The Shape of the Land
Nashville is at the center of a web of often-competing influences. The city lies between the Appalachian mountains and the Mississippi River, between the states of the North and the Deep South. This midway geography predicated the contradictory pulls--the Scotch-Irish homogeneity of East Tennessee and the black/white dichotomy of the delta country to the west, the commercial and industrial impulses of the North and the agrarian ethos of the South--to which the region has responded.

Before Nashville began, the land on which the city rests was a hunting ground for Native Americans, who tracked the animals drawn to the salt lick and thesulphur spring that lay just east of the site of the Bicentennial Mall near what is now Fourth Avenue North. Today the Lick Branch stream courses twenty-five feet beneath the Mall, flowing into the Cumberland River through a massive, brick-lined culvert.

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