Protecting Whites Creek: It’s Already Wonderful. You Don’t Have to Lie About It.

Let me state up front that I live in Whites Creek and love it. I would not recommend that anyone else think of moving out here, because we have packs of roving ugly babies that shoot lasers out of their eyes. Really, really ugly, dangerous babies. Don’t move to Whites Creek, for your sake.

Hyperbole aside, it’s a really special place. It’s also really close to downtown and it seems unlikely that we can just lie to the rest of the city about its dangers and keep people from developing the area. The discussions around development in Whites Creek have already been contentious. We all expected the city council to vote Tuesday on whether to let the Fontanel expand into a nearby meadow. As Anna Butrico at WPLN reports, that vote was deferred.

The Metro Planning Commission has disapproved the Fontanel expansion, because it doesn’t fit with a newly written community plan for White’s Creek. Because of that, approval from the Metro Council would require a two-thirds majority.

The vote was postponed for one meeting.

I have mixed feelings about the Fontanel expansion. My mixed feelings deepened when I saw the petition opposing it, especially this part:

Please help our community fight off the large hotel development within Middle Tennessee’s ONLY National Register of Historic Places - Rural District. This idyllic 26 acre grassland meadow is in the heart of Whites Creek and is historically significant not only to Nashville, but includes a 5,000-6,000 year old Native burial mound. From Zachariah White farming corn here in 1779, predating the founding of Nashville, to the renowned hospitality of his widow, Lucinda “Granny” White, to The Trail of Tears, to tangling with the Jesse James Gang, this place anchors the little historic community of Whites Creek and this place matters.

Most of this is untrue. Some of it is so painfully and dramatically untrue I have to assume it’s deliberately misleading Nashvillians who care about the area’s history, but don’t know it that well. A deliberately misleading untruth is what we used to call, in the old days, a lie.

Shall we go through them?

There is no 5,000-6,000 year old Native American burial mound in the meadow where the Fontanel wants to put its expansion. There is a mound in the general vicinity, which has been picked at by looters a bunch of times and archaeologists once. I’m not going to tell you its exact location, because I don’t want to tip off grave robbers, but it’s not in that meadow or touching the meadow. Which is not to say that there isn’t a possibly meaningful archaeological site in that meadow and known and unknown graves that would have to be dealt with. But there’s no mound.

Zachariah White did not farm corn in Whites Creek. White, for whom Whites Creek, the creek, is named, and thus for whom Whites Creek, the town, is named, came to the area before the settling of Nashville as a long hunter, probably with the Heaton/Eaton folks. He followed the creek up into the hills exploring and hunting for fur. Fur was a lucrative business — the nascent United States needed fur and, for some reason, Britain and its allies — most Native Americans — were not keen on trading furs to the U.S., so people willing to go hunt down furs could make good money. White didn’t take time away from trapping to tend corn. Please. How much work would that be for how little payout? Plus, it was incredibly dangerous to leave yourself exposed by doing things like, oh, farming. The idea that White was up here farming away is ludicrous, especially when we know what he was really doing — making money fur trapping.

When White moved to the area permanently, he settled in the Fort — the French Lick fort, downtown, nowhere near Whites Creek. He was in charge of growing corn there. He and two other guys, two to work, one armed, watching for Indians. In fact, that’s how White died. Indians killed him in 1781 at the French Lick fort.

He explored Whites Creek. He did not live here.

Which brings us to his widow. She never lived in Whites Creek. Period. Ever. She didn’t, as far as we can tell, even visit this neck of the woods while her husband was still alive. She lived out south of town on the Middle Franklin Road, now called Granny Whites Pike, but she didn’t come here until years after her husband died. You can go see her grave along Granny White Pike. It’s nicely preserved and there’s a sign. Don’t come to Whites Creek looking for Granny White. You’re just wasting your time.

The James Gang was in the area, to the extent that it’s not strange that one of the members got caught in Whites Creek, but, if you want to weep and moan about Jesse, you’re better off on Fatherland in East Nashville. And Frank? I mean, he lived near Whites Creek, the creek, but I’m afraid Bordeaux has more of a claim on him than Whites Creek, the town, does.

So, literally, all that leaves is the Trail of Tears, which, yes, did go through Whites Creek.

I hate this petition. I hate that it preys on the people of Nashville who care about history and care about preserving it by lying to them about the history of Whites Creek. You can’t deliberately mislead people and still get to think of yourselves as “the good guys.” Good guys don’t lie to get their way.

I’m genuinely not sure if the expansion of the Fontanel is a good idea. But I’m really ashamed to see my fellow preservationists trying to con the rest of the city into giving them what they want. It’s not right.

Ugly, laser-shooting babies aside, Whites Creek is a wonderful place. I invite everyone to drive up and look at it for yourself. You don’t need made-up history to convince you that it’s worth preserving, just walk along our greenways or bike our roads or have a meal at the Fontanel or Ri’chards, and contemplate the landscape from their porches. Come see — I’d especially invite the Metro Council to come on up — and you can decide for yourself.