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CONVENTION PREVIEW
Nashville: More Than Music
Get to know the town where you’ll enjoy the 2021 convention.
by Dianne White
Some of the earliest inhabitants of the region were Native Americans who lived there between 1000 to 1500 A.D. Called the Mississippians, they hunted, farmed, and built huge earthen mounds before being replaced by the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Shawnee tribes.
French-Canadian explorers established a trading post in the late 1600s on the Cumberland River near the present- day downtown Nashville, which came to be known as French Lick. Settlers traded fur with Native Americans but eventually abandoned the settlement.
In the late 1700s, explorers built a settlement was
built on the former site of French Lick and called it Fort Nashborough in honor of Brigadier General Francis Nash, an American Revolutionary hero who died at the Battle of Germantown in Pennsylvania. The settlement, river port, and railroad center later shortened its name to Nashville and incorporated it as a city in 1806.
Before the Civil War, it was home to numerous plantations and was home to thoroughbred training farms. During the war, it became the first Confederate state capital
to fall to Union troops and remained under their control for the remainder of the war. The Battle of Nashville in late 1864 was a major Union victory and sealed the fate of the Confederacy.
Nashville gained its reputation as a music capital with the establishment of Ryman Auditorium, which held its first concert in 1892. John Phillip Sousa played his first performance there in 1894. Another music institution, the Grand Ole Opry, began in a radio studio in downtown Nashville. By 1943, it became so popular that it moved to the Ryman Auditorium and Nashville became imprinted as Music City worldwide.
24 MMOPA MAGAZINE JULY / AUGUST 2021