Initially the land that occupied Nashville, Tennessee, was nothing other than an outpost for French fur traders around 1717. Just over sixty years later, on Christmas day 1779, the first permanent settlement of non-natives arrived under the leadership of an Englishman named James Robertson, to a place called French Lick, as he had been granted authority to expand North Carolina westward. It grew when more settlers arrived in April, and on April 24, 1784, the settlement, which at the time was a part of North Carolina, was named Fort Nashborough, in honor of the Revolutionary War general Francis Nash. Three years later, North Carolina named Davidson County for William Lee Davidson, another hero of the Revolution. The next year, in 1784, Fort Nashborough was renamed to Nashville in a legislative vote. The early settlers were harassed by Indian raids, until Robertson brokered a peace agreement in November 1794.
             In 1796, Tennessee earned the right to call itself a state, and sixteen years later, in 1812, Nashville enjoyed its first tenure as state capital. The capital then moved to Knoxville in 1815 and Murfreesboro in 1817. Finally, in 1826, Nashville regained its status as capital. The city was growing slowly, and in 1833 had 6,000 inhabitants. Ten years later, in 1843, the state legislature voted to make Nashville the permanent state capital of Tennessee. Due in large part to its designation as state capital, Nashville's population grew more quickly over the next seventeen years, and by the dawn of the Civil War, Nashville's inhabitants numbered seventeen thousand. The remainder of the century was a time of growth for Nashville's economy, one of the major reasons for which was the railroad industry.
             The middle of the nineteenth century was a time of vast improvements in transportation, leading to economic growth throughout the country. Nashville was no exception. On December 4, 1951, the Tennessee Leg...