Steven Hoskins

At the Corner of Them and Now:

A Social History of Downtown Nashville in the 20th Century
as seen from maps of the corner of 7th and Drexel Streets

On 12 August 1990, a warm Sunday afternoon, at the corner of 7th and Drexel, a

crowd gathered to see the unveiling of a new Tennessee Historical Marker. The memory

of the state’s first Catholic secondary school for African-Americans, Immaculate

Mother’s Academy, was finally being honored.1 Long gone from the site and the

memory of Nashvillians, this important piece of Nashville’s history was getting its due.

In the crowd that day were dignitaries of state, representatives of the Catholic church,

alumni/ae of the school, managers from the Sears, Roebuck and Co. store now on the

sight and interested people from the neighborhood, currently a mixture of warehouse

businesses and the disenfranchised and homeless of the city. What those gathered there

didn’t know was that the Sears, Roebuck and Co. store to their immediate east would be

closed almost a year to the day later. Ten years hence, those homeless and

disenfranchised would make their address within the walls of its very spacious 170,000

square foot building.

This is a quick cultural history of downtown, Nashville, TN told from the historic

drawings of the Sanborn Map Company.2 The maps were produced between 1867-1970

for the purpose of creating fire districts for an insurance company. The maps drawn

between those dates for the city of Nashville are now available online and give an
1
Nashville Banner (Nashville, TN), 12 August 1990.
2
The Sanborn Maps have proven an invaluable historical reference tool. They are large-scale plans
containing data that was used to estimate the potential insurance risk for urban structures. The maps are
now available in digital form on-line at http://80-sanborn.umi.com. I accessed them through the on-line
database available at the MTSU Walker Library site.
interesting glimpse into that history that show a downtown that was in course genteel,

culturally diverse, commercially viable and eventually abandoned.

The Sanborn Map of 1897 shows the address at Central and Stevenson (now 7th

and Drexel) still being occupied by “Mile End.”3 Quietly nestled between what was then

Lee Avenue, later Lafayette Street, and the train tracks at the Southwest end of downtown

Nashville, it had quiet neighbors. The Foster family, one of the signers of the

Nashborough Compact in 1780,4 had settled the land over a century previous and lived at

“Mile End” peaceably since. Feeling the effects of Reconstruction as did many of the

elite families of Nashville, the map reflects that the family had sold off land to survive.

Now they were surrounded by homesteads and land they had parceled out for gardens and

farms to their neighbors. By 1897, the Crittenton Mission Home for Colored Girls was

next door and a Christian Church was in the next block. The family home was situated

on a city-block size track of land that reflected what Nashville had become during the

Reconstruction period: A slowly integrating community of neighborhoods that was able

to keep its dignity mostly intact and the coming tide of commerce at bay in surrounding

burrows.

Nashville changed drastically in the next fifteen years and the maps reflect this.

The Sanborn Map of 19145 shows a very different scene from 1897 and obviously

changing neighborhood. Mile End was now home to Immaculate Mother Academy, an

African-American secondary school run by the Roman Catholic Church. The land was

purchased anonymously in 1905 for $25,000 by the famous Roman Catholic nun, Sister
3
Digital Sanborn Maps, Nashville, TN 1897, sheet 131 [database on-line]; available from 80-
sanborn.umi.com. See attached.
4
Cumberland Compact, May 1, 1780. [database on-line]; available from
www.rootsweb.com/~tndavids/cumbrcom.htm. I accessed this document through the TNGENWEB site.
5
Digital Sanborn Maps, Nashville, TN 1914, sheet 167 [database on-line]; available from 80-
sanborn.umi.com. See attached.

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Katharine Drexel. When the family found out to whom they had sold the property, they

made every effort to retract the sale including buying the property back at full price and

making a sizeable donation to a local Catholic charity. The sister and the local bishop

stoutly refused and established the Industrial School for colored girls which by 1914 had

become known as Immaculate Mother. The School razed the existing buildings and built

two new buildings on the site, a convent and a school building. The Crittenton Home

was still across the street but most of the land in the neighborhood used for food

production was now occupied by homes. Central Street had been renamed Drexel

Avenue in honor the patron. Nashville was becoming more urban as homes were being

built on top of homes on single land parcels.

Immaculate Mother Academy became so famous a work that it and its very large

land tract was listed on the 1919 AAA Blue Book map6 as the Industrial School. The

interesting thing is that it would recognized as a driving landmark as one approached the

city from the southeast on Murfreesboro Pike. It was recognizable enough to be listed

with the few other icons on the map:the State Capitol, the School for the Blind, Fort

Negley, and the Tennessee State Fair Grounds. Immaculate Mother would add Holy

Family Parish church within its boundaries in 1919, the addition noted in the Sanborn

Map of 1951.7

The 1951 map also reflects the changing pattern of urban commercialization that

was increasingly becoming Nashville. Gone from the surrounding neighborhood is the

Crittenton Home. Replacing it was the Borden Creamery, Janitors Supply Headquarters,
6
The Automobile Blue Book Pub. Co., Nashville, Tenn., public domain. [database on-line]; available from
www.lib.utexas.edu, the Castaneda map collection. This map is one in a series of road maps produced by
AAA from ca. 1908-1920 for the newly booming automobile business. They were supported by oil
company ads. Poor sales would not meant the maps would not last through the 1920’s. See attached.
7
Digital Sanborn Maps, Nashville, TN 1951, sheet 67 [database on-line]; available from 80-
sanborn.umi.com. See attached.

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and a used car lot. What were once home places had become warehouse storage. The

Drexel property was also facing the coming reality of American life—racial revolution

and integration. In 1954, following the lead of the State Board of Education, the Roman

Catholic Diocese of Nashville integrated its high schools and Immaculate Mother was

abandoned. The property was sold to Sears, Roebuck and Co. in December that existing

buildings and the memory of the school were quickly lost.

The 18 February edition of the Nashville Tennessean shows an architectural

rendering of the $2,500,000 Sears store that would be erected on the spot.8 The 1957

Sanborn map reflects the reality of the then 170,000 square foot facility and its

accompanying Auto Service Station.9 Sears parceled some of their land to a pre-

fabricated building supply outfit, Ink Manufacturing, who was indicative of the many

other supply houses which had taken over the neighborhood between 1951-57. Nashville

had become urban commercial.

Sears built its flagship store and had an amazing run of business. Many

Nashvillians have childhood memories of the glass cases and tall escalators that created a

new, modernized city. The creation of shopping malls and the commercial move to the

suburbs finally caught up with Sears in 1991. They moved to Franklin to be with many

other former downtown businesses.10 The corner of 7th and Drexel would sit vacant, like

much of the rest of downtown for ten years.

In June of 2001 the property was resurrected. The Nashville Union Rescue

Mission opened with a 4 million dollar renovation.11 The Metro Planning Department
8
Nashville Tennessean (Nashville), 18 February 1955. See attached.
9
Digital Sanborn Maps, Nashville, TN 1957, sheet 167 [database on-line]; available from 80-
sanborn.umi.com. See attached.
10
Nashville Banner (Nashville, TN), 10 May 1991.
11
Nashville Tennessean, ‘Rescue Mission has grand opening,’ 11 June 2001, [database archcive on-line]; I
accessed this story at www.tennessean.com/local/archives site.

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map shows a single large building on the original homestead of the Fosters.12 The sale

price to the Rescue Mission was $740,000 with a total appraised land value of 3.3 million

dollars. Now 7th and Drexel, like the rest of downtown was used to house and feed the

homeless. Of course, it being Nashville, this was done on a grand scale: 441 beds, 300

seat chapel, medical facilities, state of the art rescue mission stuff. The narrative of the

historical fortunes of Nashville in the 20th century was now complete.

What happened that August day in 1991 was more than the erection of a discreet

historical marker or the (re)creation of the past, but more a gathering of the history of

downtown Nashville in the 20th Century. As the maps have shown, during that century the

corner of 7th and Drexel streets saw four major changes of residents that interestingly

reflect the fortunes of the broader landscape of the city of Nashville. The “Mile End”

home place of the Foster family had become in the 20th century Immaculate Mother

Academy, The southern flagship store of the Sears, Roebuck and Co. and finally the

Nashville Union Rescue Mission. Amazing that one piece of property could reflect the

historical movements of the city from the beginning of the century in the hands of the

landed white elites to the mouths of homeless and needy at the turn of the millennium,

but indeed it did.

12
Metro Planning Commission, Assessment Maps 2002, 639 Lafayette St. [data-base on-line]; I accessed
this at www3.Nashville.org/servlet/com.esri.esrimap. See attached.

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