The Clover Bottom Mansion, Donelson, built in 1858, is currently home to the Tennessee Historical Commission
Events of the past continue to shape our lives today, and the prosperous era of the 1850s is a case in point. In 1850 the first locomotive arrived in Nashville, sustaining and enhancing the city as a regional commercial and metropolitan hub, a standing we have never relinquished. Today’s Union Station, built at the turn of the century during the railroad boom, survives as one of our most beloved cultural landmarks.
Nashville’s Union Station opened in October 1900 as a Louisville & Nashville Railroad station.
The Medical School of the University of Nashville opened in 1851, met with immediate success, and quickly established Nashville as a medical center. Following in its wake, Shelby Medical College opened in 1858. The Nashville medical tradition continued with Vanderbilt University, which today provides one of America’s finest medical centers.
The Medical Department of the University of Nashville opened on Second Avenue South in 1851. It would become part of Vanderbilt University in 1874, forming the nucleus of what is today the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
In 1854 the publishing arm of the Methodist Episcopal Church South opened on the public square, securing Nashville’s future as a publishing mecca. No doubt the presence here of the Methodist Publishing House played a part in the 1870s formation of Vanderbilt University, which began as a Methodist school. Still in operation today and publishing under several imprints, the publishing house has employed thousands of Nashvillians and pumped millions of dollars into our economy.
In 1873 Cornelius Vanderbilt, known as “the Commodore,” endowed the city of Nashville with $1 million to establish and build the university that today bears his name. The old “Main Building” (pictured above) was dedicated in 1875. Nearly destroyed by fire in 1905, the structure was rebuilt in Italianate style crowned with a single tower and renamed Kirkland Hall in honor of Chancellor James Hampton Kirkland.
Nashville’s first public school was named in honor of educator Alfred Hume, who has been called “the father of Nashville public schools.” Hume School opened in 1855 with 12 teachers. From that modest beginning developed the sprawling Metro Nashville public school system with a total proposed operating budget for the 2021-2022 fiscal year of $1,017,807,500, which provides for 157 schools, 86,000 students, and 11,000 employees.
The Hume School, Nashville’s first public school, opened in 1855 for grades 1-12. In 1874 the high school students moved to the Fogg High School, newly built on an adjoining lot fronting Broad Street. In 1912 the two schools merged and moved into this Gothic Revival building designed by architects William Ittner and Robert Sharp.
The Tennessee State Capitol, completed in 1859, is the governmental temple in which our state laws are still sanctified. Other structures built in the 1850s that contribute to Nashville’s present character include Downtown Presbyterian Church (dedicated in 1851), Holy Trinity Episcopal Church (1852), Sunnyside Mansion (ca. 1852), Belmont Mansion (1853), Literary Building of the University of Nashville (1853), Church of the Assumption (completed in 1859), Clover Bottom Mansion (1859), and Two Rivers Mansion (1859).
Holy Trinity Church, located on 6th Ave. S at Lafayette, became an Episcopal parish in 1851. The building was occupied by Federal troops during the Civil War and received considerable damage. Restored after the war, it has served the African American community for decades.
These and other events from 150 years ago belie any notion that history is irrelevant. The past has not only a chronological relationship with the present but also a causative one. We did not just happen upon the present: the past is the impetus for today.
All postcards and photographs used in this article are part of the NHN collection.
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.
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