Nashville has a founder, and most people who live there could not tell you his name. That is a shame, because his story is one of the most remarkable on the whole Tennessee frontier.
His name was James Robertson, and history remembers him as the Father of Middle Tennessee.
He is the man who led the first settlers to the bluffs above the Cumberland River and built the fort that became Nashville. He is the man who chose to stay when staying meant burying his own children. And he is a man whose name deserves to be far better known than it is.
A Wataugan First
Before he was the founder of Nashville, James Robertson was already a frontier leader in East Tennessee. Born in Virginia in 1742, he came west and became part of the Watauga settlements, where he helped establish one of the earliest experiments in self-government west of the Appalachians.
That experience mattered. Robertson learned early how to lead a community that had no government but the one it made for itself. He served as a magistrate, defended the settlements, and even lived for a time among the Cherokee as an agent for North Carolina. When the chance came to lead settlers into new country, he was ready for it.
Christmas Day on the Frozen Cumberland
In 1779, Robertson set out to establish a settlement in the Cumberland country, on land that Richard Henderson’s Transylvania Company had purchased from the Cherokee. He led a party of men overland, on what was known as one of the most difficult and dangerous journeys of the era, all the way through Kentucky and down to the Cumberland River.
They arrived at the site then called the French Lick on Christmas Day, 1779, and drove their cattle across the frozen Cumberland River. Think about that for a moment. Christmas Day, in the dead of winter, in unknown country, cattle crossing a river turned to ice.
There they built a fort atop the bluff. They named it Fort Nashborough, after Francis Nash, an officer who had fought alongside Robertson years before. That fort became Nashville. The rest of the settlers, the women and children led by John Donelson, arrived by water the following spring, a journey I have written about in the story of the Cumberland settlements and the founding of Nashville.
The Man Who Would Not Leave
What sets Robertson apart is not just that he came. It is that he stayed.
The Cumberland settlements sat in contested country, and they were attacked again and again in the years that followed. Many settlers gave up and fled north to Kentucky, where life was safer. Robertson did not. He made the decision to hold his ground and keep the settlement alive, and his steadiness is a large part of why Nashville exists at all.
That choice came at a staggering personal cost. Over the years of conflict, Robertson lost two brothers and two of his sons, and another son was scalped and survived. He did not ask others to bear a danger he would not bear himself. He and his family buried their own on that frontier.
A Story With Two Sides
Honesty requires telling the other half of this story, because the settlers were not moving into empty land.
The Cumberland country was part of the homeland of Native peoples, and the sale of that land through Henderson’s purchase was bitterly opposed by many Cherokee. A faction known as the Chickamauga, led by the formidable Dragging Canoe, had warned that settlement would bring bloodshed, and they fought for years to defend their ground. The attacks on the Cumberland settlements were not random violence. They were part of a determined effort by people fighting for a homeland they were losing.
Both things are true at once. Robertson showed extraordinary courage and endurance, and the settlement he built came at a real cost to people who were already here. I have never believed that admiring the frontier means looking away from that, and the tension runs through the whole story of Tennessee’s connections to the larger events of its era.
From Founder to Statesman
Robertson’s leadership eventually helped bring the settlement out of its most dangerous years. As the attacks lessened and new settlers arrived, the Cumberland community began to prosper.
His stature grew with it. In 1790, when Congress created the Territory South of the River Ohio, Robertson was made a commandant of the Mero District, and President George Washington later commissioned him a brigadier general. In his later years, he served as a United States agent to the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations, working on the government’s behalf in treaty negotiations, the same complicated frontier world that produced men like John Sevier, Tennessee’s first governor.
A Death in the Field
Robertson’s story ended the way he lived it, in service and on the move.
In 1814, in his seventies, he traveled through harsh conditions to the Chickasaw Agency in West Tennessee on government business. He fell ill on that difficult journey and died there, at the age of 72. His remains were later brought to the Nashville City Cemetery, in the city he founded.
His wife, Charlotte Reeves Robertson, who had endured every hardship of that frontier alongside him and raised their large family through it, was laid to rest beside him after her own death nearly thirty years later. The town of Charlotte, Tennessee, and Charlotte Pike in Nashville carry her name to this day.
The Name We Forgot
Every day, hundreds of thousands of people live, work, and visit in the city James Robertson founded. Very few of them know his name.
He crossed a frozen river on Christmas Day to build a fort in the wilderness. He stayed when staying cost him his own children. He helped turn a fragile outpost into the capital of a state. He was, by every account, a quiet and steady man who did the hard work and let others take the credit.
Nashville remembers a great many names. It ought to remember his.
More Tennesseans should know their names, and the name of James Robertson belongs at the very top of that list.
