Nashville in the 1880s and Beyond

During her three years in Nashville, from 1886 to 1889, Meta Chestnutt witnessed the life of a rapidly-growing city. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1880, Nashville had a population of 43,350, making it the fortieth largest city in America. By 1890, the population had jumped to 76,168, an increase of 76% in just ten years. During that decade, Nashville moved from fortieth to thirty-eighth largest city in the nation, ahead of both Memphis (64,495) and Atlanta (65,533).[1] It was easily the biggest, most cosmopolitan place where Meta would ever live. And who were these new residents of Nashville? According to historian Don H. Doyle, they were 

country folk who arrived from Middle Tennessee and other parts of the South. Some were ex-slaves whose ties to the land and to their former masters had been sundered; others were white farmers pushed off the land and out of small towns by the strains of postwar agricultural readjustment. Mostly young and poor, they drifted into the strange new environment of the city, some to thrive on the opportunities it offered to ambitious newcomers, others to flounder in the absence of family, church, and community ties that had guided them in the country.[2]

The social upheaval that accompanies such rapid growth was tempered by the simultaneous growth of religious groups in Nashville. The federal religious census of 1890 counted more than 8,000 white Methodists in the city. In the same year, black Methodists numbered nearly 2,000. There were slightly more than 6,000 Baptists of various kinds, and 6,000 Roman Catholics. Presbyterians numbered more than 3,500. And, Nashville was home to 2,400 adherents of the Stone-Campbell Movement, members of Christian Churches and Churches of Christ.[3]

Notes

[1] U.S. Census Bureau, "Table 11. Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1880," accessed January 24, 2022, https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/1998/demo/pop-twps0027/tab11.txt; and "Table 12. Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1890," accessed January 24, 2022, https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/1998/demo/pop-twps0027/tab12.txt

[2] Don H. Doyle, Nashville in the New South, 1880-1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 121.

[3] Ibid., 123.