Cumberland River and Woodland Street Bridge

In 1995, African American poet, writer, and intellectual Amiri Baraka wrote a poem that began, “At the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean there’s a railroad made of human bones.” This opening stanza commemorates the loss of African lives that occurred during the Middle Passage. While the statement describes the Transatlantic Slave Trade, it is also a fitting description of early Black life and culture in Middle Tennessee. The bank of the Cumberland represents the life or death desperation experienced by African Americans brought to Nashville before the Civil War.

In 1790, African Americans made up about twenty percent of Davidson County’s nearly 3,500 residents. Of the 677 African Americans that laid eyes on this river before Tennessee’s statehood in 1796, all but eighteen were enslaved. For the next seventy years, this stretch of the Cumberland would be the place where African Americans were unloaded, examined, and taken to slave brokers who prepared them for sale here in Nashville. 

The riverfront also marked a point of exit from the city for African Americans fleeing slavery. Fugitive slave advertisements were common features in Nashville’s newspapers during the antebellum era. Desperate men and women could, under the cover of darkness, stow away aboard a vessel headed up the Cumberland River. After a few days, the anxious travelers reached the town of Smithland, Kentucky, where the river intersected with the Ohio River. From there, these brave fugitives could make their way to free territory.

For those who could not escape but could no longer bear the inhumanity and cruelty of slavery, the river was also a common place for suicide. One tragic news report in the Nashville Gazette documents such an event at the old Woodland Street suspension bridge. On a cold night in March 1853, a young enslaved woman, with a child in each arm, rushed across this site making her way to Woodland Street Bridge. Facing the prospect of being separated from her family, she and her husband were “determined not to be sold.” Fearing the worst, she jumped from the bridge with her children, plunging to their deaths in the icy waters of the Cumberland.

On February 23, 1862, African Americans who gathered at this spot also witnessed the arrival of United States Army on the east bank of the river as the soldiers prepared to invade the city. Two days later, a fleet of boats carrying an additional 7,000 Union soldiers disembarked. Shortly after, Nashville was secured by Union forces—thus signaling the end of slavery in the city.

Exiting the fort, turn RIGHT and walk north along First Ave. North. The third stop is on your right, by the Puryear Mim’s statue of Nashville founders James Robertson and John Donelson shaking hands.