The Route: From Phillips-Robinson Funeral Home north on Hadley. Right on 11th Street, then right on Riverside Road and right on 14th. Left on Cleves and then right on 17th/Golf Club Lane to the park.
Abandoned Scooters: 0
Cranes: 0
Once a month, reporter and resident historian J.R. Lind will pick an area in the city to examine while accompanied by a photographer. With his column Walk a Mile, he’ll walk a one-mile stretch of that area, exploring the neighborhood’s history and character, its developments, its current homes and businesses, and what makes it a unique part of Nashville. If you have a suggestion for a future Walk a Mile, email editor@nashvillescene.com.
In a city where so many neighborhoods are changing by the moment — with old homes torn down for two new ones, businesses shuffling hither and yon like peripatetic bumblebees, and churches rebranding to web addresses — there is something very centering about stasis.
Old Hickory Village is a largely residential early-20th-century section of the broader Old Hickory area, and it looks as if it was dropped from the sky by time travelers and surrounded by a force field to fight off inexorable metamorphosis. It’s not just a neighborhood out of time. It’s almost a neighborhood out of place, looking more like a well-thought-out company town more suited to the Big 10 Midwest or industrial Northeast than to the sleepy agrarian South.
Of course, that’s essentially what it is.
In January 1918, Delaware’s E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company and the federal government decided to build a massive munitions factory on Hadley’s Bend east of Nashville. DuPont agreed to build a town for the massive number of workers needed to staff the plant, and by November 1918 there were more than 300 homes. They called it Jacksonville to honor Andrew Jackson but changed the name to Old Hickory two years later, in part because mail bound for Jacksonville, Fla., was misdirected to Tennessee and vice versa. They built a self-sufficient and largely self-contained community — note the extant guard houses on the bridge carrying Old Hickory Boulevard over the river — with hospitals, churches, a hotel and segregated neighborhoods for Black and Mexican workers.
By the time of the Armistice in November 1918, there were 56,000 people here on the DuPont payroll. At the time, Davidson County’s population was less than 160,000. The population (and the payroll) dwindled after the war ended and DuPont sold the factory, but the company eventually bought back the plant to manufacture rayon (hence Rayon City, an Old Hickory neighborhood north of the Village), bought back the Village, and ran it as a company town until the end of World War II.
DuPont is gone now, but its legacy is still intact. And if DuPont ran Old Hickory for decades, the business at Hadley Avenue and 11th Street ran something much larger for just as long: Davidson County. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about the Phillips-Robinson Funeral Home in the flatiron of OHB, Hadley and 11th. It’s a well-appointed, well-taken-care-of funeral home with capacious parking. It looks like a comfortable, welcoming church, which makes sense: It was an Episcopal church until the late 1980s, when Phillips-Robinson moved from its Rayon City location a couple miles north.
Now ubiquitous, particularly in Nashville’s eastern suburbs, the chain of funeral homes started in 1929 to serve the blue-collar families in the Old Hickory area. But here’s a couple things to remember about funeral homes: Everyone needs one at one point or another, and the best funeral directors are deeply empathic — thus it’s a great way to build connections with a broad cross-section of the community.
And as the Phillipses and Robinsons proved, it’s a great way to build a political machine.
In the years before Nashville’s Metroization in 1963, it was virtually impossible to be elected to Davidson County office without the backing of the mortician machine in Rayon City, as detailed in James Squires’ indispensable chronicle The Secrets of the Hopewell Box. The title of that 1996 book refers to Hopewell, the largely Black community south of Old Hickory, the ballots from which disappeared in a particularly contentious election.
The shift to consolidated government largely destroyed the machine’s power. (Note, however, the number of Robinsons who are or were judges in recent times.) Now the funeral home is more of a literal cornerstone to the neighborhood than a metaphorical one.
Hadley is lined with prim homes. Unusually for such an older neighborhood, there is a significant sidewalk network, though visitors quickly notice how much narrower they are than the more social distancing-friendly strips in other parts of town built up after someone in the Codes Administration dreamt up sidewalk standards. Another quirk on Hadley: The power lines run behind the homes rather than along the street. This decision, presumably DuPont’s, allows front yard trees to grow expansive canopies that stretch over the road and provide nearly complete shade on the sidewalk.
Hadley is essentially the backbone of the Village, and due to the way DuPont laid out its town, this means the homes are the median of what was available, likely intended for longtime employees with families or those on the verge of what we’d now call middle management. Farther away from the Cumberland River and closer to the factory itself, the homes are smaller and more modest. These were for the workaday Joes at the bottom of the ladder. Turning toward the river, the houses get bigger for the aforementioned middle management and truly commodious and luxurious along the river’s bluff where the plant’s top brass lived.
Though the houses on Hadley do tend to be a bit repetitious in design (DuPont, after all, was cranking out these homes at breakneck pace), modern residents add their own touches of personality — particularly by using bold color palettes for their shutters, including aqua, yellow and purple. One home, near the intersection with 13th, has a very verisimilitudinous dog sculpture on its porch (and in the middle of the uncanny valley).
Hadley is (or was) also the address of many of the neighborhood’s churches and other centers of civic life. Spanning the blocks between 11th and 13th and out a few more east and west, there’s Methodist, Baptist and Church of Christ churches, a Masonic lodge (with the usual windowless facade and imposing brick structure), a park and a public library. Across from the Methodist church is a large vacant field, unusual enough in Nashville. It’s obviously been graded at some point in the past, hinting at the former presence of a road or building.
For 50 years or so, Old Hickory Elementary School was here. DuPont gave the land to Davidson County with the caveat that if it ceased being a school, the industrial conglomerate could buy it back for $1 — which, it so happens, it did in the early 1970s. It then sold the land to the Old Hickory Utility District, which itself sold it to the church in 1976. Neither school, DuPont nor even the OHUD still exists.
There’s a community garden nearby, and though the distinctive tendrils of squash and okra plants are present (as well as a failed effort at corn), this one, unlike many others, is almost exclusively a province of flowers. There are both domesticated and wild ones, popping color into the predictably hazy August morning.
The library, built in 1937, looks like it could survive anything (though, of course, it is closed because of COVID-19), built with tough brick and metal and including a narrow chimney on the facade facing 11th. The houses grow in size as 11th rolls toward the river. The lots start to seem smaller, though perhaps it’s a trick of the eye. Styles still repeat: Barn-mimicking three-story homes are next to others with idiosyncrasies including extra-wide and extra-long diagonal eaves and windows that are seemingly between floors. The streets are wider here too — but not the sidewalk — and the trees seem to enjoy the extra space. Porch-sitting must be a prime pastime in the Village. Nearly every home has an abundance of patio furniture and other accoutrements indicating that these folks love spending time on their porches: little gardens, yard art, drinks carts and so forth.
When 11th abuts Riverside Road, the change is obvious. The first home in sight has at least 17 windows facing the street. Who knows how many are in the back, offering what are no doubt stunning views of Old Hickory Lake below? Even the houses on the side of the street opposite the lake have covetous vistas, often with upper floors reaching above the trees to offer look-sees at the water. Across from one such home — painted yellow and with poofy hydrangeas so close in hue it appears they were color-matched at a paint store — either serendipitously the trees did not grow so as to block the view or the homeowners took the time to hack out the brush themselves. Thus these homes have a view of the lake and Hendersonville, a mere half-mile away as the Canada goose flies. Or the blue heron, which flapped its big wings in flight as we walked.
At 14th Street, one house — more the middle-manager size — sits catty-corner and markedly close to the street and to its neighbors. Even in pre-World War II Nashville, someone was always trying to get just one more house on a lot. Again, the porches draw the eye: wrapping around three sides of the home, many with slowly whirring ceiling fans fighting the eternal battle against late summer. Windows of sunlight through the trees (almost exclusively deciduous but for the occasional red juniper, which, as any Wilson Countian knows, will grow damn near anywhere) allow for backyard gardens. A creeping vine from one has left a ripening spaghetti squash nearly in the road.
Along 14th is a peaceful park called Rachel’s Walk — named for Mrs. Jackson, naturally. Where its parking lot is now was once a pool, built by community volunteers after World War I and improved by DuPont when the company came back in the 1920s. It was an inexpensive day’s entertainment for the neighborhood kids — the charge was between a dime and 15 cents — and photos show how crowded it would get in the summer. Now, the shade trees offer a similar respite from the heat, though far less thronged with excitable children.
The houses are smaller once again on Cleves heading south, but for whatever reason, the street has attracted a funkier breed. One home’s front yard features a giant metal chicken statue. Another’s porch is decorated with multicolored ceramic owl lights and a stained-glass cow. Another is bright-purple (a purple Jeep and purple car are parked behind). Cleves tees with a curving road known variously as 17th Street or Golf Club Lane, even though the road is less than 500 yards long. And despite the name of its adjoining street, the rather unkempt ball field warns that due to “Safety Concerns,” golfing is not permitted. The field, which was owned by the utility district from the 1950s until its dissolution when Metro Parks took it over, does not have a rear fence marking a home run — making it rather more like a cricket pitch. (With a little love, it would make a fine oval indeed.) It also tricks the eye into thinking the field has the dimensions of the famously canyonesque jewel boxes like the Polo Grounds or Chattanooga’s Engel Stadium. In fact, it’s just 313 to right, 335 to center and 303 down left.
A squint and it’s easy to see the park bustling with ball games again. The foul poles are still there, the cinder-block dugouts sturdy. “The people will come,” as they say in the old movie. And if anywhere still feels like a place where neighbors stream to the park to watch Little League, it’s Old Hickory Village.
