L&N Railroad – Nashville Historical Newsletter

Jacob McGavock Dickinson: Jurist and Statesman

by Kathy B. Lauder.

Jacob McGavock Dickinson was a distinguished attorney, Tennessee Supreme Court Justice, Assistant U.S. Attorney General, and U. S. Secretary of War. A grandson of Jacob McGavock and great-grandson of Felix Grundy, Dickinson was born January 30, 1851, in Mississippi. He enlisted at fourteen in the Confederate cavalry,¹ just as the Civil War ended, and soon thereafter earned A.B. and M.A. degrees from the University of Nashville. He studied law at Columbia University and in Europe² before being admitted to the Tennessee Bar (1874).³He and his wife, née Martha Overton, reared three sons.⁴

Dickinson, an early law partner of Judge Claude Waller,⁵accepted four temporary appointments to the Tennessee Supreme Court (1891-1893)⁶ before becoming Assistant U.S. Attorney General (1895-1897), as well as General Attorney for the Louisville & Nashville Railroad⁷ and law professor at Vanderbilt University (1897-1899).⁸

He moved to Chicago to serve as Solicitor General (1899-1901) and General Counsel (1901-1909) for the Illinois Central Railroad.⁹ One of three attorneys representing the United States before the Alaskan Boundary Tribunal (1903),¹⁰ Dickinson delivered the successful closing argument in an emotionally charged case.¹¹ He helped organize the American Society of International Law (1906) and became president of the American Bar Association a year later.¹² Between 1905 and 1909 he received honorary doctorates from Columbia,¹³ Yale,¹⁴ and the University of Illinois.¹⁵

President William Howard Taft, seated left; Judge Howard H. Lurton, whom Taft appointed to the Supreme Court, standing center; and Jacob McGavock Dickinson, seated right. (photo courtesy of Peggy Dickinson Fleming)

In March 1909, President William H. Taft, a long-time friend,¹⁶ appointed him Secretary of War, a post he occupied until May 1911.¹⁷Secretary Dickinson proposed two pieces of legislation: providing an annuity retirement system for civil service employees and admitting foreign students to West Point.¹⁸

Much in demand as a dinner guest, Dickinson preferred the company of friends and family to the Washington social scene. Once, having refused a persistent hostess’s dinner invitations for each night from Monday through the weekend, he finally growled, “Dammit, madam, I’ll just come Monday!”¹⁹

Before 1890 Dickinson owned several large estates, including the Henry Hayes mansion, Ensworth, which he sold in 1898 to the Sisters of Charity as the future site of St. Thomas Hospital.²⁰ Around the same time, he infuriated Nashville residents with his decision to sell another historic property, Polk Place (the former residence of not only U.S. Congressman, Senator, and Attorney General Felix Grundy, but also President James K. Polk) to a developer, who razed the presidential home (1900) to build apartments.²¹ Dickinson bought Belle Meade in 1906 as a place to entertain guests²²; his son Overton lived there year-round with his family.²³ When Overton died of heart disease in 1910, a year after his wife’s death, Jacob Dickinson sold Belle Meade and never returned.²⁴

From 1913-1917 he served as Special Assistant U.S. Attorney General in the federal prosecution of the U.S. Steel Corporation, acting also as receiver for the Rock Island Line, which he restored to solvency.²⁵ In later years Dickinson was president of the Izaak Walton League, an early conservation group.²⁶

After his death on December 13, 1928, his body lay in state in the Tennessee Capitol²⁷ before being transported to Mt. Olivet Cemetery for burial.²⁸

The Dickinson papers at the Tennessee State Library and Archives include his correspondence with, among others, William Jennings Bryan, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, George W. Goethals, and presidents Cleveland, Coolidge, Hoover, Taft, Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt.²⁹ (2015)

SOURCES:

¹ Nashville Families and Homes: Selected Paragraphs from Nashville History. Nashville: Nashville Room, Nashville Public Library, 1983, 33.

² Nashville, A Family Town: 1975-76 Paragraphs from Nashville History. Nashville: The Nashville Room, Nashville Public Library, 1978, 85.

³ Dickinson, Jacob McGavock (1851-1928) Family Papers, 1812-1946. Microfilm #836. Tennessee State Library and Archives (finding aid).

⁴ Sobel, Robert. Biographical Directory of the United States Executive Branch, 1774-1989. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Publishing Group (ABC-CLIO), 1990.

⁵ Nashville, A Family Town, 85. Waller was the first judge appointed to the Second Circuit Court after its creation in 1895.

⁶ Nashville Families and Homes, 35.

⁷ Sobel.

⁸ Dickinson Family Papers (finding aid).

⁹ U.S. Army Center of Military History. Washington, D.C.: Office of the Administrative Assistant to the Secretary of the Army. http://www.history.army.mil/books/Sw-SA/Dickinson.htm (Accessed 3-23-2015)

¹⁰ Nashville, A Family Town, 87.

¹¹ Dickinson Family Papers (finding aid).

¹² U.S. Army Center of Military History.

¹³ Columbia University Quarterly, Volume 7. New York: Columbia University Press, 1905.

¹⁴ Office of the Secretary and Vice President for Student Life. New Haven: Yale University. http://secretary.yale.edu/programs-services/honorary-degrees/since-1702?field_degrees_value=All&field_year_value=All&keys=&page=13&order=title&sort=asc (Accessed 3-24-2015)

¹⁵ Commencement at Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Campus: Honorary Degrees 1891-Present. http://commencement.illinois.edu/ceremonies/honors_awards.html (Accessed 3-24-2015)

¹⁶ Nashville Families and Homes, 37.

¹⁷ Sobel.

¹⁸ U.S. Army Center of Military History.

¹⁹ Fleming, Peggy Dickinson. “Jacob McGavock Dickinson, Sr.” Nashville Historical Newsletter, https://nashvillehistoricalnewsletter.com/2021/10/17/jacob-mcgavock-dickinson-sr/ (Accessed 3-15-2015)

²⁰ Nashville, A Family Town, 90.

²¹ Nashville, A Family Town, 90.

²² Fleming, Peggy Dickinson.

²³ “Later Residents of Belle Meade.” Belle Meade Plantation website. http://bellemeadeplantation.com/later-residents/ (Accessed 3-24-2015)

²⁴ Fleming, Peggy Dickinson.

²⁵ Nashville Families and Homes, 35.

²⁶ U.S. Army Center of Military History.

²⁷ Nashville Families and Homes, 44.

²⁸ Find A Grave. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=8004817 (Accessed 3-24-2015)

²⁹ Dickinson Family Papers (finding aid).

A. N. Eshman and Radnor College

by Mike Slate.

He is responsible for the use of the “Radnor” name for Tennessee’s first natural area, Radnor Lake. He was president of two colleges. He knew William Jennings Bryan. He wrote books and ran a publishing house. He helped save a church. He conducted tours across the United States. He had two wives named “Annie B. Eshman.” He was a pioneer in the field of automobile driving safety. Nevertheless, few Tennesseans would recognize the name of this gifted farm boy, Andrew Nelson Eshman.

A.N. Eshman, born near Mt. Pleasant, Tennessee, came to Nashville in 1905 from West Point, Mississippi. He was 40 years old, yet he had already served as Huntsville, Alabama’s superintendent of schools and as president of West Point’s Southern Female College. In 1898 he had drawn a renowned speaker, William Jennings Bryan, to the SFC campus, where the noted orator addressed an audience of 5,000. After arriving in Nashville, Eshman bought 20 acres on the Nolensville Pike and built a 250-foot-long brick school building on a hill overlooking the pike. Like the SFC, it was a women’s school, which he named Radnor College.

*Radnor College (postcard from NHN collection)*

Eshman’s use of the name “Radnor” was apparently the first in Nashville. Several years after the school was founded, the L&N Railroad opened Radnor Yards, located just to the west of the college. The railroad evidently appropriated the name of the school for its freight and switching yards. In turn, Radnor Lake was named after the yards. A man-made reservoir in the Overton Hills, the lake provided Radnor Yards with water. The larger question is how Eshman came by the name “Radnor” for his school. No one knows, but it is conceivable that he named the college after Radnor Township near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The famous women’s college Bryn Mawr is located there, and Eshman, a frequent traveler, had no doubt ridden trains through Radnor on trips to Philadelphia.

Eshman was a Cumberland Presbyterian minister who, along with other dedicated leaders, fought to save the Cumberland Presbyterian Church from losing its identity after its 1906 merger with the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. Thanks to the efforts of these men, the C. P. Church survived, although greatly diminished in size. One unfortunate casualty of the merger was the Cumberland Presbyterian Publishing House, which had operated for many years on Cherry Street (today’s Fourth Avenue) in downtown Nashville. In 1913 the Federal District Court in Nashville granted control of the publishing house to the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. From that point forward, Eshman did the work of the C. P. publishing house in his own printing plant on the Radnor College campus. Cumberland Presbyterian publishing continued there until 1924, at what came to be called “Radnor Terrace” on McClellan Avenue. The present church building of the Radnor Church of Christ is thought to sit approximately where the old printing plant stood.

For reasons not fully understood today, Eshman closed Radnor College in 1914. No doubt a large factor was the death that May of his wife, Annie Bone Eshman, who had served as treasurer of the school. The rising popularity of co-education may have contributed to the decision as well. Other local schools for women closed during this same period: Columbia’s Athenaeum college in 1907, Franklin’s Tennessee Female College in 1913, Boscobel College in 1914, and Buford College in 1920.

After closing the school Eshman converted the main building into apartments and subdivided the acreage into housing lots. He sold lot numbers 24 through 31 to the Board of Trustees of the Cumberland Presbyterian Theological Seminary, who were searching for a permanent location for a ministerial school. The Board chose not to use the site, however, and the C. P. Church continued to rely on its theological department at Bethel College in McKenzie, Tennessee. If fate had twisted in a different direction, we might today find several imposing academic structures along McClellan Avenue and Nolensville Pike.

Ostensibly, Eshman had named McClellan Avenue, which led from Nolensville Pike to the main college building, in honor of Judge J. J. McClellan of West Point, Mississippi, another leader in the C. P. Church. In addition to an “Eshman Avenue,” West Point also has a street named after McClellan. Thus, Nashville and West Point are historically entwined, yet their interconnected stories have long been virtually unknown to either city.

On April 15, 1919, Eshman married Annie Boardman Mack in Hartford, Alabama. This second Annie B. Eshman had been a student at Southern Female College and had taught music at Radnor College. She was younger than Eshman by 18 years.

After their marriage A. N. and Annie moved to the resort town of Estill Springs, Tennessee, where he engaged in writing and conducting tours across the country. On the evening of September 28, 1921, the Radnor Apartments, formerly Radnor College, were totally destroyed by fire. So spectacular was the nighttime fire on the hilltop, an L&N train engineer reportedly sighted the blaze from 47 miles away. The sad news of the loss of the building, however, was no doubt mitigated by the happy event of October 8, 1923. On this date Eshman and Annie, he at 58 and she at 39, became the parents of A. N. Eshman Jr., born at Estill Springs.

In his later years Eshman served as an agent of the U. S. Sesquicentennial, pastored churches in Alabama and Tennessee, and authored books including Beauty Spots in America and the Life-Saving Brigade, in which he championed the safe driving of automobiles. He and Annie spent the last years of their lives in Columbia, Tennessee, Annie’s home town. A. N. Eshman passed away on January 23, 1951; Annie died on October 26, 1965, and was laid to rest beside her husband in the historic cemetery of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church at McCains, Tennessee.

Now the site of a telephone relay tower, Eshman Hill was crowned with city water tanks for many years following the destruction of the college building. A Radnor College catalogue of 1911-1912 had boasted that from the hill one could see up to 30 miles to the east. So prominent is the knoll that it can be seen from Ft. Negley (St. Cloud Hill), causing one to wonder what part it may have played in the 1864 Battle of Nashville. This and other captivating aspects of the hill’s history await future research.

The Army Air Forces Classification Center

by Kenneth Fieth, Metropolitan Nashville Archivist.

“At long last a use has been found for those extra coat hangers that always fall to the floor,” commented Guy Redmond, Red Cross Field Director, in his plea to Nashvillians in August of 1943 to send their extra hangers to the Army Air Forces Classification Center on Thompson Lane. Some 2,500 were needed. Everything had been planned and considered: housing, hospital, mess halls, roads, sewers, and electricity. Nice new lockers, no hangers. So the call went out to wartime Nashville.

The Army Air Forces Classification Center was brand new in the summer of 1943. As early as the spring of 1942, plans had been underway to build a training center for Army Air Force cadets. The Center was an induction station where cadets were brought for preliminary training, aptitude tests, and physical examinations. They were classified according to their skills and talent and then shipped on for further training. Many became pilots, bombardiers, navigators, and gunners in the war against Germany and Japan.

*Postcard of Army Air Force Classification Center* *(from NHN collection*)

The Center eventually encompassed approximately 560 acres along Thompson Lane and Franklin Road. The close proximity of Radnor Yards and the L&N Railroad lines helped win the contract for Nashville. The City Council, in special session, passed resolutions authorizing the city to enter into contracts with the Federal Government to furnish water, electrical power, and sewer facilities for the site.

The local railroads agreed to build spur lines into the facility and Nashville Electric Service made a commitment to bring electric power into the site. To win the $5,000,000 project for Nashville, Mayor Cummings worked successfully with local contractors, businessmen, and the Federal Government. Warfield and Keeble, Foster and Creighton, and other architectural and engineering firms provided the expertise to build the complex. When completed, the complex contained hundreds of buildings, including barracks, mess halls, fire halls, warehouses, recreation halls, several theaters, and a chapel.

At its height, the Center had a staff of 200 officers and 500 enlisted personnel and was the largest of the three Army Air Force centers in operation in the United States. The Center housed, on average, 10,000 soldiers per year.

The Center operated from 1942 until 1944 as a classification center, housing WACs (Women’s Army Corps) and Army Air Corps cadets. In early 1945, the classification center was shut down and a portion of the facility served as a separation center for U.S. Navy personnel. Sailors were sent to the Center for final separation from service and were given orientation on civilian life, proper discharge papers, and transportation to their homes.

The U. S. Government continued to lease the site from the Nashville Public Housing Administration well after the war ended. Finally in 1952, the site was declared surplus and the remaining few veterans and their families were transferred to other posts.

Four local businessmen—Dewitt Carter, R. M. Crichton, A. D. Creighton, and John D. McDougall—purchased approximately 113 acres of the site for $456,000. The Nashville Chamber of Commerce led a campaign to make the site Nashville’s first planned and controlled industrial development area. Consequently, the Suburban Industrial Development Company was formed in 1953 and became known by its acronym, SIDCO. By 1954, SIDCO had plants, warehouses, and small manufacturing shops throughout the area. The buildings used during the war were razed to make way for the new development, which grew rapidly and completed its first 50-acre phase in 1959.

The Sidco area still has the plants, factories, and warehouses that were the excitement of the post-war years in Nashville. The building frenzy continued until nothing of the original Army Air Classification Center was left. Those driving by the area today will not realize that during W.W. II the region between I-65 and the Radnor railyards was home to tens of thousands of American soldiers. (2000)