Architecture of Middle Tennessee

Preface to the New Edition

Preface
Acknowledgments

Government and Public Buildings
Tennessee State Capitol (Nashville), 1845-1859
Tennessee State Penitentiary (Nashville), 1895-1897
Federal Building (Old Clarksville Post Office), 1897-1898

Commercial Structures
Poston Buildings (Clarksville), ca. 1843
S. D. Morgan and Company (Nashville), 1856
The Grange Warehouse (Clarksville), 1858 or 1859
Second Avenue, North, Commercial District (Nashville), 1896-1920(?)
Werthan Bag Corporation (Nashville), 1871-188os 
Bear Spring Furnace (Dover), 1873
Ryman Auditorium (Nashville), 1888-1892
Union Station (Nashville), 1898-1900
Public Arcade (Nashville), 1902

Churches
St. Mary's Cathedral, Roman Catholic (Nashville), 1844-1847
First Presbyterian Church (Nashville), 1849-1851
Zion Presbyterian Church (Columbia), 1849
Holy Trinity Episcopal Church (Nashville), 1852-1887

Schools, Institutions
University of Nashville-Children's Museum (Nashville), 1853
Jubilee Hall, Fisk University (Nashville), 1876
Vanderbilt University Gymnasium (Nashville), 1880
West Side Row, Vanderbilt University (Nashville), 1886-1887

Residences
Rock Castle (Hendersonville), 1784-1797(?)
Hays-Kiser House (Antioch), ca. 1796
Travellers' Rest {Nashville), 1799-1885
Cragfont (Gallatin), 1802
Oaklands (Murfreesboro), 1815, 1825, 1859-1860
The Hermitage {Nashville), 1819
Wessyngton (Robertson County), 1819
Castalian Springs-Wynnewood (Gallatin), 1828
Carter House (Franklin), 1830
Fairvue {Gallatin), 1832
Rattle and Snap (Columbia), 1845
Adolphus Heiman House {Nashville), 1845-1850(?)
Belmont (Nashville), 1850
Worker's House (Nashville), ca. 1850
Two Rivers {Nashville), 1859

Epilogue

Foreword to the Paperback Edition

When Vanderbilt University Press first approached me about writing a new foreword to a reissued book on local historic preservation from 1974, I was delighted and almost incredulous to hear that most of the buildings included were still standing. Nashville's unprecedented growth is a dream for some and a nightmare for others, but no one can deny that one of the most visible manifestations of this reality has been the decimation of our historic landscape. Was this book a talisman? Did inclusion provide structures with some sort of protection against the city's indifferent cannibalization of the places that form its character and sustain its people? I was enthusiastic, but a bit wary.

Then I received the publication: a selection of "thirty-five interesting and important structures representative of Middle Tennessee's rich architectural heritage" drawn from the Historic American Buildings Survey work done in the state in the early 1970s. Complete with descriptions, photos, and architectural drawings, the book was edited primarily by Thomas B. Brumbaugh, then a professor of fine arts at Vanderbilt. Iconic structures like the Ryman Auditorium and Union Station were included alongside lesser-known gems like Holy Trinity Episcopal Church (now Church of the Holy Trinity) and, further afield, the Poston Buildings in Clarksville and Bear Spring Furnace in Dover. Working with a limited palette of pre-1920 structures (adhering to preservation's apocryphal "fifty-year rule") and a marked preference for classical and monumental forms, Brumbaugh assembled a respectable grouping of governmental, commercial, religious, institutional, and residential buildings that neatly embodies the preservation and public history standards of its time.

The book itself, then, is an artifact, a snapshot of the preservation ideals of the country on the cusp of the Bicentennial and its subsequent history and nostalgia boom. It is also a time capsule of our region (but primarily Nashville) at the transitional moment when it was redefining its role in the New Sunbelt South and its relationship to the past. Brumbaugh presciently warns the city of emulating too closely "dead Athens, that most cruelly vandalized of ancient cities," and points us instead toward the model of Amsterdam, a bustling modern city that nonetheless preserves and cherishes its past.
If this work is so much a product of its time, why reissue it? Why share these half-century-old descriptions and views of structures, many of which one can visit today, which even Brumbaugh admits are not fully representative of the region's architectural heritage? What is this book's purpose in Nashville in 2020 and beyond?

Architecture of Middle Tennessee is a microhistory of the preservation field itself, with all its shifting biases, prejudices, and assumptions. It is a lens through which to view the evolution of preservation ideals and practices in our region, and a roadmap for measuring how far we've traveled. It's a behind-the-scenes look at history production and the way societies construct a past that suits them through the built landscape. It's a potent manifestation of the dangers of survival bias. It's both a warning and a catalyst for hope.

Although Brumbaugh himself was not a trained historian or preservationist, his instincts and preferences were aligned with the field in certain respects. This is traditional history interpretation of the twentieth century: instructive in its narrow focus, privileging the elite and distant past, and prizing typology over narrative. By only discussing structures older than fifty years, it conveniently sidesteps any sites of controversial recent history, be it the Civil Rights Movement or women's suffrage. It's a safe book that wouldn't have ruffled any feathers or challenged anyone's acceptance of "great white men" history.

And yet we can see moments that almost feel like small rebellions from the time's staid notions of what counted as properly historic and noteworthy. By including workaday structures like Clarksville's Grange tobacco warehouse (the largest in the world until World War I, but still, a standard antebellum brick warehouse) and, seemingly begrudgingly, the downtown Public Arcade ("never innovative in any way and appeared late in the development of such buildings") alongside the Tennessee State Capitol and Jubilee Hall, the editor makes a tacit and perhaps unconscious statement that buildings can be significant even without particularly ostentatious architecture.
The entries are heavy on quantitative data, sometimes to the point of exhaustive cataloging: years, measurements, expenses, and architectural classifications and terminology share the page with detailed drawings of elaborate Corinthian capitals and several carefully rendered elevations, but substantial narrative is hard to come by. Beyond a few anecdotes about the circumstances of construction or the source of the owners' wealth, it's often hard to get a sense of humanity or life from the descriptions. Today, this kind of preservation documentation feels curiously sterile and superficial, as if it were taken from a laundry list of features that were necessary to be deemed "historic." Historians today seek context and personal perspectives of the past; this work reminds us that this was not always the case.

When I first opened this charmed book of buildings that had miraculously weathered our city's redevelopment boom, I was unsurprised to see that roughly one-third were plantations. Large, impressive structures belonging to elites that appeal to many as relics of a romanticized past tend to escape the wrecking ball, even in Nashville. Until fairly recently, preservation, just like traditional academic historical inquiry, was overwhelmingly concerned with privileged white narratives and the spaces in which they played out. Although the new social history began to change the scene in the 1960s, it nevertheless has taken decades to challenge the view that famous, ornate, and upper-class spaces are the only ones worthy of being cared for, interpreted, and saved for posterity.

To his credit, Brumbaugh acknowledges enslaved labor and even enslaved builders at several points, but nonetheless discusses historic buildings as "monuments of self-reliant men" in an instance of cognitive dissonance and erasure that is impossible to ignore. He describes slave houses as outbuildings, not residences, placing them in the same category as smokehouses and barns. I was surprised that they were noted at all, and I do wonder how many are still standing currently. Today, preservationists like Joseph McGill of The Slave Dwelling Project are desperately trying to save these essential buildings and stories by reversing the historic tide that declared them and their inhabitants as inconsequential and disposable. This work reminds us of just how recently we have seen the light: anyone who has visited one of the dozens of plantation museums in our state will likely recall interpretations that focused on the house's white owners and visitors, architecture, and decorative arts but neglected to discuss the enslaved people who built, managed, and sustained every square foot of the property and whose forced labor enabled the luxurious surroundings admired by past guests and contemporary tourists.

The amount of attention and description warranted by each property in the book varies wildly, likely for several reasons, but chief among them is that Brumbaugh and the editors were selecting buildings to highlight for their fine art and architectural appeal. This is directly in line with preservation thinking of the time: what mattered was a beautiful building, and not necessarily one that held unique cultural significance without classical grandeur. Even today, preservationists often struggle to make the case that modest structures utilized by the working classes or enslaved people can hold enormous significance and thus deserve stewardship and attention.

The entry for the Hermitage, President Andrew Jackson's plantation, spans eight pages, with descriptions of every possible architectural element, footnotes, and a half dozen bibliographic resources. The entry for "Worker's House," in comparison, is almost comically short: three paragraphs, no footnotes, no bibliography. This abbreviated narrative is meant to be a generic description of a type, not even of a particular worker's house (although one is pictured: 1724 North Jefferson Street, boarded up but, incredibly, holding its own at the time of this writing). Brumbaugh describes its predicament ("the modest small structure so difficult to preserve, the first to disappear with the onrush of time") but does not expound on why this is so. Surely it is easier in terms of finances and labor to preserve a modest three-room house than it is to maintain an enormous plantation, and yet historically, we've almost always chosen the latter. The appeal of antebellum Italian villa-style cottages and the stories they could tell us about Nashville's nineteenth-century immigration and industry and the changing landscape of the vital yet overlooked North Nashville community is simply no match for our penchant for opulent and unbalanced history.

Architecture of Middle Tennessee also functions as a cautionary tale for readers, many of whom will be alarmed and incredulous to learn that buildings like the Ryman Auditorium were ever in danger of being razed. But it's true: when a new state-of-the-art home for the Grand Ole Opry was being constructed, many felt the old-fashioned Ryman had become obsolete. Today, of course, it's the most iconic structure in the state and a world famous performance venue, but in 1974, Music City's crown jewel was seen as a relic that should make way for progress.

There is tremendous value in telling a story that challenges the apparent permanence of our landmarks and the wisdom of our ancestors. Are we so sure that the historic structures we demolish every day are not rich in historical merit and integral to our city's identity? Today we've built a multi-billion-dollar tourism empire on our musical legacy, but in the 1970s we were almost the town that tore down the Ryman. And we don't appear to have learned from it: in just the past few years, we've almost taken down Studio A. We continue to decimate Music Row, declared a National Treasure in 2015. And we almost built condos on a UNESCO Site of Memory in Fort Negley Park. This work makes a strong case for re-examining our hubris.

Brumbaugh's book is a powerful reminder that preservation is never guaranteed, even for structures that, in hindsight, have obvious significance and value. Following our ideas of "progress" and appropriate redevelopment in the 1970s almost led us to take down the Ryman and Union Station, both foundational to our city's growth and essential components of a thriving downtown today. And if even sites with well-documented importance like Music Row are endangered, who can say what we are losing with the sites we don't bother to fully investigate before knocking down? Preservation does not happen by accident; it takes vocal advocates to fight for these stories and their value to communities. Reading the entry on the Werthan Bag Corporation with its "bricked-up windows, cyclone fence, and the innumerable accretions of a century," it's difficult to grasp the structure's importance to the city's industrial and Jewish history, and even harder to envision its future as the renovated and desirable Werthan Lofts residences. The entire complex could have been razed in the 1970s and probably few would have complained, but Nashville would have lost an incredible structure with an important story that now anchors a rejuvenated Germantown.

In discussing the once-dubious futures and eleventh hour redemptions of some of the city's most iconic structures, this work offers some hope for those concerned about preservation in our rapidly changing and expanding region. If we can pull the Ryman back from the brink of demolition, maybe we can do the same for other buildings. We can come up with a plan for the Tennessee State Penitentiary before it reaches a critical tipping point. We can work to recognize unique regional sites before they are engulfed by Nashville's growing and homogenizing footprint. We can save what's left of Music Row, Jefferson Street, and Elliston Place's Rock Block. We can make the Civil Rights history held in schools, churches, streets, and homes a priority to save and share before it becomes just a trail of historical markers in parking lots. All of these histories converged to shape our region, and all are worthy of living on. But we must move quickly to recognize our most endangered assets, those unassuming buildings of the recent past, "the first to disappear with the onrush of time," in Brumbaugh's own words.

Nationally, there are several examples of populist history triumphing through grassroots preservation that we should look to. Consider the watershed created in 1988 by the Tenement Museum opening on New York's Lower East Side. Now, 97 Orchard Street interprets the generations of immigrants that shaped the city and the nation in a dilapidated building that had been condemned for fifty years. To most people it was an eyesore, not a source of valuable and vulnerable history with the potential to educate and inspire. Restoring the Orchard Street tenement and telling its inhabitants' stories revolutionized the idea of American house museums and was instrumental in proving that ordinary people have just as much a place in history as presidents and plantation owners.

As a resident of North Nashville and an advocate for recognizing and appreciating all of the city's history, I often wonder if we've already lost our chance. Every time I see artist Peggy Snow painting a memento mori of a doomed building, working through rain and cold and dark because there is so little time left, I wonder. What irreplaceable opportunities to tell inclusive stories have we rejected because we didn't recognize their meaning? Were they cleared out by urban renewal, leveled for an interstate, or dug up for mixed-use redevelopment? We have erased so many histories through neglect or demolition because we thought the people who lived them weren't important enough and their buildings weren't beautiful enough to matter. I hope our opportunities are still out there, and I hope we are wise enough to see their worth while we still have time to protect them.

Historical erasure through the failure to preserve material culture has enormous social, economic, and ethical consequences. Modern preservation is not just about the buildings, picturesque as they might be. Structures are vessels for historic voices and experiences, tangible reminders of those who composed a culture even when their documents and descendants are gone (or never existed).

This reissued work prompts us to consider what's not there and why, both in the book itself and in the larger preservation landscape. I also find myself wanting to supplement the descriptions, both with deeper historical research and contemporary updates. How many of these sites are currently threatened? How many are now museums? How many were damaged by floods or tornadoes and rebuilt? How does what we choose to save reflect our values and prejudices, and how can we recoup our losses when those views inevitably change?

I hope readers will be prompted to think more critically about the cultural heritage of our region, both within and beyond this book, and will be inspired to consider their own role in saving Middle Tennessee's incomparable stories as told through architecture.

Aja Bain
December 2019
Nashville, Tennessee