Tag: public square

Reverend Charles Spencer Smith (1852-1922)

by Jean Roseman.

As Nashville’s attention turns to the revamped Public Square, we should take note of a fascinating but little-known story about that area. It is the story of the Reverend Charles Spencer Smith, an African American man of extraordinary accomplishments.

Photograph from The Centennial Encyclopædia of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; Philadelphia, 1916; Richard R. Wright Jr., ed.

Smith was born into humble circumstances in Colborne, Canada, in 1852. Said to be able to read before the age of five, the boy loved books so much that the first money he ever spent was for a book. Attending school irregularly until he was ten, the youngster then struck out on his own. He first learned the trade of furniture refinishing and later worked at various other jobs: as a general utility boy in a boarding house, as a deck hand on the Great Lakes, as a cook, and as a waiter, continually working his way southward on the waterways.

Passionately fond of reading, especially newspapers, he educated himself successfully enough to become a teacher in Kentucky. When the Ku Klux Klan broke up the school, Smith moved on to Mississippi. There he was licensed to preach in the African Methodist Episcopal Church at Jackson, Mississippi, and also began to take an active role in politics.

Smith next settled in Mobile, Alabama, where he was ordained as a minister. Under the political changes initiated during Reconstruction, he was elected by a large majority to the 1874 Alabama House of Representatives. Widely respected for his prodigious knowledge and his impressive speaking skills, Smith gained a reputation as “the orator of the House.” However, the signing of the Amnesty Act, a period of economic depression, and a series of violent acts by white supremacists heralded a return to Democratic control of politics in the South, and many newly elected black politicians lost their seats in the 1874 and 1876 elections.

When his term ended in 1876, Smith came to Nashville. Still very active in the church, he attended Central Tennessee College (Meharry), receiving a full medical degree in 1880.

Two years later Smith founded a publishing house, the Sunday School Union of the A. M. E. Church, at 206 Public Square. He purchased the property for $9,000 from Maria Louisa Elliston Yandell, who had inherited it from her father, William Elliston. Much earlier it had been the site of the Nashville Inn in 1804.

The Sunday School Union was the first and only steam printing establishment in America to be owned and managed by an African American. From that location, Smith generated an enormous amount of printed religious material circulated not only in the United States but also abroad. Despite Charles Spencer Smith’s international renown, however, it was seven years before the Nashville City Directory (1889) mentioned him or his publishing house.

Not only did Smith successfully supervise the Nashville publishing operation, but he also became a bishop of the A. M. E. church in 1900, traveling widely throughout Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Europe. In 1911 he was distinguished as the first black recipient of the degree of Doctor of Divinity from Victoria College, Toronto. Before his death in 1922, Smith completed a continuation volume of the history of the A. M. E. church.

In Smith’s time 206 Public Square was a four-story building only 20 feet wide and 120 feet deep. Inscribed on the stone façade was the legend, “Founded A.D. 1882 by C. S. Smith.” At some point after 1918 the top two floors were blown off in a storm.

The building was purchased in 1918 by shoe businessman Sam Levy, who sold it in 1943 to the Katz family for their men’s furnishings wholesale house. In the mid-1960s, when the building was facing demolition, Katz descendant Dorothy Katz Mintz allied herself with others interested in preserving the building, hoping to convert it into a museum to commemorate Smith for his service to church and society. To this day, she still laments, “Now, why did they have to build a jailhouse on that property?” Some Nashvillians may still remember that, just prior to the demolition, the building housed the “Judge’s Chambers,” a restaurant on the Square.

Because of the efforts of the Reverend Charles Spencer Smith and others, 206 Public Square North has had a unique and unlikely history – one that should not be forgotten as a remodeled courthouse casts new shadows on the old Public Square.

The Old Nashville Market House, 1828-1937

by Dave Price.

Our original market house was completed during 1802 and can be seen in the well-known map of 1804 Nashville, which appeared in Clayton’s History of Davidson County, Tennessee. Its replacement was begun in April 1828 and was occupied in January 1829. This structure, shown on the 1831 J.P. Ayres (Doolittle & Munson) map, consisted of a long market shed running north and south with a two-story building at each end.

Photograph of the Public Square courtesy of Debie Oeser Cox, https://nashvillehistory.blogspot.com/

The Ayres map was surrounded by a number of drawings of local buildings and scenes, so we know what the southerly building looked like. It was the “Tennessee Lottery Office,” the image of which has been reproduced, although I am unable to cite such a copy in one of the standard histories. Interesting features of this Lottery Office are a recessed arch shape in the brick on the west side of the building and round windows in the upper corners of the south end.

A “salt print” (dated ca. 1856) of the west side of Nashville’s Public Square attracted a good deal of attention a few years ago when the State Museum purchased the rare item at a Sotheby’s auction. (We old Nashville buffs had been aware of a copy negative in the state archives for years.) The print reveals the same features mentioned above in the northwest corner of the northerly building, indicating that the matching original end buildings of the market house were still in place with some modifications: single story wings added to the south (and we presume north) sides of the end buildings and a cupola added to the roof of the south building (and probably to the north one as well, although it cannot be seen in the print).

A familiar photo taken from Capitol Hill a few years later shows that the end buildings had either been extensively remodeled or replaced with much larger three-story structures having two square towers on each end building. This image is reproduced in Adams-Christian, p. 53. Since the old Methodist Publishing House is shown, the picture must date from before 1873. The southerly building at some point became the City Hall, and Creighton tells us that the Supreme Court met in one of the buildings for a time and that 100 stalls existed in the market section or long connecting shed.

A good view of the southerly building can be seen in James Patrick’s Architecture in Tennessee, 1768-1897, where it is suggested that Adolphus Heiman may have remodeled the buildings “about 1855.” Despite the estimated dates, the “ca. 1856” image was obviously made prior to the “about 1855” remodeling. Incidentally, this building is shown in Max Hochstetler’s great Opryland Hotel mural, which can be seen on the cover of the Summer 1990 Tennessee Historical Quarterly. A view that shows both end buildings and the connecting market building is seen in Jack Norman’s The Nashville I Knew, p. 125.

Although not mentioned by any of the histories that I consulted, the southerly building was consumed by the Burns Block fire on the square during the night of January 2, 1897. The fire company stopped at the site of an old cistern between the Court House and the Market House but found it had been Macadamed over. During the delay in finding a new water source, the old dilapidated City Hall was engulfed in flame and the crowd shouted, “Let it burn!” which is exactly what happened.

This fire was responsible for the replacement of the City Hall with the large 1898 building that older readers will recall (Norman has a good view of this on p. 122 and an unusual architectural drawing is found in the photo section of Fedora Small Frank’s Beginnings on Market Street).

In the meantime the northerly building still had at least one of its towers in an 1892 photo but had lost both towers by 1910. This building contained the office of the Market Master and such city offices as those of the Meat and Dairy Inspectors and was generally called simply, “the north end.” The new City Hall remained much the same, although much of its one large tower was gone by the time of its 1936-37 demolition. The March 14, 1933, East Nashville Tornado caused some damage on the square and this may have been when the tower was shortened.

Aerial photographs taken during the construction of the present (Woolwine) Court House show that, while the market house section and the northerly building were razed along with the Strickland Court House (since they lay in the path of construction), the City Hall was actually a few feet south of the new building and was the last part to fall. It is also obvious from these photos that the market section had been widened considerably over the years; it contained 114 or more stalls by the time of its demise.

The later (1937-1955) Market House stands today behind the present court house and is still in use as the Ben West Building, or more commonly the “Traffic Court Building.” The once-familiar wagons are gone, and the farm trucks that once surrounded the Court House moved north of the Capitol to the new Farmer’s Market in 1955. That market has now been replaced and will no doubt be recalled by a later generation as “the old Farmers’ Market.” (1998)