The Most Impossible Rise of a City Ever: Nashville, Tennessee

Nashville started as a wooden stockade on the Cumberland River in 1780 and spent its first century trying to become the intellectual capital of the South. It hired the architect behind the Second Bank of the United States to build a Greek Revival state capitol, earned the nickname "the Athens of the South" for its concentration of colleges, and then proved the point by constructing a full-scale replica of the Parthenon — first in plaster for the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition, then rebuilt in permanent concrete by 1931. In between, it became the first Confederate state capital to fall in the Civil War, saw its population surge from 17,000 to 80,000 by 1900, and watched a riverboat captain named Tom Ryman build a tabernacle after a tent-revival conversion — the building that would become the Ryman Auditorium and, eventually, the home of the Grand Ole Opry. From a $7,500 house on Sixteenth Avenue South, Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins built Music Row and invented the Nashville Sound. From a single 200-bed hospital, Dr. Thomas Frist and Jack Massey built HCA into the largest for-profit healthcare company in the world. This is the story of a city that kept insisting on being something it had no right to be — and then becoming exactly that. Sources "Davidson County," Tennessee Encyclopedia, Tennessee Historical Society (tennesseeencyclopedia.net) "Nashville (Metropolitan Nashville / Davidson County)," Tennessee Encyclopedia, Tennessee Historical Society "Tennessee State Capitol," Wikipedia — including references to Mary Ellen Gadski, "The Tennessee State Capitol: An Architectural History," Tennessee Historical Quarterly 47 (1988) "Tom Ryman," Wikipedia; "Captain Tom Ryman: Captain. Skeptic. Convert.," Ryman Auditorium official site (ryman.com) "Nashville Recording Industry," Tennessee Encyclopedia; "Quonset Hut Studio" and "RCA Studio B," Wikipedia "Jubilee Singers of Fisk University," Tennessee Encyclopedia; "Fisk Jubilee Singers," Wikipedia