Joadair Hamilton grew up in Old Hickory Village, attended the neighborhood’s DuPont High School, and then went off to Vanderbilt. She didn’t return to the community, except to visit, for almost 30 years. “When I first came home in 1988,” Hamilton recalls, “I’d go out with my mother, and I’d say, ‘Mama, there’s so-and-so.’ And Mama would say, ‘No, he’s dead. That’s his son.’ I recognized all the faces, but I’d sort of skipped a generation.”
Recognizing all the faces is a tradition in Old Hickory, an unincorporated town of 1,400 families that lies 12 miles northeast of downtown Nashville, snugly embraced by an arm of the Cumberland River. Everybody knows everybody else because for most of its 80 years Old Hickory was a company town with a DuPont label.
The village got its start as living quarters for workers at the powder plant that E.I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co. built and operated for the federal government, on government-owned land, when the United States entered World War I. In those days, the town was called Jacksonville, because Andrew Jackson had once lived nearby. After Jacksonville, Tenn., began getting mail intended for Jacksonville, Fla., the town was rechristened with the cantankerous president’s nickname instead.
After the Armistice, Old Hickory’s population shrank from 35,000 to 500, and the War Department put its 5,600 acres up for sale. In 1920, amid charges of bribery and conspiracy that were finally settled out of court, the Nashville Industrial Corporation, a group of local businessmen and out-of-town investors, purchased the entire property. Their dream was to create an industrial park in the bend of the Cumberland.
In 1923, DuPont put its own money into the project, purchasing 500 acres that included the workers’ housing units as well as land for a factory that would manufacture “fibersilk” (soon to be known as rayon). For almost three decades, the town of Old Hickory was owned and operated by DuPont. “Everybody who lived here worked at DuPont, except for physicians and ministers,” Hamilton says. “Those were the rules.”
The historians
Ask a question about Old Hickory history, and village residents tell you to talk to three people: Eleanor Long, Paul Hall, and James “Shorty” Gordon.
Eleanor Long was gossip reporter for the Old Hickory News from the 1950s into the ’70s. That’s how she gained her encyclopedic memory of the names and faces in the village. Today she laughs about the in-depth coverage her column, “Heard on the Party Line,” gave to the most minute of social events. “I was paid 10 cents for each column inch,” Long says, “so of course I made that wedding go on forever.”
Paul Hall became a DuPont employee in 1963 at age 19, but he has lived in Old Hickory since he was 3. Today Hall teaches safety procedures at one of DuPont’s Old Hickory plants and serves as the plant’s unofficial archivist. On metal shelves in the maintenance shop, he has arranged row after row of bound copies of Rayon Yarns and the Cellophane Observer, two newsletters published by and about the workers at the DuPont plants of yesteryear. File drawers are stacked with photographs of the DuPont basketball team that played the New York Celtics in the 1920s, of the company picnics and Christmas parties enjoyed by workers now long retired.
Old Hickory lies in Hadley’s Bend, the curve of the Cumberland River named after Dr. John Livingston Hadley, once the largest landowner in the area. His manor house was demolished in 1924 to make way for the DuPont Rayon plant. But Paul Hall can also show you the burial ground for earlier residents than the Hadleys. Under now fractured 18th-century limestone markers, 10 people are buried in the Gleaves cemetery, near the site of the old powder plant.
The Gleaves were the first permanent settlers of Hadley’s Bend. Patriarch Michael Gleaves stayed at Mansker’s Station at night, fearing Indian attack. During the day, he traveled by boat to the “bend,” to clear and plant the 640 acres of land North Carolina had granted him for his service during the Revolutionary War. “The original road through Hadley’s Bend was beside the cemetery,” Hall writes in Old Hickory: Reflections From the Past. If you could go back in time and stand by the side of that road, “you would see the Trail of Tears and Andrew Jackson on his way to Kentucky to fight the duel with Dickerson.”
“Shorty” Gordon is Old Hickory’s senior barber. During World War II, he gave haircuts to sailors on a variety of islands in the South Pacific. When he was discharged from the Navy in January 1948, his wife was working at Old Hickory’s DuPont plant. Shortly after his arrival in town, Gordon was taking a little R&R at the rec hall in the Old Hickory community center when someone told him there was an empty chair in Mr. Beaver’s barbershop. He’s been the village’s barber-in-residence ever since.
Gordon takes his Old Hickory history seriously. The walls of his Village Barber Shop are lined with photographs of the old days, when the broad porch of Maude Robinson’s grocery store stood at the center of town and everybody passed through the classical columns of the Old Hickory Theater to see the latest from Hollywood. In his shop, Gordon keeps a scrapbook of yellow newspaper clippings of the Old Hickory heads he has trimmed—clean-cut DuPont High School football players, divers flexing their muscles at the DuPont swimming pool. “He’s 93 and he’s 95 now,” Gordon says, pointing to the sleek heads of two businessmen sporting the wide lapels of the 1940s, “and I’m still cutting their hair.”
Built by the book
The feel of Old Hickory may be Mayberry, but the look of the tiny town is definitely Yankee. The architecture is reminiscent of neighborhoods in Pawtucket, R.I., and other northern mill towns. It also suggests working-class districts in Boston and Queens—small lots with plain, sensible frame houses with an occasional Dutch gambrel roof or a Colonial Revival detail thrown in for distinction.
The home styles came out of a pattern book DuPont used to construct housing for manufacturing plants in other locations, says Paul Hall. “I’ve been to DuPont’s earlier Hopewell plant in Virginia, and the layout and style of the housing and the plant there are just like Old Hickory,” he explains.
In the early 1920s, the Nashville Industrial Corporation published the pattern book as marketing for its industrial park. DuPont was the only buyer. Today the villagers identify the houses in Old Hickory not by address, but by the names in the pattern book—“The Davis,” “The Baytree,” “The Haskell,” and “The Ketchum.”
In building housing for its powder-plant workers, DuPont followed not only architectural patterns, but patterns of social hierarchy as well. The town’s main dividing line was Hadley Avenue. Temporary housing—dormitories and “tar babies” covered with a black asphalt compound—was constructed west of Hadley. The “colored village” and the “Mexican village” were situated in this area.
East of Hadley Avenue, DuPont built the “Permanent Village”—single-family houses, each built according to one of 10 different floor plans and arranged in a definite caste system. Top-level managers lived in large, vaguely neo-Colonial three-story homes built at the eastern edge of the village on Riverside Drive, overlooking the stretch of the Cumberland that was dammed in 1954 to create Old Hickory Lake. “The Davis,” the only home on the river side of the street, was reserved for the plant manager. Middle managers lived in smaller two-story homes that were stacked down the slope on rectangular blocks divided by alleys. Laborers could rent one-story cottages and bungalows.
When DuPont purchased Old Hickory Village in 1923, the “tar babies” and dormitories had deteriorated so badly that many had to be demolished. The company renovated the permanent housing and paved the rutted dirt roads and the wooden sidewalks. New single-family cottages and duplexes appeared in the area east of Hadley. Staggered lots were left vacant as firebreaks; DuPont filled them with lawns and circular flower beds.
There were two distinct business districts in the village during the early 1920s. One was on Hadley Avenue south of the 1918 fire hall. A larger business district was concentrated at the triangle at the intersection of Hadley and Donelson Avenue, where a gazebo stands today. The Works Progress Administration constructed a Colonial Revival post office near the triangle in 1934. The same district also featured a branch of First American Bank, the Old Hickory Theater, and the community center. A shopping center replaced many of the individual stores in 1948.
When DuPont decided to sell the village in the late 1940s, the company issued a price list of the houses available to its employees. “The Davis” topped the chart at $13,500. Other homes on Riverside were in the $9,000-to-$11,000 range. Middle management and worker housing went even more cheaply—from $3,450 to $8,400. Of course, housing prices in Old Hickory are higher today, but they remain reasonable by Nashville standards. The houses and even many outbuildings still stand in their original form.
The Dynasty
Old Hickory Village lies in Hadley’s Bend, but in political terms it might as well have been called “Robinson’s Bend.” The Robinson family was a band of shrewd operators from the get-go. According to James Squires in The Secrets of the Hopewell Box, Warwick Gale Robinson arrived in the “bend” in 1886, floating down the Cumberland on a bed of logs. Through marriage into the Hadley family, he acquired some land. “Through sheer force of personality he became known as ‘Boss,’ even to his children,” writes Squires.
When World War I broke out, agents for the government started looking for land on which to build a munitions plant. They approached Boss Robinson, who held out until the price climbed to $105 an acre, far above the market value. Robinson also reserved the right to supply some of the construction workers for the powder plant. One of the workers he supplied was his son Garner.
The Robinson family enterprises were numerous, but the anchor was a grocery store in the town center that also doubled as the post office and bus station. Boss’ favorite child was Maude Muriel, and he put her in charge of the family store. To keep Garner and his son-in-law, Duncan Phillips, profitably employed, Boss Robinson built a small two-story funeral home in nearby Rayon City and offered free ambulance service to build up a customer list.
Garner enjoyed driving the ambulance because it took him into people’s homes during their darkest hours, and because it encouraged close personal relationships with the police and firemen who often summoned ambulances. Garner Robinson became the sort of man whom people east of the Cumberland called when they had trouble. The family opened a second mortuary on Gallatin Road, and Garner bought a home in Madison so that he could commute between the two. The Phillips-Robinson funeral homes would become the hub of Davidson County’s political machine. And Sheriff Garner Robinson would become the head of a political dynasty that still exists today.
DuPontville to now
Today, the sprawl of Metro Nashville is intricately linked by arterials and interstates, but Old Hickory Village remains a well-kept secret. Many Nashvillians have heard of it, but far fewer have actually walked the sidewalks in the town’s tiny grid. It was the village’s peninsula-like isolation in a sharp bend of the Cumberland River that made DuPont want to stake a claim there in the first place.
“It was a question of company security,” says Paul Hall. “They wanted a place with controlled access.” When DuPont purchased the Old Hickory site in 1923, the eight-foot-wide “Swinging Bridge”—so called because of the structure’s propensity to sway with the traffic—was the only avenue across the Cumberland. “In the 1920s DuPont had a guard stationed at the bridge entrance,” Hall says. “If you didn’t have identification as a DuPont worker, or special permission from DuPont, the guard wouldn’t let you in.”
The “Swinging Bridge” was replaced by a more stable structure four miles downriver in 1928. But even without guardians at the gates, DuPont continued to exercise paternalistic control over the village. “DuPont was the daddy; Old Hickory was the child,” wrote Old Hickory native Freddie Holder in a 1983 article in a local newspaper.
DuPont owned every house in town, and only its workers could live in them. DuPont painted the houses every three years, sanded the floors, changed the light bulbs, replaced the fuses in the fuse box. DuPont provided all the urban services—streets and sidewalks, utilities, garbage collection, recreation, and police and fire protection. DuPont built and owned the community center and the Old Hickory Country Club. The company gave the land for the public library. The public schools were, and still are, called “DuPont.”
The company’s primacy was also reflected in the names of Rayon City and Dupontonia (now Lakewood), surrounding communities that emerged after DuPont purchased Old Hickory Village. Hopewell was named after a DuPont plant in Virginia; Brandywine took its name from the river where the company was founded in 1802.
As an indulgent parent, DuPont paid the bills for Old Hickory Village for 25 years. Then the company decided it was time for the town to grow up. In 1946 DuPont announced that it intended to sell off the village gradually because the cost of running it was too high. But the “pater” carefully eased its “child” into adulthood.
DuPont turned over the utilities to a village commission, set aside land, and found a developer for a new shopping center at the center of the town. The company expanded its village service department from 68 to more than 300 workers so that 900 village homes could be renovated before they were offered for sale to DuPont employees. Another 500 less desirable houses were sold for removal. “There was a period when hardly a day passed without some house passing by the plant,” DuPont supervisor D.M. Barnette recalled in a 1975 anniversary publication.
Today the company-town character of Old Hickory Village is gradually becoming the stuff of history. Many DuPont workers who bought their houses from their employer are dying off, and others are selling out because they’re no longer able to maintain a single-family home. New families with no connection to the chemical giant are moving in, attracted by the reasonable prices of the real estate and by the fact that their children can walk to school.
The small-town feel of Old Hickory makes walking the sidewalks of the village like stepping onto the set of Father Knows Best. Picket fences surround perennial gardens blooming in the front and backyards. Kids ride their bikes on the quiet, tree-lined streets. The Old Hickory Bridge over the Cumberland is still the dividing line between someplace and the no place of Nashville’s suburban sprawl. But there are questions about how well the center will hold in the next millennium.
