Tennessee Supreme Court – Nashville Historical Newsletter

Nashvillians Who Stood behind the Sit-ins: B. The Attorneys

by Kathy B. Lauder and Tara Mielnik.

The Civil Rights Movement in Nashville was led, for the most part, by college students and their instructors in the techniques of nonviolent protest. The Nashville sit-ins became a model for many other successful desegregation efforts across the nation. However, working in the background to support the protestors were some remarkably gifted individuals. Lawyers, journalists, educators, and many other local citizens donated their time and their skills to support the movement.

*Z. A. Looby* (*from Tennessee Portrait Project*)

Attorney Z. Alexander Looby (1899-1972), who became a powerful force behind the protestors, came to the U.S. from Antigua at 15. He earned degrees from Howard (A.B., 1922), Columbia (LL.B., 1925), and NYU (J.D., 1926). Following his move to Nashville, he taught economics at Fisk University, passed the Tennessee bar, and became legal director of the NAACP. In 1946, when Thurgood Marshall came to Columbia, Tennessee, to represent 25 black citizens after an outbreak of racial violence, he requested Looby’s help in mounting their defense. They successfully won acquittals for nearly all of them. After State Senator Ben West, soon to become mayor of Nashville, guided a charter reform bill through the General Assembly, which allowed voters to elect city council members from individual districts, rather than choosing all of them at large. As a result, in 1951 local black residents were able to elect the first two African American council members since 1911 – attorneys Z. A. Looby and Robert Lillard. Five years later Looby and Avon Williams were the plaintiff’s attorneys in Kelley v. Nashville Board of Education, which ultimately ended Nashville school segregation. Looby, Williams, Robert Lillard, Coyness Ennix, and Adolpho Birch led the volunteer legal team for student protesters during the 1960 Nashville sit-ins. When Looby’s house was dynamited in April 1960, nearly 3,000 demonstrators marched to the court house to confront Mayor Ben West, whose unprecedented support soon (May 10 1960) ended lunch counter segregation in Nashville. By October, Looby’s legal team managed to have all the charges “for conspiracy to disrupt trade and commerce” dismissed against 91 student protesters. Looby was a city/Metro councilman for 20 years and a founder of Kent College of Law.

*Avon N. Williams Jr.* (*courtesy of Williams family*)

Looby’s partner in many of his precedent-setting legal events was his former intern, Avon Nyanza Williams Jr. (1921-1994). A native of Knoxville, Williams earned an L.L.B. (1947) and an L.L.M. (1948) from Boston University. After interning with Looby in Nashville, he set up a law practice in Knoxville, often working closely with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Williams filed Tennessee’s first school desegregation case (Anderson County, 1950), and his lawsuit to admit African American students to the UT graduate school (1951) was one of seven discrimination cases he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1953 he moved to Nashville, partnered with Looby, and took an active (and mostly unpaid) role in civil rights cases ranging from lunch counter and school desegregation to housing discrimination. A founder of the Davidson County Independent Political Council and the Tennessee Voters Council, he was one of Tennessee’s first two African American state senators, serving from 1969-1990. His lawsuit to merge UT Nashville with TSU led to a landmark legal decision and the renaming of the downtown campus after him.

*The attorneys in court: front row from left, Adolpho Birch, Robert Lillard, Coyness Ennix, and Avon Williams (Nashville Banner Archives, Special Collections, Nashville Public Library)*

Alabama teenager Coyness Loyal Ennix Sr. (1901-1984) came to Nashville to attend Roger Williams University. Later, having graduated from Howard University Law School (1931), he returned to Nashville, where he and Z. Alexander Looby founded Kent College of Law to train other African American attorneys. Known for his flamboyant style of dress, Ennix was well known as a civic and political leader in Nashville’s black community. In the late 1940s he founded The Solid Block, a political organization which helped abolish Tennessee’s poll tax and supported African American candidates. Ennix himself ran for City Council (1951) but lost to Looby and Robert Lillard, Nashville’s first black councilmen in 40 years. Ennix was the first African American to serve on the Nashville Housing Authority and the Nashville Auditorium Commission. He was also the first black member of the Board of Education, serving during the arduous school desegregation process. One of thirteen volunteer defense attorneys for students arrested during the February 1960 Nashville Sit-ins, he was an active member of First Baptist Church, Capitol Hill, site of many Civil Rights training sessions.

*Robert E. Lillard (photo courtesy of African American Registry)*

Commercial college graduate Robert E. Lillard (1907-1991) worked as a garage attendant in order to take night classes at Kent College of Law, while also organizing the 15^th Ward Colored Voters and Civic Club. After being admitted to the bar (1936), he opened a law practice and drove a fire truck for Engine Company No. 11. In 1951, ignoring bribes and threats, he ran for city council, joining Alexander Looby as the first black council members since Solomon Harris (1911). During his 20 years of service, Lillard never missed a regular council meeting. He assisted in desegregating the Parthenon and helped make Cameron High School the city’s second African American secondary school, and he joined other black lawyers volunteering their legal services during the 1960 sit-ins. The first African American vice mayor pro tem (1967), he was admitted to plead in the U.S. Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit Court, and U.S. Supreme Court, and he served as judge of the First Circuit Court, Tenth Judicial District.

Adolpho A. Birch (1932-2011), the son of an Episcopal priest, grew up in Washington, D.C., and earned both his B.A. and J.D. from Howard University. During his term of service in the U.S. Navy, he studied for and passed the bar exam (1957), a year before his honorable discharge. After moving to Nashville (1958), he opened a private law practice with Robert Lillard, also teaching law courses at Meharry Medical College, Fisk University, and Tennessee A&I (now Tennessee State University). He was part of the volunteer legal team who defended student protestors during the Nashville Sit-ins. He was named assistant public (1963); assistant district attorney (1966 – the first black prosecutor in Davidson County); General Sessions Court judge (1969); Criminal Court judge (1978); and first black presiding judge over the Trial Courts of Davidson County (1981, the same year he became an instructor at the Nashville School of Law). The only person, black or white, to serve in every level of the Tennessee judiciary system, he was appointed to the Court of the Judiciary (1983) and the Tennessee Court of Appeals (1987). In 1990 he became only the second African American to sit on the Tennessee Supreme Court. Four years later his fellow justices selected him as Chief Justice (October 1994-May 1996), making him the first African American to hold that position. After being confirmed for another eight-year term, he again served as Chief Justice (July 1997-August 1998 and September 1999-August 2001). He retired at the end of his second term (September 2006). He received many awards during his years of service, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, who called him a “beacon for equality.” He died of cancer on August 25, 2011. The Davidson County Criminal Courts now meet in the A. A. Birch Criminal Justice Building, dedicated in his honor in 2006.

*Robert Churchwell Jr.* (*photo courtesy of Afro-American Historical & Genealogical Society*)

It was not only attorneys who assisted the protestors in the Nashville civil rights movement. Newsman Robert Churchwell Sr. (1917-2009) graduated from Pearl High School (1940) before being drafted (1942) and assigned to a WWII engineering unit. Suffering terribly from misdiagnosed PTSD, he graduated from Fisk in three years by attending both Fisk and Tennessee A&I. His earliest publishing attempts were unsuccessful, but they eventually brought his talents to the attention of the Nashville Banner editor, a racial separatist who disdained African Americans but realized he needed to sell papers in the black community for economic reasons. When Churchwell reluctantly took the job writing “Negro news,” he became one of the first black journalists on any white Southern municipal newspaper. He had to carry his stories into the news office from home – he worked there for five years before he had a desk in the newsroom. He authored articles about Nashville school desegregation, interviewing both black and white educators, and he covered the 1960 sit-ins, but the Banner refused to publish stories about the protests. After Churchwell’s 1981 retirement, his pioneering efforts finally won appropriate recognition, including the establishment of Nashville’s Robert Churchwell Museum Magnet Elementary School (2010).

Some of this material has been adapted from the Greenwood Project.

Daniel Smith, Frontier Surveyor (1748-1818)

by Kathy B. Lauder.

Daniel Smith was born October 29, 1748, in Stafford County, Virginia. Having made up his mind to become a doctor, he studied medicine with Dr. Thomas Walker at Castle Hill, in Albemarle County, Virginia. However, he soon made an abrupt career shift and, at the age of 22, was licensed as a surveyor by the College of William and Mary (founded in 1693).

Three years after he began working as a surveyor, he married Sarah Michie and took a position as Deputy Surveyor and later sheriff of Augusta County, Virginia, where their son George was born in 1776. Smith first came to Middle Tennessee during the winter of 1779-1780, after he was hired to survey the western region of the Virginia frontier, and particularly to chart the border between Virginia and North Carolina. During the American Revolutionary War, he was commissioned a colonel in the militia, took part in a number of battles, and was appointed Assistant Deputy Surveyor for the Southern Department of the Continental Army in 1781. Strongly attracted to Middle Tennessee, in 1784 he claimed a land grant awarded for his military service and moved his family, which now included daughter Mary Ann “Polly,” to a 3,140-acre tract in Sumner County, where he served as the county surveyor.

*Rock Castle State Historic Site, home of Daniel Smith, *in Sumner County, Tennessee, was completed* in 1796*

After reaching adulthood, both of Daniel Smith’s children wed members of the Donelson family. George married Tabitha, the daughter of Capt. John Donelson III; Polly and Rachel Jackson’s brother Samuel Donelson eloped, with the assistance of Rachel and her husband, a circumstance that caused hard feelings between Daniel Smith and Andrew Jackson for many years*.

*Mary “Polly” Smith Donelson (Tennessee Portrait Project)*

In 1783 Daniel Smith was appointed both county surveyor and justice of the peace for Davidson County (still part of North Carolina at that time), and helped to survey the state military land-grant reservation in the Cumberland valley. One of the five trustees responsible for overseeing the establishment of the City of Nashville, he was also a charter trustee of Davidson Academy, the first institution of higher learning in Nashville. This school, founded in 1785, would over the years be transformed into Cumberland College (1806), the University of Nashville (1826), the Peabody Normal College at Nashville (1875), and finally the George Peabody College for Teachers, now part of Vanderbilt University.

When Sumner County was created in 1786, Daniel Smith, as justice of the peace, presided over the first session of the Sumner County Court. Two years later he was named Commanding General of the Mero District (Sumner, Davidson, and Tennessee counties), and in 1789 he was a member of the North Carolina convention that voted to ratify the United States Constitution. In 1790 Smith was appointed by President George Washington to become secretary of the Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio, with authority to act for the territorial governor in his absence. The first map of the region, created in large part from Smith’s own surveys, was published during his term as secretary.

*1795 Tennessee map based largely on Daniel Smith’s surveys (courtesy Alabama Department of Archives and History)*

Daniel Smith held the post of territorial secretary until 1796, when the territory became the State of Tennessee. Smith was a member of the 1796 Convention and chaired the committee that wrote the young state’s first Constitution and Bill of Rights.

During the first decade of the 19^th century, Smith played a key role in negotiating a series of treaties with the Cherokee. He was appointed to serve several months of Andrew Jackson’s unexpired term in the U.S. Senate (after Jackson resigned to serve on the Tennessee Supreme Court), and in 1804 was elected to his own full term in the Senate. Unfortunately, he was forced to resign from the Senate in 1809 because of ill health. He and Sarah remained at home for several more years, overseeing various farm and business interests from their Sumner County plantation house, Rock Castle, which still stands on Drake’s Creek in Hendersonville. He died there on June 16, 1818, at age 69. Both Daniel and Sarah, who died thirteen years after her husband, are buried in the family cemetery at Rock Castle. Smith County, created while Daniel was still very much alive, was named to honor his service in the Revolutionary War and his many other contributions to the development of the state of Tennessee.

*Smith family cemetery at Rock Castle (Daniel and Sarah’s grave markers are the table-like platforms at upper right behind the obelisk*)

* Note: This was not the only time Andrew and Rachel Jackson helped a young couple elope! See also https://nashvillehistoricalnewsletter.com/2021/11/20/til-death-do-us-part-love-and-devotion-at-city-cemetery/

The Powder Magazine Explosion (1847)

by Allen Forkum.

During October 1847 Nashvillians were alarmed by newspaper reports of numerous fires in the city, some caused by accident, some by “incendiaries” (i.e., arsonists). But on the evening of October 12, 1847, something much worse happened when a strong thunderstorm passed over the city.

A newspaper editor wrote of hearing a thunderclap, then a “terrific report—a lifting up sensation, as if something had exploded in the interior of the earth, with the effects of an earthquake.” He was in an office on the Public Square about one-half mile from the source of the explosion: a brick building storing gunpowder just west of Capitol Hill. The “powder magazine,” which reportedly contained over 500 kegs of gunpowder, had been struck by lightning. The building was completely blown from the site, sending brick missiles throughout the city.

The shock wave and debris broke almost every pane of glass in the city, some two miles away. More than fifty nearby houses were destroyed or rendered unfit for occupation, particularly on the streets Gay, Spruce (today’s Rosa L. Park Avenue) and High (today’s 6th Avenue North). Three people were killed instantly and at least one other person died later; many more were wounded. One newspaper account described a 100-pound rock going through the roof and into the cellar of the Nashville Inn on the Public Square.

Within a week of the explosion, city officials took measures to relocate another powder magazine away from the city, and the owners stationed a guard by it “day and night” until it could be moved. An attempt was made in the Tennessee House of Representatives to pass a resolution giving the city $1,000 from the State Treasury “for distribution among the sufferers.” The resolution did not make it to the Senate.

Lawsuits for damages were filed against the owners of the powder manufacturing company, Sycamore Powder Mill. One case went all the way to the Tennessee State Supreme Court, which found that “powder houses” placed in populated areas constitute a “nuisance.” During the Civil War, the memory of the 1847 explosion prompted the Nashville Dispatch to call for the removal of powder and ammunition stored downtown, a recommendation with which Federal authorities complied.

Sources:

Nashville Whig, October 7, 1847, “DISTRESSING AFFAIR,” regarding an explosion at a house on Market Street where fireworks were being manufactured.

Nashville Whig, October 9, 1847, “FIRES,” regarding “several fires during the present week.”

Nashville Whig, October 12, 1847, “MORE FIRES.”

Nashville Daily Union, October 13, 1847, “TERRIBLE CATASTROPHE.”

Republican Banner, October 13, 1847, “Explosion of a Powder Magazine by Lightning,” which also includes a reprint of a detailed article from the Orthopolitan titled “DREADFUL ACCIDENT” containing a house-to-house description of damage.

Nashville Whig, October 14, 1847, “FRIGHTFUL CALAMITY, A POWDER MAGAZINE EXPLODED!!!”

Nashville Daily Union, October 14, 1847, “FURTHER PARTICULARS OF THE DISTRESSING CALAMITY,” regarding the 100-pound rock and other stories.

Republican Banner, October 18, 1847, “The Powder Magazine Below the City.”

Republican Banner, November 19, 1847, “Corporation of Nashville.” Attributes three deaths to the “Explosion of a Powder Magazine.”

Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Tennessee, at the Twenty-Seventh General Assembly, Held at Nashville, 1847-8. Pages 79 and 80, Resolution No. 26.

Republican Banner, May 22, 1851, “Suit for Damages.”

Reports of the Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Tennessee, During the Years 1851–2, Volume 1 (1853), pages 213–217, Cheatham et als. vs. Shearon, Trustee, &c.

Nashville Dispatch, June 4, 1863, “Whether justly entertained or not, there is no little uneasiness among the citizens of Nashville in regard to the large quantity of powder and ammunition of various kinds believed to be stored in the city for the military authorities.”

Nashville Dispatch, December 18, 1863, “Removal of Powder.”

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).

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)