16. Braid Electric Company (1879) – sold to Rexel, a French electrical equipment distributor, in 2004; now called Rexel-Braid Electric Co.; no website.
Note to readers: This list is nearly 25 years old, and some of the data is no longer correct. Follow the links for the updates we have located. If you have more recent information about these businesses, we’d love to have your input – you can leave any comments below.
Renowned Tennessee newsman Elbridge Gerry Eastman was born in Bridgewater, New Hampshire, on February 27, 1813,1 to Timothy and Abigail Eastman. As a young man, he learned the printing trade,2 which would support him throughout his life.
E. G. Eastman’s gravesite in Mt. Olivet cemetery, Nashville, Tennessee.
Young Eastman moved to Boston and then, by 1838, to Washington, D. C., where he worked at the Washington Globe and became a trusted confidant of House Speaker James K. Polk.3 In 1839 Polk brought Eastman and his new wife, Lucy Ann Carr, back to Tennessee, to install the young publisher as editor of the Knoxville Argus.4 Eastman’s incisive writing helped Polk win the governorship that October, while establishing his own reputation as “the leading Democratic editor of East Tennessee”5 – quite a political shift for Eastman, who had published The Abolitionist in New Hampshire only four years earlier.6
While in Knoxville, he also encouraged and published the writings of humorist George Washington Harris, whose works would influence Twain and Faulkner. Harris dedicated Sut Lovingood, Yarns (1867) to Eastman, “the friend whose kindly voice first inspired my timid pen with hope.”7
When Polk became the eleventh U. S. President in 1845, Eastman followed him to Washington.8 However, he was quickly called back to Tennessee by Democratic party leaders, who put him in charge of the Nashville Union (1847).9 Eastman’s newspaper not only showed Polk in the best possible light but also supported other Democratic candidates, including Andrew Johnson, then facing a difficult Congressional reelection campaign. “Take high ground on the slavery question,” Johnson wrote to Eastman in 1849.10
In 1850 the Union changed its name to The Nashville American, with E. G. Eastman and Thomas Boyers as editors. In 1853, in “one of the most important newspaper mergers in the antebellum history of the state,”11 the newspaper became The Nashville Union and American. Eastman was elected clerk of Tennessee’s Democratic House (1849)12 and Senate (1853).13 When Andrew Johnson became governor in 1853, he appointed Eastman to the State Agricultural Bureau. As bureau secretary,14 Eastman instituted Tennessee’s first county, regional, and state fairs.15 Meanwhile, his firm, E. G. Eastman & Co., Public Printers, produced many of the state’s publications, including the House and Senate journals.
Base of E. G. Eastman’s gravestone in Mt. Olivet Cemetery, Nashville.
On November 23, 1859, five days after Union and American editor George Poindexter was shot to death by rival editor Allen A. Hall of the Nashville Daily News,16 Elbridge G. Eastman died suddenly at his home from a paralyzing stroke.17 “The most influential political writer in the State,”18 he was only 56. Governor Isham Harris later wrote a friend that he believed Poindexter had been killed deliberately in an effort to break Eastman’s spirit.19 Both houses of the Tennessee General Assembly adjourned that day “in token respect to the memory of E. G. Eastman, the public printer.”20
Lucy Eastman was left with nine children, ages one to eighteenteen.21 She eventually sold her interest in the Union and American to Thomas S. Marr and Leon Trousdale. When the Confederates evacuated Nashville in early 1862, the operations of the paper were suspended. (2014)
SOURCES:
1 Ancestry.com. New Hampshire, Births and Christenings Index, 1714-1904 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011. Accessed January 13, 2014.
2 Clayton, W. W. History of Davidson County, Tennessee. Philadelphia: J. W. Lewis & Co., 1880, 385.
3 Burt, Jesse C. The Most Tremendous Democrat: The Editing, Publishing & Public Service Career of Elbridge Gerry Eastman in Tennessee, 1839-1859. Bound, unpaged manuscript in Jesse C. Burt, Jr., Papers, 1920-1981, chapter 1. VI-L-1-2. Tennessee State Library and Archives.
4 Guild, Josephus Conn. Old Times in Tennessee : with Historical, Personal, and Political Scraps and Sketches. Nashville: Tavel, Eastman & Howell, 1878, 142-143.
5 Clayton, 385.
6 Moore, Jacob B. “History of Newspapers in New Hampshire,” in Edwards, B. B., and W. Cogswell, eds. The American Quarterly Register, Vol. XII. Boston: The American Education Society, 1840.
7 Harris, George Washington. High Times and Hard Times: Sketches and Tales. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967.
8 Clayton, 385.
9 Clayton, 385.
10 Graf, LeRoy P., and Ralph W. Haskins, eds. The Papers of Andrew Johnson: Volume 1, 1822-1851. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1967.
11 Burt, Introduction.
12 House Journal (Tennessee), 1849, 8.
13 Senate Journal (Tennessee, 1853-1854, 19.
14Biennial Report of the State Agricultural Bureau of Tennessee to the Legislature of 1855-56, prepared by E. G. Eastman, Secretary of the Bureau. Nashville: G. C. Torbeit & Co, 1856.
17 Ancestry.com. U.S. Federal Census Mortality Schedules, 1850-1885 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. Accessed January 13, 2014.
18Second Report of the Board of Health to the Honorable City Council of the City of Nashville, for the Year ending July 4, 1877. Nashville: Tavel, Eastman & Howell, 1877.
19 Burt, Introduction.
20 House Journal (Tennessee), November 23, 1859, 280; Senate Journal (Tennessee), November 23, 1859, 170.
21 Ancestry.com 1860 United States Federal Census [database online]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2009. Accessed January 14, 2014.
SUGGESTED READING:
Clayton, W. W. History of Davidson County, Tennessee. Philadelphia: J. W. Lewis & Co., 1880.
Harris, George Washington. High Times and Hard Times: Sketches and Tales. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967.
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.
Nashville Historical Newsletter 