Caitlan Fleurette Dillingham
Caitlan Fleurette Dillingham may not have planned on becoming a digital curator of Nashville history, but she’s always been an archivist at heart.
Dillingham is the creator of Nashville History X (@nashvillehistoryx), an Instagram account with a focus on photos and history from the greater Nashville area. One day about three years ago while walking her dog, she noticed an interesting-looking old house. Outside of Zillow, she couldn’t find any information about the people who lived there or its history. After some digging, she found that the house was built in 1925; the state lists the parcel as historical, but there’s no plaque there. That moment set her on a journey to start an account just for her, where she would research houses like this and share as much history as she could find.
“Every single day, I’m thinking about history and what was here before me,” the Nashville native tells the Scene. “So I started pulling it. I wanted to make it accessible, because it’s not accessible. History is not accessible.”
What started as a creative outlet for Dillingham in 2021 soon caught on. The account has 21,000 followers and an active audience. She receives direct messages every day from people asking her to help them find old photos of their home, or information on previous owners.
“The history is going to hold you in and start a conversation and a dialogue,” Dillingham says. “And that’s where we get improvement, change, hope.”
Dillingham may not be a ninth-generation Nashvillian, but she has roots. Her parents met at The Gold Rush in the ’70s, and her great-grandfather died, along with at least 100 people, in Nashville’s Great Train Wreck of 1918, also known as the Dutchman’s Curve train wreck.
By making history accessible, Dillingham hopes her posts inspire people to go to places like the Tennessee State Museum and take more of an interest in local history.
“I want you to be able to be on your phone and on a bus and just be like, ‘Wow, this is history I didn’t know about. Now I’m going to be able to share this with A, B and C.’ It’s a new generation. Everything’s mobile.”
Dillingham lists Nashville’s Public Square as a site she wishes she’d been alive to see in its heyday, when it bustled as a market full of grocers and wholesale vendors. But as Dillingham says, the space also has a dark past — it was the site of at least one racist lynching in the 19th century. But that history is hard to see now. “Now it’s just a central traffic-jam area,” she says.
Sharing what she learns and knows about Black history is a core value for Dillingham. “When it comes to Black history, I’ll put almost anything out there,” she says. “I’m going to put it in your face, and I hope that you take a step back and read it.” Dillingham uses #nashvilleblackhistory on these posts so they are searchable and easy to find.
Everyone has a story, and with Nashville History X, Dillingham says she wants to help people tell theirs. “Everyone is so important, and everything is so important,” she says. “It’s important for me to share.”
Photographed by Eric England at Union Station
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