-month river journey on which settlers died. That full picture is what makes the founding genuinely interesting rather than just a date on a marker.
Sources
- City Cast Nashville: “How Nashville Was Founded on Christmas Eve” (nashville.citycast.fm)
- Wikipedia: “History of Nashville, Tennessee” (en.wikipedia.org)
- Wikipedia: “Nashville, Tennessee” (en.wikipedia.org)
- HMDB: “Founding of Nashville Historical Marker” at 1st Ave N and Church St, erected 1962 (hmdb.org)
- WNPT: “Nashville: The Early 1800s” (wnpt.org)
- Revolutionary War and Beyond: “Fort Nashborough Founded January 28, 1779” (revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com)
- Preserve Nashville: “Nashville’s First 150 Years” (preservenashville.com)