A hectic holiday season kept me from rolling out the weekly posts after mid-December, and now I am about to embark on a project that will absorb all of my energies for some time to come. So, with regrets, I have to put Old News on mothballs until my schedule becomes more manageable.

Best wishes to all,

Tom Wood

December 13 was the date of at least three notable Nashville demises in the first half of the 20th century, as noted in this NashvillePost.com history item from 2005:

December 13, 1907 — Arthur St. Clair Colyar dies at age 90. He served in the Confederate Congress, led a successful effort to place Nashville in financial receivership in 1879 on the grounds of alleged public corruption, served as publisher of the Nashville Daily American, and co-founded the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Co. — a prime mover in the development of the steel industry in Birmingham, Ala., and a company included in the first Dow Jones Industrial Index in 1896.

December 13, 1928 — Jacob McGavock Dickinson, a Nashville lawyer who became Secretary of War under President W. H. Taft and president of the American Bar Association, dies at 77.

December 13, 1935 — Joel Owsley Cheek dies at the age of 83, seven years after the Nashville-based coffee business that he co-founded was sold for a reported $40 million. As detailed in newspaper obituaries, the roster of Cheek’s honorary pallbearers was truly a who’s who of Nashville civic life at the time, with the likes of C.A. Craig, C. Runcie Clements, Dr. Rufus E. Fort and Ridley Wills of National Life & Accident Insurance Co., emerging grocery magnate H.G. Hill Sr., telecom entrepreneur Leland Hume, Gov. Hill McAlister, Mayor Hilary E. Howse, American National Bank honcho P.D. Houston Jr. and Vanderbilt Chancellor J.H. Kirkland.

In more recent history, Nashville said buh-bye to its status as a national air travel hub on December 14, 1995. That’s the day American Airlines ceased to operate flights from Nashville to Austin, Denver, Newark and Philadelphia, with a spokesman conceding that BNA could no longer be considered an American hub.

On the other hand, two longstanding Nashville religious congregations have celebrated new milestones during this week in years past:

December 16, 1894 — Christ Church, Episcopal moves into its new building at the corner of Ninth and Broadway.

December 19, 1930 — The Nashville Tennessean spreads word that the three-year-old Hillsboro Church of Christ has set out to build a fine new church building at the corner of 21st Ave. S. and Ashwood Ave. The church would meet there until it outgrew the facility in the 1970s and constructed a new home at the corner of Tyne and Hillsboro in Forest Hills. Hillsboro is now in the midst of a major expansion at that campus.

Just next to Hillsboro’s news is the announcement of a significant moment in the history of the arts locally. James M. Cowan, a little-known former resident of Nashville, was revealed to be the donor who left an art collection and $10,000 in support funding to the Parthenon.

The Commodores have just wrapped up their season with a 7-3 record, including wins over Georgia Tech, Alabama and Tennessee. But times are hard, as Coach Ray Morrison explains:

“It would be a fine vacation for the boys, who deserve it, but little or no profit could be realized. And since we can’t afford to lose any more money on athletics, I’d say that Vandy be counted out.”

The Orange Bowl ultimately chose Catholic University and Ole Miss for the game. Catholic won, 20-19.

As Honolulu’s Star-Advertiser reported last week, actuarial realities are working against the remaining veterans of the 1941 surprise attack. For example, one Medal of Honor winner from the fateful Sunday died this year at 100. After 69 years, those who lived through the battle are considering disbanding the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association.

If you have seen and heard the elegiac press coverage that went along with the last reunion of Civil War soldiers in 1938, you’ll see something familiar in the unavoidable pathos surrounding the Pearl Harbor vets’ situation.

Last year, the Nashville Scene‘s news blog ran a post that focused on Nashville’s experience of the war’s first days, as chronicled in the Banner. On December 8, as the nation declared war against Japan, the afternoon paper ran a full page of photos and information on Nashville people known to be in the area of the hostilities.

One photo was of was Miss Cornelia Fort, a local socialite who had become a flight instructor in Hawaii:

In her last letter, Miss Fort recounted that “the streets of Honolulu were teeming with Army and Navy men and were lined with defense workers.” She did not indicate, however, that any disturbance was pending in that area and commented only on the “peaceful and beautiful country and the enjoyable American gatherings that were frequent at the Pearl Harbor Officers’ Club.”

Only later would her family learn that Fort had been in the air near Pearl Harbor as the Japanese attack began. She had to grab the controls from her student and swerve to avoid an oncoming enemy bomber. She then landed the aircraft under fire.

Fort went on to join the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, flying military aircraft to bases around the country. On March 21, 1943, when the airplane she was ferrying went down after a mid-air collision over Texas, Cornelia Fort became the country’s first female military pilot to be killed in the line of duty.

Before the week ended, the paper would carry the first news of a local service member killed in combat:

BEN EDWARD HOLT, 21, Negro mess attendant, was listed today as the first Nashville man to give his life for his country in the war against Japan. Holt’s sister, Inez Stewart, received a letter from Honolulu last Saturday in which the boy said he had ordered two tons of coal for his mother and father for Christmas. Yesterday Elder R. E. Holt, Sr., minister of the Negro Church of Christ in Springfield, received a telegram from Rear Admiral C. W. Munitz [sic - Nimitz] saying that Ben was “lost in action in the performance of his duty and in the services of his country.” The boy’s mother and father, four brothers, Mack, R. E., Jr., Homer Cleoplus, and Hawthorne, and two sisters, Mary and Juanita Holt, all live at 508 Fourteenth Avenue, North. His grandmother, Missouri Oliver, also survives. Holt graduated from Pearl High School of Nashville and then attended A&I State College here for one year.

The newspaper would go on to report that Seaman First Class James Dewey Wauford and Radioman Robert H. Bennett, both from Nashville and both 20 years of age, had also died at Pearl Harbor.

Curiously, the names of Holt, Wauford and Bennett are missing from an official list of Navy dead from Nashville that was compiled after the war. They are also not included in the National Park Service’s lists of those who perished aboard the USS Arizona and elsewhere at Pearl Harbor.

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Our encounter with the 80-year-old reminiscences of Nashville Banner Managing Editor Markmaduke Morton ends this week with a final installment that may have more going for it than first appearances indicate. The old fella chose to conclude his memories of life in the 1880s with a somewhat rambling recollection of Nashville’s clergymen from that decade. But he does drop some interesting names from the city’s ecclesiastical history, such as:

• David Lipscomb, E.G. Sewell and Phillip Fall — three 19th-century ministers who did much to popularize the revivalist theological approach of Rev. Alexander Campbell in the Nashville area. Campbell’s ideas provided the foundation for the Church of Christ movement, which remains influential in Nashville today, not least through the university that bears Lipscomb’s name.

• Brothers R. Lin Cave and Robert C. Cave, who were both early leaders of what became Vine Street Christian Church. Robert Cave went on to become a highly controversial figure after preaching that the Bible was not divinely inspired and that Jesus was not raised from the dead.

• Catholic priests John A. Floersh and Samuel Stritch. Floersh went on from Nashville to become Archbishop of Louisville for thirty years and founder of Bellarmine College (now University). Stritch was elevated to the College of Cardinals in 1946. In 1958, shortly before his death, he became the first American cardinal to be placed in charge of a congregation in the Roman Curia.

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Also this week, a little sports item: Vandy turns down Orange Bowl invite.

30 Nov. 1930: “Achievement of Nat Baxter, Jr., and Col. A.M. Shook — Duncan R. Dorris — The First Nashville Press Club”

In those days of the long ago the perennial crop of country boys who flooded to the urban Utopia “to make a fortune,” slept in garrets, over stores and in various cubby holes, and ate at cheap rate hotels and cheaper boarding houses. The railroads were then growing young industrial giants, and all the boys, who could not get to sweep out somebody’s store, sought a job with the railroads, all expecting soon to become magnates of large dimensions. Quite a bunch of these young countrymen were handling freight at the N. C. & St. L. freight depot on Church Street, and they were in the habit of going to the St. Cloud Hotel for dinner, where they could get cabbage, beans, potatoes, country ham, fried chicken, milk, coffee and pie, dumpling or pudding, all for 25 cents.

Three of these promising youngsters were Bill Huggins, Bill Napier and Jake Stevenson, the latter’s nickname springing from the fact that he had recently emerged from the Mud River Bottoms in Logan County, Kentucky. All three are now prosperous and well-known elderly gentlemen, known to the public as Mr. W. T. Huggins, Mr. W. W. Napier and Mr. E. B. Stevenson, Sr.

New theories were being advanced even at that early date and one day, as the boys were getting ready to leave the freighthouse for dinner a hot argument developed over the theory that no matter how much a man might eat, he weighed the same after eating as he did before. Jake took the affirmative and Bill Napier the negative side. Bill Huggins was umpire. Bill Napier asserted that sometimes he weighed five pounds more after eating a hearty meal than he did before. Notwithstanding he was considered a gastronomic marvel, this seemed impossible, and so Jake proposed to bet him $5.00 that he would not weigh five pounds more when they returned from the St. Cloud.

The boys put up the money, and Bill Huggins was appointed weighmaster and stakeholder. Arriving at the hotel Napier drank buttermilk and sweet-milk, ate raw tomatoes as an appetizer, and then proceeded to eat everything else he could lay his hands on. Returning to the railroad, Bill Huggins weighed him, and he tipped the beam at just six pounds more than when he left.

Mr. Napier says that Mr. Stevenson has been unsuccessfully trying to get that five dollars back ever since.

If Eldon Stevenson’s name rings a bell, you may know him as the father of Eldon B. Stevenson Jr., a top exec at National Life & Accident Insurance Co. and benefactor of Vanderbilt University, where a building bears his name.

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Young Mr. Lytle

Eighty-five years ago today, the Sunday Tennessean carried its usual book page, curated by Vanderbilt Professor of English Donald Davidson. The page, viewable in full here, was densely packed with high-minded reviews of serious literature. Davidson was moonlighting not only for the newspaper but also for a poetry journal, The Fugitive, which would publish its final issue the following month.

Fugitives Davidson, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren would all go on to become prominent men of letters in the ensuing decades. Joining them as a co-author of the Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand in 1930 would be Middle Tennessee native Andrew Nelson Lytle.

For the November 29th book page, Lytle took on the breakthrough second novel of Norwegian-Canadian Martha Ostenso, Wild Geese. The future Agrarian found much to like in Ostenso’s tale, set amid the fertile fields of Manitoba:

With Knut Hamsun, Johan Bojer, and now with Miss Ostenso, it is the soil itself that grasps the attention. The characters as they speak, eat, act and think, speak, act and think for the soil. The acrid odor of manure permeates the pages, and when the author digs into the hearts of Amelia, Ellen, Martin and particularly Judge, the analogy to a plow throwing back the rich, black loam is irresistible.

This country has long hungered for a literature of the soil. Miss Ostenso is to be hailed as the first vigorous pioneer. Our eyes shall follow with enthusiasm the paths she blazes.

Six decades on, one fine afternoon in September 1986, a carload of young men ascended Monteagle Mountain to pay a call on Mr. Lytle at his log cabin in the Assembly. Fortified by a solid-silver julep cup full of W.L. Weller Special Reserve (“Don’t bring me Jack Daniel’s,” the sage had instructed. “They’ve ruined that stuff.”), Lytle held forth at length about history, culture, symbolism and much else. Here are a couple of snippets recorded that day:

[Audio.] “That’s why soldiers polish their shoes. You cannot confront the last great experience with shoes like I’ve got on now…. So you confront these things ceremonially. They’ve forgotten the meaning of it, and the moment it turns into the industrial — in the First World War, you see, they dug holes in the ground and crawled in ‘em like rats, and were all killed — ignominiously…. This was an ignoble way to fight. And the generals took no risk. They were back there like boards of directors meetings. All of our proletarian world, this servile world we live in now, is just that, because you’ve lost ceremony.”

[Audio.] “What is divine in man, don’t you see — I’m saying that the creator, for whatever reason, he became an artist…. That’s what is divine in man: he wants to make things…. ‘Progress’ means, finally, the perfectibility of man — which is both a heresy and an impossibility.”

If you have been reading the episodes posted in recent weeks, you know by now that the old gentleman goes on in a more-or-less stream-of-consciousness manner, sometimes leaving modern readers scratching their heads, but that there are moments of discovery in his ramblings.

23 Nov. 1930: “Nashville Becomes a Great Center of Education — Some Great Teachers — Old Metropolitan Police Force — John L. Sullivan’s Arrest and Trial — ‘The Headless Horror’”

There was a number of others, from time to time, who served on the detective force, among them, Alex Bolton, popularly known among his associates, when he was not present, as “Horsehead.” He was one out of a number on the force who were friends of Frank James, when he lived in Nashville under the name of Mr. Woodson. Every once in a while the force was given a tip to look out for some member of the James Gang, but it never occurred to them that its chief was their friend Mr. Woodson.

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A.M. Burton’s best-laid plans

As detailed in a Nashville Scene blog post a year ago, The Nashville Tennessean led off the business section of its Sunday paper for Thanksgiving week 1925 with a photo of Life & Casualty insurance honcho A.M. Burton, accompanied on page 2 by a fawning profile of Burton and his business and on page 3 by a photo of the new office building at 159 Fourth Ave. N. that the insurance company would occupy until it moved nextdoor, 32 years later, into the L&C tower — the South’s tallest skyscraper at the time it opened in 1957.

Why all the ink? Maybe it had something to do with the double-truck L&C ad spread that appears later in the section.

A.M. Burton died in 1966, but he planned on L&C lasting forever. He established a series of trusts under which his heirs could never sell the L&C stock he bequeathed to them. L&C paid an ample dividend, which he deemed sufficient to keep the coming generations of Burton progeny well-endowed. Problem was, American General bought L&C in 1969, so the heirs became involuntary shareholders of that Houston-based insurer. Still, the dividends remained OK.

Then AIG bought American General in 2001. AIG historically paid only a tiny dividend, far less per share than L&C or American General had doled out. By now there were scores of Burton heirs in Nashville and around the country, and they had varying opinions over whether they wanted to have major parts of their nest eggs tied up in AIG stock. SunTrust Bank, as trustee, sued to ask a court to decide whether it still had to enforce the restriction in the old man’s will.

Chancellor Carol McCoy eventually presided over a settlement that provided for the gradual diversification of the trusts so that by 2012, AIG stock would make up between 10 and 20 percent of their holdings. Court documents show that by January 2007, the trusts had a total value of $36.75 million. The court file does not reveal how much of the AIG stock was sold off by then or in the 19 months afterward, but the rules of the settlement indicate that it must have still owned a substantial amount when AIG imploded amid the financial crisis in late 2008.

Two years on, the best estimate I can come up with is that the trust corpus value may well have shrunken to between $1 million and $2 million — an amount several dozen heirs across the country would share in owning. Scheduled Chancery proceedings in 2012 should provide an update on the remaining assets.

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Bring on the Sesquicentennial spectacle

If the word sesquicentennial sounds a little exotic to you now, you’ll be sick to your back teeth of it by May 2015. It means 150th anniversary, and American society has now embarked on a sesquicentenary commemoration of all that transpired in the Late Unpleasantness from 1861 through 1865.

(See, if you call it the L.U., you can steer clear of zealots who insist, rightly, that there was nothing “Civil” about the war, along with those Foghorn Leghorn-wannabes who — with more justification than you may find it comfortable to contemplate — cling to wording such as the “War Between the States” and the “War of Northern Aggression.”)

Odds are that if you know the word, you are a confirmed numismatist. The commemorative half-dollars issued for the 1926 sesquicentennial of American independence haven’t held their value especially well but are known to many coin collectors.

Some of our readers will also remember the media phenomenon that was the nation’s Civil War centennial in the 1960s. I was born halfway through those years, but I have read many of the reflections published for the occasion — which coincided, in Nashville anyway, with major steps toward ameliorating the consequences of slavery that still impacted the descendants of slaves and free persons of color.

So far, The New York Times is doing a fine job cataloging the run-up to war in late 1860 with blog posts that draw on its archives, stretching back into the 1850s. But outside the dreaded mainstream media, a crowdsourcing effort is also underway in Tennessee.

The State Library & Archives is now on the hunt for family memorabilia related to the War. They will send teams out to capture digital images of artifacts, photos and documents in family hands. They are interested only in original materials. Here’s hoping plenty of good stuff comes out of the attic for this TSLA effort.

Davidson County Chancellor Andrew Allison cut a national profile as a legal thinker and jurist. He had been vice-president of the Harvard Law School Alumni Association and served on the executive committee of the American Bar Association. He had served under Stonewall Jackson in the Confederate Army, rising from corporal to 1st lieutenant in Company H, 7th Tennessee Infantry Regiment. His father had been Nashville’s mayor in the 1840s. Allison was a consummate Nashville insider with a reputation of strong integrity.

George K. Whitworth, son of a judge-turned-banker, had served as the county’s trustee and tax collector. He was part-owner of the Nashville Union and American newspaper. In 1884 and again in 1892, he had managed Allison’s successful bids for a seat on the Chancery bench. Allison had named him Clerk and Master, putting him in charge of the administration of the court.

In November 1894, however, Allison announced plans to replace Whitworth with his son, Granville Allison. On November 14th, Whitworth accosted Allison in a corridor at the courthouse. Leveling a shotgun at the judge, Whitworth emptied both barrels into his face and chest. Allison perished immediately. Whitworth then took out a pistol and shot himself twice in the chest. Those bullets missed his heart, and he remained conscious.

Newspapers across the country carried dispatches on the shocking event, initially speculating that Whitworth had acted out of revenge at his dismissal. But as The New York Times reported on November 16th, word soon emerged that Whitworth had serious financial troubles — and that he blamed them on Allison. Whitworth was expected to die soon of his self-inflicted wounds, although he would ultimately linger eight days before passing away.

On the 17th, Knoxville’s Daily Journal let the other shoe drop. It published in full a deathbed statement Whitworth had dictated to his father. The assassin claimed Allison had required him to kick back half of his more than $18,000 in annual salary as a condition for getting the clerkship, and he said he had check stubs to prove it. Whitworth also claimed Allison had taken out thousands of dollars in illegal loans from court funds, money for which Whitworth was on the hook. In all, Whitworth asserted, Allison owed him more than $26,000.

“Allison had bled me from the first and I could bear it no longer,” Whitworth said in the statement. “I did not kill Allison because he hadn’t appointed me clerk and master, but because he was willing to let me be behind in the office on account of the money he had gotten…. To humiliate me this way when I believed I had elected him both times was more than I could bear.”

In Nashville in the 1890s (Vanderbilt University Press, 1970), attorney William Waller writes that the ensuing investigation and litigation revealed more improprieties at the clerk’s office than just the Allison dealings. The funds missing from court accounts “largely exceeded the amount which Whitworth claimed the Chancellor owed him,” Waller states.

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16 Nov. 1930: Marmaduke B. Morton’s reminiscences of the 1880s continue in the Nashville Banner. This week’s topics: “Decade of Political Events — ‘Bob’ Taylor’s Star Arises — A Republican Filibuster — Negro Office Holders in Nashville — Many Unusual Incidents.”

With the passage of the Dortch law in the late eighties the Negroes were practically eliminated from politics. Prior to that time they were active and aggressive. They entered into every campaign and their speakers canvassed the town. One of their “rabble rousers” was Henderson Young. He claimed that Hannibal, the Pharaohs, the Queen of Sheba and most of the heroes of antiquity were Negroes. All the older citizens of Nashville will remember him as well as John Cochran, “The Buzzard Orator.” The Negro orators were frequently the targets for eggs and tomatoes, but they paid little attention to such slight interruptions.

[note added 16 Nov. 2010: Further research indicates that the "Buzzard Orator" was named John Cockrill, not Cochran. He stood trial with Joe Banks for the Littleton killing, as Banks allegedly accosted Littleton after hiding in Cockrill's rented room. Both were acquitted. I would welcome hearing from anyone with further info on the African-American branch of the Nashville Cockrill family.]

12 Nov. 1925: The Nashville Evening Tennessean announces the arrival of George Dewey Hay, a/k/a the “Solemn Old Judge,” to take over operations at WSM, the National Life and Accident Insurance Company’s “big broadcasting station.”

This new “Voice of Nashville” needs no introduction to Nashville and Tennessee radio fans. As announcer of WMC, the Memphis Commercial Appeal’s station, he won such wide renown and popularity that last year he was awarded the Radio Digest cup as the most popular announcer in the country. For the past 18 months he has been directing the destinies of WLS, Sears-Roebuck’s Chicago station, with ever increasing popularity….

Among the new ideas which he introduced at WMC was the Mississippi river steamboat whistle, which he used as a “sign-off” He brings to WSM a new signal, this latest being a railroad whistle which is guaranteed to make the lordly whistles of the Dixie Flyer and Pan-American locomotives become shrill with envious anger and the plaintive tootings of the Tennessee Central engines even more mournful.

In his first weeks on the job, Hay would create the Saturday evening program of old-timey tunes that he would later dub the Grand Ole Opry.

9 Nov. 1921: Tourists are money! The growing popularity of motoring vacations is paying off nicely for Nashville, the Banner reports:

As early as 1915, 1,500 touring parties registered at the Nashville Automobile Club headquarters. In 1916 the number increased to 2,500; in 1917, 3,400 registered; in 1918, 4,000 parties were routed by the club; in 1919, 5,200 parties registered at the club; 1920, brought about 9,000, and 1921 promises to bring about 15,000.

Data collected by the Automobile Club shows that at least $500,000 was spent by tourists in Nashville last year.

9 Nov. 1930: Marmaduke B. Morton recalls “Kings of Commerce — Strong Array of Lawyers — Outstanding Physicians — Spectacular Fires” — and the tale of a youngster for whom the rod was spared when Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant came calling.

As recounted in a 2008 NashvillePost.com history column, Grant’s troops gained control of the Cumberland River in mid-February 1862 when they routed the Confederates at Fort Donelson, near what is now Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. The fall of the fort left Nashville indefensible, and Rebel forces hastily abandoned the city to the Yankees.

Squire George Campbell was a live wire in the eighties. He was active in politics and in the affairs of the county. He had an unusual maxim: “Never do today, what can be put off until tomorrow.” When asked why he had adopted such a dilatory rule of conduct, he said that just before the Civil War he was going to a country school with his brother.

One Saturday afternoon the teacher asked him and his brother to remain after school had been dismissed. He then explained that he knew of some of their misdoings that deserved a whipping, and they were going to get what was coming to them. “But,” said he, “it is Saturday, and if you prefer it I will put it off until Monday.” The brother said he would take his punishment at once, and not have it on his mind all day Sunday. So he got it.

The young Squire-to-be said he preferred to defer the evil day, and would take his licking Monday. Sunday came the news of the fall of Fort Donelson, and there were no more schools in Nashville for three years. And the Squire’s licking will have to be administered in the New Jerusalem, where hickory switches do not grow.

The seventh column in his series “The Colorful Eighties in Nashville” starts off with a disquisition on the competitive military drilling craze of the 1870s and 1880s. It illustrates a sentiment among men too young to have fought in the Late Unpleasantness that roughly parallels recent popular reverence for the “Greatest Generation” of WWII vets — but in all honesty, it’s way more info than most readers will care to take in on the subject.

Don’t give up on the old man, though. Skip to the bottom of page three and check out what he has to say about the 1889 inauguration of the city reservoir that still provides our water from a hill above 8th Ave. South.

1 Nov. 1930: “Military Spirit and May Drills — Porter Rifles and Other Crack Companies — New Waterworks and Bursting Pipes — Hermitage Club Organized”

The pressure from the new reservoir was much greater than that from the old. There was one startling result. The old water pipes had not been constructed to stand this additional pressure, and besides, many were rusty and dilapidated. When the water was turned into them from the new reservoir many of them burst — not all at one time, but from day to day. Geysers spouted at various points over the city. One was especially notable. The main on Seventh Avenue in front of the First Christian Church burst, and the water spouted fifty or sixty feet high, carrying with it rocks, dirt and other wreckage. The church and an adjoining residence were badly damaged. Holes were knocked in the roofs by the falling stones, and the interior of the buildings drenched with water, destroying plastering and furnishings. It was said that a live catfish eighteen inches long was thrown out upon the street. This fish was supposed to have got into the main when a baby.

For a 2007 column dealing with this episode and others in the surprisingly lively history of Nashville’s public plumbing, I spoke with Ron Taylor, resident historian at Metro Water Services. I had to ask his opinion of Marmaduke’s fish story. Ron allowed as how a fish truly might have found its way into the then-uncovered reservoir. But an 18-incher in the water mains? “A bit implausible,” he opined.

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Here’s an entertaining little discovery I made over the weekend: a 1907 Nashville society directory that Google has made available through its book-digitization initiative. If you’re familiar with “old Nashville,” you will see a lot of familiar surnames in there.

This pair of ads in the directory particularly jumped out at me:

Lockeland Springs, now an East Nashville neighborhood, had just been incorporated into Nashville’s city limits in 1905, according to this writeup at the neighborhood association’s blog. In Nashville: Yesterday & Today (published earlier this year), my wife Nicki Pendleton Wood described the waters that gave the area its name:

The springs on the Lockeland property were full of dissolved lithium salts. Mineral waters were the wellness fad of the day, and when businessman James Richardson bought the old Lockeland mansion and eight of its acres in 1900, the estate became a business as well as a home. He bottled the lithium water and sold it as a remedy for bladder, kidney, stomach, dyspepsia and rheumatic afflictions, growing very rich as a result.

Stief Jewelry was a well-known presence locally for generations. I asked my friend David A. Fox (co-founder of NashvillePost.com and former chair of the Metro Nashville Board of Education) to provide the lowdown on his family’s involvement with the business:

B.H. Stief was a repairman of fine watches and retailer of jewelry who started his company in the late 1800s. My great-grandfather, George Fox in Cincinnati, was a supplier of diamonds to his store. When Stief fell far behind on his bills, George Fox bought out the company in 1916 or 1917 and sent his son, Gilbert Fox, to run the company. Since Gilbert didn’t know anything about the business, George took in James Cayce as a partner to run it. It was located then on Union Street, but later moved to the corner of Capitol Boulevard and Church, and then to 6th Avenue. (Mr. Cayce was very involved in city life, served on the State Fair Board, and is the namesake of the James Cayce Homes.) Mr. Cayce died in 1940. Gilbert Fox died in 1942. The wives of the two men briefly ran the company, but Natelle Fox sold her interest to Mrs. Cayce a few years later. In the 1960s, E. Jaccard Jewelry Co. of St. Louis bought the company, renamed it Stief-Jaccard’s and relocated to 100 Oaks. It ceased operating some years later.

Above: One of the mule-drawn streetcars in use between the 1860s and 1880s. This photo, from the 1926 newspaper story linked from this post, may be the only existing image of the mule cars. Below: Inauguration of electric streetcar service, 30 April 1889. These cars are at the corner of Broadway and 16th Street (Tennessee State Library and Archives).

Let’s wind up Marmaduke Morton once more and let him spin a yarn. Eighty years ago this week, the Nashville Banner‘s longtime managing editor published part six in his 12-part series on “The Colorful Eighties in Nashville,” recalling the city he had encountered as a young reporter a half-century earlier.

Much of this installment deals with the evolution of Nashville’s public transport system in the 1880s. Morton recalls the mule-drawn streetcars that gave way in 1889 to an electrified urban rail network.

26 October 1930: “Rapid Transit and Old Dummy Lines — New Buildings Spring Up — Places of Interest — A Balloon Ascension.”

In those days most of the street sprinkling was done privately by the property owners along the streets. The sprinkling was the task of the boys of the family. These were warned through the press not to squirt a stream of water on the trolley wire, as the electricity would run down the stream and strike them. It is safe to say all these young sprinklers tried the experiment at least once. Then everybody was told that the electricity in the cars would interfere with the time-keeping qualities of the watches, and that the only preventive was to be very careful and also to have a non-conductor plate put in the watches. The jewelers did a thriving business for a while.

This week in 1926, Nashville celebrated the delivery of new, state-of-the-art streetcar wagons by holding a parade that highlighted the system’s history. As the Tennessean reported on October 28, featured guests included about 25 former mule-car drivers from days of yore.

The story which Friday’s parade will not tell is, that from an humble start obtained in the mule car, the street railway industry here has grown to be such a public servant that it carries approximately 35,000,000 passengers every year [sic — is that possible?] in Nashville, and in 1925 was rated as the nation’s safest street railway system.

Together with passenger rail services from suburbs like Bellevue, the streetcar system provided Nashvillians from all walks of life with efficient transportation to and from downtown for more than a half-century. But internal combustion would win out. In February 1941, just as a dispute between the U.S. and Japan that had much to do with oil and rubber began to take on ominous proportions, gasoline-powered city buses took over the streetcars’ routes.

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New to the blogroll this week: The Posterity Project, Gordon Belt’s very active blog on issues involving Tennessee history and archives.