At the end of the 19th century City Cemetery was in crisis. Once a burial place for all Nashvillians, it had been supplanted by the newer and more beautiful Mt. Olivet, Mt. Ararat, and Calvary cemeteries. The Union Civil War dead had been transported to National; the Confederates, to Mt. Olivet. Neglected and ignored, City was described by the Banner on June 21, 1868, as a ruin: “robbery, murder and lust have held their horrid orgies in it and even now nightly desecrated by being the rendezvous of lascivious love.” No wonder the cemetery was promptly declared a “public nuisance” and burials were suspended the following month. A plan quickly came together within city government to remove all the graves and make the land a public park.
Sunset at Nashville City Cemetery (photo by Rebecca Sowell)
“Not so fast! Absolutely not!” Nashville’s women spoke out forcefully against such an idea. This was “sacred ground and should never be called a park,” protested Felicia Steger, a granddaughter of Felix Grundy. Women had found a new freedom of expression with the advent of the 20th century. In 1897 their Woman’s Building at the Tennessee Centennial had been a triumph. Now they found that, although not yet allowed to vote, they could nonetheless organize and engage in “civic housekeeping” with positive results. “We shall never have clean cities until the women undertake the job” was the credo of these busy ladies. Their noble efforts notwithstanding, a Banner reporter of 1900 expressed indignation that “women were boldly wearing ankle-length skirts on clear days because they were helpful in getting on and off streetcars.”
· Woman’s building at Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 1897 (Image #27163; Calvert Brothers Photography Studio; courtesy of Tennessee State Library & Archives)
Saving and caring for City Cemetery became the focus of several groups. In 1903 the Tennessee Women’s Historical Association was organized, its specific purpose to preserve the cemetery. Sumner A. Cunningham, editor of the Confederate Veteran, claimed credit for suggesting its formation. He was the only male member of an industrious group that included Louise Lindsley and Carnegie librarian Mary Hannah Johnson. Other civic and patriotic organizations were asked to join them “to assist in improving and preserving the old city cemetery, to dispel the spirit of vandalism and promote civic pride. The Ladies’ Hermitage Association, DAR, UDC, and Colonial Dames all cooperated under this umbrella. One of their successful projects was the construction of a Memorial Gate at the 5th Avenue entrance. Dedicated in 1909, the gate exists only in pictures now, having been destroyed in an automobile accident during the 1930s. Wishing to do their part, Cumberland Chapter, DAR, erected a sundial to mark the path leading to the James Robertson family plot.
Nashville City Cemetery (photo by Rebecca Sowell)
The South Nashville Federation of Women was another group that worked to care for the City Cemetery grounds. The guidebook All About Nashville reported in 1912 that “with the cooperation of 400 members, they have cleared away the rubbish, pruned trees, graveled the walks, and planted a line of memorial elms and lastly, are in the process of erecting a handsome memorial gateway to the heroes of another day.” These gateposts, on 4th Avenue, still stand. May Winston Caldwell, whose parents and siblings are buried at City, remembered the pre-Civil War days when her mother and Peter, the gardener, came to care for the family plot. Now May, as a member of the South Nashville Women, was proudly carrying on that tradition.
Sign at City Cemetery entrance gate (NHN collection)
These hard-working women began a program of stewardship and restoration that has resumed in recent years after a period of neglect. Today the Nashville City Cemetery Association (composed of both men and women!) is ten* years old, making it the longest-lived and most professional volunteer organization ever to protect and renovate the grounds and markers: an endowment established at the Community Foundation will support the continuing restoration of the City Cemetery in the years to come. Thanks to the $3 million allocated by the Metro Council, and with the cooperation of the Metro Historical Commission and such citizen organizations as Master Gardeners of Davidson County, the cemetery is once again prepared to maintain its status as a historically valuable resting place of our pioneer heritage. (2008)
A volunteer from the Master Gardeners of Davidson County works in one of the family plots (NHN photo)
Previously published in Monuments and Milestones, the Nashville City Cemetery Newsletter.
* Note: This article was written in 2008. The NCCA began its work in 1998. By this time (late 2021) the organization is more than 23 years old.
A short list of important dates in Nashville history must necessarily exclude many defining events. Nevertheless, we believe the effort to narrow our history into an easily memorized list is worthwhile. The listed items provide an overview of the whole and serve as guideposts between which additional events can be viewed with some perspective. Perhaps it is also motivating to realize that memorizing a list of ten important Nashville dates will result in your suddenly knowing more Nashville history than probably eighty or ninety percent of all Nashvillians!
Photo of Tennessee State Capitol from NHN collection
Regrettably, in addition to Native American history, our list of dates omits Nashville’s heroic pre-settlement period, including the exploits of Timothy Demonbreun and the founding journeys to the Cumberland region led by James Robertson and John Donelson. Also omitted is the date of the formation of Davidson County (1783) as well as the dates on which Nashville was officially named (1784) and incorporated (1806). The Union occupation of Nashville (beginning February 1862) is another significant event not specified here. Several important twentieth century dates, including the rise of the huge DuPont Powder Plant complex during World War I, are not included. Finally, the modern development of Nashville, with its high-rise buildings and its various sports and entertainment venues, has been left for some future list.
No entry on the list should necessarily be construed as carrying the same historical weight as any other item on the list. For example, the 1925 beginning of the Grand Ole Opry would probably not carry the same weight as, say, the 1864 Battle of Nashville.
Expansive timelines of Nashville history can be found in other sources, including such excellent books as Henry McRaven’sNashville: “Athens of the South.”
April 24, 2003, marks the 223rd anniversary of the historical founding of Nashville. On that well-known date in 1780, John Donelson’s flotilla of about 30 flatboats and several pirogues completed the 1006-mile voyage via four rivers to the French Lick’s almost-completed log central station. Here the travelers joined James Robertson’s overland settlement party that had traveled into the western North Carolina frontier to cross the frozen Cumberland River on Christmas Day 1779 to establish an outpost of civilization. This two-prong settlement of Nashville was described by Theodore Roosevelt in Winning of the West as “being equal in importance to the settlement of Jamestown or the landing at Plymouth Rock.”
Not as well known is that this year also marks the 100th anniversary of the October 11, 1903, dedication of the Robertson Monument in Centennial Park. The monument’s towering 50-foot granite shaft is actually seven years older than its year of dedication, and the story of the monument’s creation in Nashville’s first public park is nearly as interesting as the Robertson pioneers it memorializes.
Photograph adapted from General James Robertson: Father of Tennessee by Thomas Edwin Matthews (Nashville: The Parthenon Press, 1934)
The monument’s existence is due to the energy, dedication, and vision of Nashville’s Major Eugene C. Lewis (1845-1917), owner of theNashville American newspaper and a consulting civil engineer. It was Lewis’ friend, local architect William C. Smith, who suggested in a late-1893 speech to Nashville’s Commercial Club that “a spectacular Tennessee Centennial be held to alleviate financial distress and to divert the attention of the people” from the long and severe depression that had engulfed America after the Panic of ’93. Before the depression, according to W. F. Creighton inBuilding of Nashville, local attorney Douglas Anderson had suggested in local newspapers that a celebration be held in Nashville to celebrate the centenary of Tennessee’s 1796 statehood. Although Anderson’s earlier suggestion had evoked favorable public response, no action was taken until Smith renewed interest in the project. The Nashville Tennessee Centennial Exposition Company was formed and by the summer of 1895 was beginning to acquire financial support for the event. John W. Thomas, president of the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railroad, served as president of the Centennial Company and chairman of the executive committee of the Exposition, and Major E. C. Lewis was named director general. The site selected for the Exposition was the West Side Race Track and Park, located on the old fairgrounds surrounding the historic Cockrill Springs area at the end of Church Street and the terminus of the West End Avenue streetcar line. The first Tennessee State Fair had been staged on the site in 1869, with subsequent fairs held in 1873, 1879, and 1884.
The Centennial Exposition, held May 1 through October 30, 1897, was “essentially a fair on a grand scale,” wrote A. W. Crouch and H. D. Claybrook in Our Ancestors Were Engineers. Attractions included 12 large buildings featuring exhibits on the commercial, industrial, agricultural, and educational interests of the state; a “midway” including Egyptian, Cuban, and Chinese villages; a “Giant See-saw” designed by local engineer and steel fabricator Arthur J. Dyer; Venetian gondoliers on newly created Lake Watauga; a Venetian Rialto bridge designed by local architect C. A. Asmus; parades and “sham battles” by the Tennessee Militia; fireworks and other entertainment; and a 250-foot flag staff designed by E. C. Lewis. Major Lewis also had conceived the idea to create a replica of the 5th-century B. C. Athenian Parthenon to house the art exhibit, then commissioned local architect W. C. Smith to make the needed drawings. (The Parthenon, built during 1895-1897, and the city park board’s 1920 decision to have it rebuilt as a permanent structure is a story unto itself.)
Among the exhibits featured at the Exposition’s Mineral and Forestry Building was a towering, 50-foot granite shaft. The impressive monolith is attributed to the “Barry Vermont Granite Quarries” by Creighton in Building of Nashville, but Leland Johnson wrote in The Parks of Nashville that the “granite shaft was quarried at Stone Mountain, Georgia, by Venerable Brothers of Atlanta and shipped to Nashville for display during the 1897 Centennial Exposition. Oral tradition says a portion of the shaft broke off during transit to Nashville.” The shaft’s original flat-stone base remains today on the west bank of Lake Watauga and bears a metal plate commemorating the Centennial Exposition.
After the Exposition closed, all buildings except the Parthenon were torn down and removed. The success of the Exposition, as well as the progressive movement of the late 19th Century to establish public parks, planted the seed for Nashville’s park system. In 1901 Mayor James Head appointed five men, one of whom was Major E. C. Lewis, to the new Board of Park Commissioners. Negotiations were begun by the city in early 1902 with the owners of the 72-acre Centennial Park to purchase the land for a permanent city park. After months of complicated offers and counter-offers, described in The Parks of Nashville, Nashville Railway and Light Company purchased Centennial Park and its title was presented to the city park board on December 22, 1902.
On January 13, 1903, Major Lewis addressed the Tennessee Historical Society on the subject of James Robertson. He began his speech by informing the assembled members of “a fortunate circumstance that transpired only a few days ago. . . .For the first time in all its history, Nashville has park ground worthy of the Capital of Tennessee. The title to the Centennial Grounds, upon which the city has already contributed a large sum of money toward the adornment thereof, is now in the city of Nashville. The Park Commission. . .has so far determined upon but one measure, and that, the erection in Centennial Park of a monument [for] James Robertson, the founder of Nashville.” He concluded his lengthy profile of Robertson by asking, “What have we of Nashville done to honor this man’s memory? Has even the memory of all the good Robertson did been interred with his bones?. . .Are we a grateful people?”
Major Lewis had made prescient provisions to answer his own questions. When negotiations had begun to purchase the Centennial land, he purchased the 50-foot granite shaft for $200, then his fellow-commissioner Samuel A. Champion “resolved that it be erected in the park as a monument to the memory of James Robertson.” Lewis also purchased the flat-stone base for $10 in 1903 to remain beside Lake Watauga as a memorial to the Centennial Exposition. A new granite base was needed to support the heavy shaft after its relocation, but no record has yet been found of the base’s creator or its procurement. Wherever the massive base originated, Johnson described the monument’s creation in The Parks of Nashville: “With a tripod made of three large oak logs and block and tackle, Major Lewis raised the shaft into position and then constructed the foundation beneath it.” The granite shaft and its base weigh a total of 52.5 tons. Text is inscribed on a plaque on each side of the monument:
North Side Text: “James Robertson/Born in Brunswick County, Virginia, June 28, 1742. Moved to North Carolina in 1750. Came to Tennessee in 1769. Settled Nashville in 1780. Died in Tennessee Sept. 1, 1814. Reinterred in the City Cemetery at Nashville, 1825, under authority of the Tennessee Legislature.”
East Side Text: “Charlotte Reeves/Wife of James Robertson/Born in North Carolina, Jan. 2, 1751. Married to James Robertson, 1768. Died in Nashville, Jun. 11, 1843. Buried in the City Cemetery. Mother of the first male child born at Nashville. She participated in the deeds and dangers of her illustrious husband: won honors of her own and along his path of destiny cast a leading light of loyalty, intelligence, and devotion.”
South Side Text: “A worthy citizen of both Virginia and North Carolina. Pioneer, patriot, and patriarch in Tennessee. Diplomat, Indian fighter, maker of memorable history. Director of the movement of the settlers requiring that hazardous and heroic journey so successfully achieved from Watauga to the Cumberland. Founder of Nashville. Brigadier-General of the United States Army. Agent of the Government to the Chickasaw Nation. He was earnest, taciturn, self-contained, and had that quiet consciousness of power usually seen in born leaders of men. ‘He had winning ways and made no fuss.’ (Oconnostota) He had what was of value beyond price–a love of virtue, an intrepid soul, an emulous desire for honest fame. He possessed to an eminent degree the confidence, esteem, and veneration of all his contemporaries. His worth and services in peace and war are gratefully remembered. Amiable in private life, wise in council, vigilant in camp, courageous in battle, strong in adversity, generous in victory, revered in death.”
West Side Text: “James Robertson/Founder of Nashville/’We are the advance guard of civilization. Our way is across the Continent.'” Robertson—1779
The monument to James and Charlotte Reeves Robertson was presented to the city of Nashville on October 11, 1903, by Major E. C. Lewis on behalf of the Park Commission. About 100 Robertson descendants from all over the United States and one foreign country attended the ceremony in Centennial Park, according to Sarah F. Kelley in Children of Nashville. Three-year-old Dickson Wharton Robertson, descended through Dr. Peyton Robertson, was dressed in Scottish-plaid kilts and pulled the string to unveil the towering monument honoring his great-great-grandfather. Among those offering memorial tributes to Nashville’s founder were Governor James B. Frazier and Mayor James Head.
“History often repeats itself,” wrote Kelley. “On June 28, 1972, the descendants of James Robertson gathered once again in Nashville to celebrate Tennessee’s ‘James Robertson Day’ proclaimed by Governor Winfield Dunn.” Among the descendants gathered around the Robertson Monument in Centennial Park was the same Dickson Wharton Robertson who had participated in the monument’s unveiling 69 years earlier.
As the Robertson Monument approaches its centenary, the 107-year-old shaft has weathered well, as have the 100-year-old base and four bronze plaques. Attesting to the passage of a century is that the massive base appears to have sunk several feet into the earth since 1903. Without measured drawings to provide dimensions of the original base, however, a definitive conclusion cannot be made. Thus we celebrate the founding of Nashville with the hope that Centennial Park’s terra firma will continue to support the city’s monument to its founder, so that future Nashvillians may enjoy a bicentennial celebration of the Robertson Monument.
SOURCES:
Winning of the West, Volume II: From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783, by Theodore Roosevelt (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889).
Tennessee Old and New, Sesquicentennial Edition, 1796-1946, Volumes I and II (Nashville: Tennessee Historical Commission and Tennessee Historical Society, 1946).
Seedtime on the Cumberland, by Harriette Simpson Arnow (New York: The Macmillian Company, 1960).
Building of Nashville, by Wilbur Foster Creighton; revised and enlarged by Wilbur F. Creighton, Jr., and Leland R. Johnson (Nashville: Wilbur F. Creighton, Jr., and Elizabeth Creighton Schumann, 1969).
Children of Nashville: Lineages of James Robertson, by Sarah Foster Kelley (Nashville: Blue and Gray Press, 1973).
Our Ancestors Were Engineers, by Arthur Weir Crouch and Harry Dixon Claybrook (Nashville: Nashville Section of American Society of Civil Engineers, 1976).
The Parks of Nashville: A History of the Board of Parks and Recreation, by Leland R. Johnson (Nashville: Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County Board of Parks and Recreation, 1986).
Andrew Jackson Slept Here: A Guide to Historical Markers in Nashville and Davidson County (Nashville: Metropolitan Historical Commission of Nashville and Davidson County, 1993).
Frank Goodman, an expert accountant and one of Nashville’s hardest-working educators, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on Christmas day 18541 to blacksmith Vincent L. Goodman and his wife, née Jane Lewis, whose Welsh Quaker ancestors had followed William Penn to Philadelphia.2 Jane died shortly after Vincent’s return from the Civil War, and young Frank worked his way through Bryant & Stratton’s Business College, where he and Platt Rogers Spencer Jr., son of the developer of Spencerian script, became lifelong friends.3
Photograph of Frank Goodman, p. 448, Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition. Press of the Brandon Printing Co., 1898, Herman Justi, ed.
Around 1874 Goodman arrived in Nashville to teach penmanship4 and was soon employed by Ward’s Seminary5 and by Toney’s Nashville Business College, which then served as the business department of Cumberland University.6 In 1878 the college’s board of directors removed the Rev. Thomas Toney as principal, appointing 24-year-old Frank Goodman to reorganize the failing establishment.7 Incorporated in 1881 as Goodman’s Business College (sometimes called “Goodman & Eastman”), it was a respected Southern institution for over twenty years, with a branch college in Knoxville.8Goodman’s Book-keeping Simplified became a widely used textbook,9 and author Frank Goodman was credited with introducing bookkeeping as a course of study in the Nashville public schools.10 In the margin of his personal copy of Goodman’s Book-keeping Simplified, William Alexander Provine, renowned Cumberland Presbyterian minister and official of the Tennessee Historical Society, noted that many of the names used in the book’s exercises were those of fellow Nashvillians, including the ten-year-old boys Frank had taught in Sunday school . . . one of whom was the young Provine himself!
A member of the State Board of Education from 1880-1903, Frank Goodman replaced John Berrien Lindsley as secretary after 188711 and served on the committee which named Peabody Normal College.12 He represented an Edgefield district on the Nashville City Council from 1894-190013 and served as auditor of the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition.14 Secretary-treasurer of the State Teachers Association for seventeen years,15 he also chaired the finance committee for Nashville’s first Labor Day observance in 1894.16
In July 1880 Frank Goodman married Pattie Sims,17 daughter of Edgefield insurance agent Leonard Swepson Sims. All four of their sons would eventually become successful businessmen. Active in the Masons and the Knights Templar,18 Frank was treasurer of the United Order of the Golden Cross,19 a temperance-based insurance fraternity, and taught Sunday school in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.20
Pattie Sims Goodman with granddaughter, 1904 (from NHN collection)
By the end of the 1890s, his hearing failing, Goodman closed the college and worked as an expert accountant, appearing as a witness in court cases across the country. His testimony resulted in, among others, the conviction of the Mississippi State Treasurer for embezzling $315,000 from the state coffers.21 He audited the Tennessee State Comptroller’s and Treasurer’s records at least seven times,22 helped the city of Chattanooga reorganize its financial records,23 and reportedly audited the books of the U. S. Treasury in Washington, D.C.24
When the Reverend John B. Morris of St. Mary’s Church in Nashville was selected Bishop of Little Rock in 1906, he took Frank Goodman with him as diocesan auditor.25 Pattie, quite ill by then, received medical treatment in Hot Springs but died in 1909.26 Her body was brought back to Nashville for burial. Eight months later Frank himself died mysteriously on July 28, 1910, following an excessively hot mineral bath at Hot Springs.27 On July 30 the body of the man St. Louis Magazine had described as “the rising young businessman of the South”28 was brought home to Nashville by his young sons and laid to rest beside Pattie in Mt. Olivet Cemetery.29
Frank Goodman’s pallbearers included Tennessee Secretary of State Hallum W. Goodloe; George W. Stainback, Chairman of the Nashville Board of Public Works; Nashville City Assessor Roger Eastman, a longtime business partner; John W. Paulett, newsman and Assistant Superintendent of Public Instruction; Dr. William H. Bumpus, President of the American Local Freight Agents Association, renowned orator, and past Grand Master of the Tennessee Masons; Dr. William E. McCampbell, the Edgefield physician who had delivered the Goodman children; Marcus B. Toney, Civil War veteran and author; and Sumner Cunningham, fractious editor of theConfederate Veteran, who wrote his friend a tender eulogy in “The Last Roll,” despite the fact that, at the outbreak of the Civil War, his subject had been a seven-year-old Yankee boy! (2014)
NOTES AND SOURCES:
1 Richard, James Daniel. Tennessee Templars: A Register of Names with Biographical Sketchesof the Knights Templar of Tennessee. Nashville: Robert H. Howell & Co., 1883, 78.
2 Glenn, Thomas Allen. Merion in the Welsh Tract: With Sketches of the Townships ofHaverford and Radnor. Herald Press, 1896, 236 ff.
3 Goodman’s son Leonard owned a photograph of the Goodman and Spencer families taken during a Nashville visit in the 1890s, according to an interview with Leonard’s daughter, Kathleen Goodman Bowman about 1995.
4Catalog of Cumberland University, Lebanon, Tennessee, 1874-75. Lebanon, TN: R. L. C. White, University Printers, 1875.
5 Nashville City Directory, 1877 and 1878.
6Annual Report of the Department of the Interior, 1875, 605, footnote.
7 Clayton, W. W. History of Davidson County, Tennessee. Philadelphia: J. W. Lewis & Co., 1880, 270-271.
8 Nashville City Directory, 1883, advertisement opposite p. 568.
10 “Frank Goodman, Sr., Dead.” Nashville American, July 29, 1910.
11State Board of Education Minute Book #56, page 27, May 24, 1887. Tennessee State Library and Archives, Record Group #91, Vol. 56.
12State Board of Education Minute Book #56, page 53, February 15, 1888, and page 57, May 31, 1888.
13 Nashville City Directories.
14 Justi, Herman, ed. Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition. Press of the Brandon Printing Co., 1898, 31.
15 “Tennessee Teachers: How the Association Feels About Prof. Goodman’s Resignation as Secretary.” Nashville American, August 1, 1897, 6.
16 “Prof. Frank Goodman: Labor Day Committee Thanks Him for His Efforts.” Daily American, September 7, 1894, 3.17 “The Nuptial Knot,” Daily American, July 21, 1880.
17A There were no wedding attendants (bridesmaids or best man), but the ushers were an interesting cross-section of friends:
Charles B. Glenn was listed in the 1880 Nashville City Directory as a bookkeeper for the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway. He lived at 357 Broadway. By 1906 he was paymaster for the NC&StL. One wonders whether he might have been a Goodman graduate.
Robert T. Creighton was a surveyor at this time, but he later became city engineer and was a partner with Wilbur F. Foster in Foster & Creighton, civil engineers and contractors, #3 Berry Block.
Robert A. Fraley Jr. was a clerk at Collier, Fraley & Co., cotton factors and commission merchants, a business owned by his father. He was later bookkeeper for the National Manufacturing Company and may also have been a Goodman student.
Henry C. Jameson, originally from Hickman, Kentucky, was listed in the 1880 Census, along with Herbert W. Grannis, as one of Frank’s housemates at #7 Summer St. (5th Ave.). [Other residents in what was apparently a men’s hotel or boarding house included the brothers George and Robert Cowan (who owned Cowan & Co., wholesale notions & white goods at 36-37 Public Square), Van Buren Dixon (a dentist, with an office at 93½ Church), Porter Rankin (William Porter Rankin, with his brother David P., owned Rankin & Co., wholesale clothing at 57 Public Square.), W. S. Duckworth (who owned WS Duckworth & Co., books, stationery, cigars, tobacco, and railroad tickets, at 4 S. Cherry and also the corner of N. Cherry and Union), Samuel N. Warren (a bookkeeper who worked at 43 N. College), and Robert Fletcher (a salesman).] Goodman, Jameson, and Grannis all listed their occupation as “teacher,” and we know from Clayton’s History of Davidson County that all three were faculty members in Goodman’s Business College. Jameson was listed in the 1876 Cumberland University catalog as a student at the Business College there. The 1878, 1879, and 1880 Nashville City Directories say he was a professor at the business college in Nashville. The 1878 book terms it “F. Goodman & Co’s College”; 1879 lists it as “Goodman’s Nashville Business College”; and in 1880 it is simply “Nashville Business College.” In 1878 he boarded at 95 Church St., and in 1879-1880, at 24 S. Summer. In 1887 the City Directory describes him as a teacher at Goodman & Eastman’s Business College, living two miles from Nashville on Chicken Pike (today’s Elm Hill Pike).
17B The Goodman-Sims wedding in the First Cumberland Presbyterian Church was somewhat unusual, in that it took place at 7:00 a.m. According to the news item in the American, many of the couple’s friends – including the youngsters in Frank’s Sunday school class, accompanied them to the train station to give them a rousing send-off as they left on their honeymoon trip to Louisville, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Chicago.
18 Richard, James Daniel. Tennessee Templars: A Register of Names with Biographical Sketchesof the Knights Templar of Tennessee. Nashville: Robert H. Howell & Co., 1883, 78.19 Nashville City Directories.
20 “Obituary: Funeral of Prof. Frank Goodman,” Nashville American, July 31, 1910; also mentioned in July 29, 1910, story; see footnote 21.
21 “Frank Goodman, Sr., Dead.” Nashville American, July 29, 1910.
22 “Prof. Goodman’s Reappointment,” Nashville American, January 23, 1903, 1. At least two of his audit reports are reproduced in their entirety in Senate Records: Tennessee Senate Journal 1895, pages 89-100, and Tennessee Senate Journal 1903, pages 755-805.
23 “Chattanooga City Books to be Overhauled by an Expert.” Daily Journal and Journal andTribune (Knoxville), January 7, 1890.
24 “Frank Goodman, Sr., Dead.” Nashville American, July 29, 1910. This is also mentioned in Cunningham, Sumner. “Frank Goodman,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 18: 1910, 382.25 “Former Citizen of Nashville: Prof. Frank Goodman Passes Away in Little Rock – Interment Here Saturday,” Nashville Banner, July 29, 1910.26 “Mrs. Frank Goodman Dies in Arkansas,” Nashville Banner, November 1, 1909.
27 Special dispatch to the American, July 29, 1910. This follows the article, “Frank Goodman, Sr., Dead.” Nashville American, on the same date. Similar information appears in the article “Goodman Funeral Saturday Morning,” Nashville Banner, July 29, 1910.
28 Nashville City Directory, 1883, advertisement opposite p. 568.
29 Participants in Frank’s funeral, most (if not all) of whom were fellow Masons/Knights Templar:
Rev. George W. Shelton was the pastor of the Russell Street Presbyterian Church at the time of the laying of its cornerstone in 1904. The Cumberland Presbyterian described him as “a young man of energy and enthusiasm.”
Rev. William A. Provine (1867-1935) (who as a boy had been a member of the Sunday school class taught by Frank Goodman) assisted in the funeral. He had attended Vanderbilt and earned a Bachelor of Divinity from Cumberland University, which later awarded him an honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity. A widely respected minister of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, he served as Superintendent of the Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath School Work and Treasurer of Mission Work for the Synod of Tennessee. He was for many years corresponding secretary of the Tennessee Historical Society and editor of its journal.
Sumner Cunningham (1843-1913) was a sergeant in Company B, 41st Tennessee Infantry. He was the editor and publisher of The Confederate Veteran and lived at the Maxwell House. He was instrumental in fundraising for the monument to Confederate hero Sam Davis that was unveiled near the Tennessee Capitol in June 1909.
Attorney Hallum W. Goodloe (1869-1956) was Tennessee’s Secretary of State at the time of Frank Goodman’s funeral. He was Clerk and Master of Crockett County Chancery Court (1891-1901); Chief Clerk to the TN Secretary of State (1901-1907); Secretary of State (1909-1913); Private Secretary to Gov. Tom C. Rye (1915-1918); Assistant to the Superintendent of Banks (1918-1929); Chief Clerk to State Treasurer (1929-1931); and Deputy Superintendent of State Banks (1931-1949).
George W. Stainback (1842-1918) was the chairman of the Nashville Board of Public Works and Affairs, a very powerful three-man group. Members were required to abstain from other active employment – they received a salary for their work – and were ex officio members of the City Council. They hired city laborers and department heads; oversaw streets, sewers, and public property; supervised the laying and removal of railroad tracks on city streets; and prepared an annual operating budget. Stainback was a lodge brother of Frank Goodman in the UOGC. He was honored by having a portrait of his face displayed in fireworks at the 1897 Tennessee Centennial.
Roger Eastman (1858-1938), youngest son of Elbridge Gerry Eastman and Lucy Ann Carr, was a banker, rising to the position of assistant cashier [in those days a cashier was a bank manager] with the First National Bank. He was Frank Goodman’s business partner in both the college and the accounting business. He was probably Frank’s closest friend – Frank named two children after him (Frank Eastman Goodman, 17 July 1881 – 29 December 1882, and Roger Eastman Goodman, 14 April 1895 – 29 April 1953). He served several terms as Nashville Tax Assessor, beginning in 1898. He was an active Mason (elected worshipful master of Phoenix lodge at the age of 23), a member and auditor of the Baptist Sunday-school board, treasurer of the First Baptist church, and vice-president of the Nashville Athletic Club. His biography was included in John Allison’s Notable Men of Tennessee (1905).
Dr. William E. McCampbell (1854-1924) had a medical office at 523 Woodland Street in East Nashville. He was the physician who had reported Roger Goodman’s birth in 1895 so had probably delivered him. He served on the Nashville City Board of Health for many years and was elected its chairman in 1911.
Captain Marcus Breckenridge Toney (1840-1929) was a convinced Methodist, Confederate, and slavery partisan who became an early volunteer for Confederate service. He served with the 1st Tennessee Volunteer regiment in campaigns in West Virginia and at Shiloh, Chickamauga, and the Wilderness, where he was captured. He was the author of The Privations of a Private (1905), which described his experiences as a Federal P.O.W. in the Union prison camp at Elmira, New York, as well as the war’s immediate aftermath and the growth and appeal of the Ku Klux Klan, which he had joined after the war. He was an active member of the Masonic fraternity and worked with W. H. Bumpus to found the Masonic Widows’ and Orphans’ Home, which was incorporated in 1886.
John W. Paulett, who was a Knoxville textbook salesman when he first met Frank Goodman in the early years of Goodman’s Business College, was Assistant Superintendent of Public Instruction around the turn of the century, and later worked as a newspaper correspondent. He was appointed by the governor to serve on the Board of Visitors of the University of Tennessee.
Dr. William Hill Bumpus (1843-1926) one of Frank Goodman’s closest friends, is actually buried in the Sims-Goodman plot at Mt. Olivet. Trained as a physician and a lawyer, he was the local agent for the Louisville & Nashville Railroad for 52 years, serving for a time as the president of the National Association of Local Freight Agents’ Associations. An active Mason, he was the editor and publisher of the Tennessee Mason and a sometime-writer for the Nashville American. He and Marcus Toney were the driving force behind the Masonic Widows’ and Orphans’ Home. He was elected Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Tennessee, Free & Accepted Masons, on January 26, 1898.
[Note: Bumpus, Eastman, McCampbell, Paulett, and Stainback had also served as pall bearers for Pattie Goodman in November 1909.]
SUGGESTED READING:
Clayton, W. W. History of Davidson County, Tennessee. Philadelphia: J. W. Lewis, 1880.
Goodman, Frank. Goodman’s Book-keeping Simplified. A Work Thoroughly Explaining theTheory of Single and Double Entry. Nashville: Wheeler & Osborn, 1882. (A copy is available in the Tennessee State Library and Archives.)
Nashville Historical Newsletter 