Richard Locker: Nashville-Memphis tie erased in Music City
Apparently clueless to history, Metro Council removes name of John C. McLemore, prominent Nashvillian and a founder of Memphis, from street after nearly 200 years.
By Richard Locker
Originally published 12:09 a.m., September 9, 2010
Updated 09:22 a.m., September 9, 2010
UPDATE: Nashville Metro Councilwoman Erica Gilmore responded by e-mail early today to questions about the McLemore Street name change: "I don't know if you have already printed this story. However, I did want to follow up with you. There was a little discussion, but not too much considering the YMCA does such great work in the city and is technically the only building located on the street, and that particular Y has been in that location since the early 1950s."
NASHVILLE -- Nashville has dissed Memphis again -- and dishonored its own history in the process -- but it's not likely that many Nashvillians are even aware of the slight.
Nashville recently took down the street signs for its McLemore Street and replaced them with signs designating the block-long strip of asphalt in the shadow of the State Capitol as "YMCA Way."
The sign change came months after the Metro Council voted 28-0 to change the street name. As Ordinance No. BL2010-619 put it, the name change is "for the purpose of recognizing the contributions of a 501c3 charitable organization's history of serving the citizens of the downtown area."
That would be the newly expanded and renovated Downtown YMCA, which takes up about one-fourth of the block along the west side of the former McLemore Street. The rest is the Avon Williams Campus of Tennessee State University, which is a large circa-1970 building and its parking lot. The other side of the street is mostly an exit ramp.
Other than those two institutions, YMCA Way is not very notable, running only one long block from Charlotte to Church. But both of those streets are main routes into the business district, so the overhead McLemore signs at the north and south ends of McLemore were prominent.
An 1831 map of Nashville shows McLemore Street as much longer -- and ironically, only one of three streets that kept their names for nearly two centuries. Construction of viaducts over a railroad gulch and later urban-renewal projects that reshaped the area shortened the street to its current length.
But more important is the historical perspective. The renaming removed the city's most visible reminder of one of its most prominent early citizens, John C. McLemore.
Memphians may or may not recognize that name: John Christmas McLemore was the last and least known of the four Nashville land speculators who founded Memphis on the bluffs of the Mississippi River. Andrew Jackson, John Overton and James Winchester made bigger names for themselves.
Memphis historian Perre Magness has written that McLemore was the only one of the four who actually came to live, and die, in the fledgling new town. He's buried in Elmwood Cemetery.
McLemore was born on New Year's Day 1790 in North Carolina and moved to Nashville when he was 16. He became a surveyor of some renown.
Magness wrote of McLemore in a 1992 Commercial Appeal piece:
"John Overton, James Winchester and Andrew Jackson bought the claim along the Chickasaw bluff and ordered the town of Memphis laid out in 1819.
"McLemore (had) married Elizabeth Donelson, a niece of Jackson's wife, Rachel. When Jackson, preparing to run for president, wanted to rid himself of the possible political embarrassment of the land at Memphis, he traded his remaining interest, 625 acres, to McLemore for a tract of land in Madison County."
McLemore moved to Memphis and devoted his energies to selling lots and promoting the town.
"The partnership of Overton, Winchester and McLemore continued for five years to develop the town," Magness wrote. "Then McLemore turned his attention to land he had bought south of town and developed the town of Fort Pickering," eventually absorbed into Memphis.
"McLemore became wealthy. To make Fort Pickering the premier town on the river, he had a great idea: a railroad. He envisioned a railroad from his trading post on the bluff to the village of LaGrange. To ensure that the terminus was on his property, he provided land for a depot," at what is now Kansas and Pennsylvania.
He was also one of the signers of the deed that created Court, Exchange, Market and Auction squares and the Promenade along the riverfront. "Thanks to this deed, access to the river was public, not private property," Magness wrote.
Court Square and the Promenade remain public spaces today.
After he lost his fortune, McLemore joined the gold rush to California. He returned to Memphis and lived with his daughter on Walker Avenue, just south of Lauderdale, until his death Feb. 20, 1864.
About three blocks south of there today is Memphis' McLemore Avenue, still bearing the name of one of the city's founders.
McLemore was a prominent Nashvillian before his Memphis venture. An 1880 history of Davidson County noted that he built the first house, a sturdy brick, on McLemore Street at the corner of Broad.
The Metro Council approved the name change of McLemore Street with little apparent regard for its history. The ordinance sponsored by Councilwoman Erica Gilmore -- who didn't respond to a reporter's questions about the name change -- was vetted by the planning commission and the council's public works; traffic and parking, and planning, zoning and historical committees before winning approval.
