Nashville has two founders, and they did not arrive together. James Robertson came overland with the men. John Donelson came by river with the families. They met on April 24, 1780, on the banks of the Cumberland River. A bronze statue commemorating that handshake stands on First Avenue South in downtown Nashville.
Robertson gets the most credit in the official historical record. He is called the “Father of Middle Tennessee.” But the settlement did not exist without both men, and it did not exist without the roughly 300 people they brought with them, including a large number of enslaved Black residents who made up about 20 percent of the founding population.
James Robertson
Robertson was born in 1742 in Virginia, of Scots-Irish descent. He was not formally educated but had spent years on the frontier, helping to establish the Watauga Association in northeast Tennessee and fighting off Cherokee attacks at Fort Watauga in 1776. By the time he organized the Cumberland expedition, he was one of the most experienced frontiersmen in the region.
In December 1779, Robertson led approximately 226 men on a grueling overland route through Kentucky and south through Tennessee to the Great Salt Lick on the Cumberland River. They arrived on Christmas Day and immediately began building a log stockade they called Fort Nashborough, named for General Francis Nash, a North Carolina brigadier general killed at the Battle of Germantown in 1777. Robertson’s job was to build shelter before the Donelson party arrived.
He stayed in Nashville for the rest of his life, serving in the North Carolina legislature, founding the first school in the area (Davidson Academy), and surviving decades of Cherokee attacks on the settlement. He died in 1814 near Memphis while serving as an Indian commissioner. His family had his remains moved to Nashville City Cemetery in 1825.
John Donelson
Donelson was older and, in some ways, the more remarkable figure. He was a Virginia-born surveyor, ironmaster, and politician who had served in the House of Burgesses. In December 1779, he set off from Fort Patrick Henry in east Tennessee with a flotilla of about 30 flatboats carrying women, children, household goods, supplies, and a large number of enslaved people, including approximately 30 enslaved members of his own family’s party.
He documented the entire voyage in a journal, beginning with the entry on December 22, 1779: a trip he intended, as he wrote, “by God’s permission.” The four-month journey traversed the Holston, Tennessee, Ohio, and Cumberland Rivers, a distance of over a thousand miles. The party endured Cherokee attacks, a smallpox outbreak among the boats, extreme cold, swift river currents, and near-starvation. People died on the water.
Donelson’s party arrived at the Big Salt Lick on April 24, 1780, and were reunited with Robertson and the men who had been waiting in the half-built fort for months. One of Donelson’s daughters on that boat was a 13-year-old girl named Rachel, who would later become the wife of Andrew Jackson.
Donelson did not have much time to enjoy what he had built. He was shot and killed in 1785 on the banks of the Barren River in Kentucky, while returning from a business trip. He was likely ambushed, though the exact circumstances were never confirmed.
The Man Behind Both of Them
There is a third figure who rarely gets credit: Richard Henderson, a North Carolina judge and land speculator. Henderson purchased roughly two million acres of land from the Cherokee in 1775 through the Transylvania Company, including the area that would become Nashville. He specifically recruited Robertson to lead the Cumberland expedition and backed the whole enterprise financially and logistically.
Robertson is justifiably remembered as the hands-on founder, the man who cleared the land and built the stockade and defended the settlement for decades. But Henderson was the planner who conceived the operation and made it possible. The Nashville Historical Newsletter has called him the “CEO behind the initial enterprise.”
What the Statue Gets Wrong
The bronze founding statue downtown, commissioned by Mayor Ben West and installed in 1963, shows Robertson and Donelson at the moment of reunion, Robertson holding an ax, Donelson holding a rifle. The plaque beneath them describes Donelson’s river voyage as a triumph over “savage Indians.”
What the statue does not depict: the enslaved people who were part of the founding party from day one, the Cherokee whose treaty was violated to make the settlement possible, or the smallpox that killed members of the Donelson party on the river. History has annotated the statue in its own way: someone had written “YOU THIEF” beneath Donelson’s feet at some point, visible in photographs.
The founders of Nashville were real, complicated people who did something extraordinarily difficult under brutal conditions, on land that belonged to someone else.
Sources
- Wikipedia: “James Robertson (explorer)” (en.wikipedia.org)
- Wikipedia: “John Donelson” (en.wikipedia.org)
- Tennessee Encyclopedia: “John Donelson” (tennesseeencyclopedia.net)
- HMDB: “Founding of Nashville Historical Marker” (hmdb.org)
- Nashville Public Art: “The Founding of Nashville” (nashvillepublicart.com)
- Nashville Historical Newsletter: “Nashville Founding Factors” by Mike Slate (nashvillehistoricalnewsletter.com)
- WNPT: “Nashville: The Early 1800s” (wnpt.org)
- Vanderbilt Libraries: “Exploring the Legacies of James Robertson and John Donelson” (betweenthelines.library.vanderbilt.edu)
- Wikipedia: “Nashville, Tennessee” (en.wikipedia.org)