A great Southern philosopher once said: “I know you like to think your shit don’t stink, but lean a little closer, see, roses really smell like boo-boo-ooh.”
It is likely that those words have never blessed the ears of the median resident of Davidson County’s favored quarter. But the contemporary character and affluence of these sprawling hills — Oak Hill, Forest Hills, Green Hills and Hillwood — are owed in large part to their original effluence. (A fancy rhyming word for “wastewater.”)
Lean a little closer.
Scratch the surface of the manicured meadows and you’ll start to smell the roses. Dig deeper, and a story bubbles to the surface: one of sewers and septic tanks, the safety of children and the dangers of racism, and how it all flowed into metropolitan government.
Favelas of the Privileged
Automotive subdivisions were sliced off so rapidly in suburban Davidson County during the postwar boom that developers ran out of names and soon needed more resources than what an antiquated country government could provide. As in most Southern states, counties in Tennessee were originally designed for rural governance, and the provision of urban services — like firefighting, water and sewer — was not allowed under state law.
The East Nashville neighborhood serves as a bridge between two eras of suburban growth
The problems of limited government were compounded by lax regulation. Early county subdivision regulations allowed developers to construct roadways so cheaply that their surfaces soon deteriorated. Sidewalks were not required. Neither were sewer systems — most postwar subdivisions relied on septic tanks, which performed poorly atop Davidson County’s shallow limestone base.
In 1946, Davidson County revised its subdivision regulations to increase minimum residential lot sizes to half an acre to provide more space for septic drain fields. Areas with less suitable soil conditions, like Oak Hill and Hillwood, required even larger lots. The lot size requirements, as the city-county planning engineer noted, “mean that frequently subdivisions which should accommodate 1,000 families for an ideal urban development, now only provide for 500 families with lots which are too big for the average priced home.”
The large lot expedient locked lower-income households out of suburban growth, just as it locked much of the county into a sprawling pattern of development too sparse to support urban services and made annexation a costly proposition.
And then there was that septic tank problem.
For the Health of the Children
Almost 150,000 Davidson County residents — more than 95 percent of them white — lived in unsewered subdivisions by the mid-1950s. Only a decade into mass suburbanization, 1 in 10 septic tanks was discharging sewage onto suburban lawns, and a quarter presented a “danger to public health.” Ironically, white families fleeing the alleged social and environmental harms of urban living now found themselves growing anxious about septic tanks in suburbia.
The first of Nashville’s turn-of-the-century streetcar suburbs is lost to history — but one home tells its story
Karen Benjamin, author of the forthcoming book Good Parents, Better Homes, and Great Schools: Selling Segregation Before the New Deal, tells the Scene, “At the turn of the 20th century, residential developers urged affluent white parents to build a house in the suburbs for the sake of their children [and] mimicked the language of social science experts, doctors and educators to suggest that it was bad parenting to expose children to urban areas.”
While streetcar suburbs would benefit from extended sewer lines upon annexation, automotive suburbs were fundamentally different — isolated from all urban services. Yet despite the county health director warning several times between 1949 and 1960 of an imminent epidemic outbreak from faulty septic tanks, white families still surged to new subdivisions in the county, in search of “safety” of a different sort.
Black City, White County, Black Water
Efforts to improve the “septic tank problem” in the outlying county stood in stark contrast to the decades-long civic disinterest toward sewerage in Black neighborhoods of the central city.
In 1946, a report found: “Approximately 48 percent of the total population in the entire urban area are not at the present time using public sewer systems. This is a considerably higher percentage of the total population than is found in other comparable Southern cities.” The majority of unsewered city territory covered areas of Black concentration, including much of Edgehill and Hadley Park.
Sewer service was segregated by design. Nashville planners modeled their work on the neighborhood unit concept, which divided the city into sections defined by “similar ethnic groups” to enable “more effective planning” — a bureaucratic euphemism for the allocation of public goods in privileged places and the rationing of public goods in disfavored districts.
Jessica Trounstine, a Vanderbilt University political scientist and author of Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities, tells the Scene local governments “used residential segregation to deny Black and other less privileged communities access to public goods.
“In cities that were less segregated by race and class, sewer access was also less segregated,” says Trounstine. “This is an artifact of the way that sewer lines are laid. It is much easier to deny whole neighborhoods access to sewers than single blocks or houses.”
Black communities faced more diseases and illness due to the lack of sewerage. As fears spread that domestic workers — commuting from Black neighborhoods to white suburbs — could spread disease, the city finally created a full sewer system by the mid-1950s. Overall rates of death from disease dropped precipitously, and racial disparities narrowed — but only after Nashville’s Black community suffered thousands of excess deaths across more than half a century.
Water, Earth, Fire and Change in the Air
Long-forewarned disaster struck when Hillsboro High School was destroyed by a fire on Halloween 1952. With inadequate water supply, the school was a total loss — and was insured at just half its value due to exorbitant insurance premiums. The county health department refused to permit rebuilding on the site “unless some system is found for proper disposal of sewage,” which set off a brief search for alternative school sites. By January 1953, the county government, school board and developers of The Mall at Green Hills agreed to financial arrangements for a sewer line that would weave nearly three miles through the rolling hills of residential subdivisions and tap into a city system the public works director described as “one of the most garbled in the country.”
Reconstruction of Hillsboro High School, in its celebrated midcentury-modern style, began concurrently with the sewer extension. But the problem was larger than one school. Sixty-four of the county’s 77 schools — from Inglewood to Burton and back to Madison — relied on septic tanks or pit privies.
The blaze and the broader school sewage crisis illuminated the “price of disunity” and consolidated efforts toward metropolitanism — a pricey and impractical proposition up until this point. A movement to incorporate a series of splinter cities pushed civic elites further than annexation — the only solution was a consolidated metropolitan government for Nashville and Davidson County.
A first vote for consolidation failed in 1958, though it garnered a majority of city voters and enjoyed strong support among the “cosmopolitan” voters in the district around Hillsboro High School. A plan for metropolitan government was approved by voters in Nashville and Davidson County in 1962.
Green Hills neighbors convinced board members to ignore the law in favor of protecting their neighborhood aesthetic
The massive countywide project to extend sewers throughout the suburbs started soon after consolidation and lasted into the early 1990s. But the large lots that began as an unsewered expedient — and made Nashville one of the world’s sparsest urban areas — soon became central to concepts of community character, which residents have fought to maintain even as their original purpose was obviated. Today, Metro subdivision regulations enforce compatibility requirements that effectively prohibit resubdivision for lots smaller than the original in suburban areas of the county.
The favored quarter — with lots “too big for the average priced home” from the start — remains far wealthier and whiter than the rest of Davidson County. In the 2020 Census, non-Hispanic whites made up 89 percent of residents in the section, compared to 51 percent of the rest of the county. Each census tract in the area boasts six-figure median household incomes, with all three of the favored quarter satellite cities eclipsing $200,000 annually — more than two-and-a-half times greater than the median household in Nashville.
Unifying and connecting the city, even via a sewer system, was a great triumph in progressive governance. But the spacious lots in the favored quarter show how uneven those results can be.
