Historic Second Avenue

Welcome to the Historic Second Avenue Walking Tour on Nashville Sites! I’m Trenton Wheeler—music producer and member of the band Seryn as well as co-founder of the cultural arts festival IndigeNash. I’ll be your guide on this journey through time and place.

Nashville Sites is a free, accessible digital public history project created for everyone from longtime locals and first-time visitors to students and lifelong learners. This tour is self-guided so explore at your own pace or take a virtual tour anywhere in the world.

Together, we’ll travel back to the 1800s, when this riverbank bustled with dockworkers, sailors, and steamboat captains. You’ll hear about the many people—and even animals—that shaped Nashville’s history from merchants and musicians to horses, potbellied pigs, and beloved dogs. Along the way, we’ll visit the sites of former saloons, hotels, grocers, warehouses, banks, and even a Civil War–era hospital, while also stepping inside current businesses.

Before Nashville was Music City—or even called Nashville—this place was shaped by the Cumberland River. Long before streets or stages existed, the river served as a lifeline for Native peoples including the Cherokee and Chickasaw. In the late eighteenth century, settlers chose this bluff overlooking the water not for comfort, but for access, protection, and possibility.

The Cumberland has always brought movement and change—sometimes prosperity and growth, other times hardship and loss. This tour explores how Second Avenue has responded through preservation, adaptive reuse, and restoration. Stops also include musical touchstones including Alan Jackson, Tina Turner, Garth Brooks, Noel Gourdin, Elton John, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Norah Jones, Alabama, Bob Dylan, and the Indigo Girls. Because in Nashville, history and music are inseparable.

Written by Jessica Fitzpatrick and Mary Ellen Pethel, with assistance from Daniela Barranco Cornejo and Russell LeStourgeon, this tour is sponsored by The District, with in-kind support from the Nashville Historical Foundation, Nashville Downtown Partnership, Metro Historical Commission, and other partners across the city.

This tour is dedicated to Ann Roberts, a passionate preservationist with fifty years of work in downtown Nashville. So let’s get going. At Nashville Sites, it’s our story but your tour. And it starts here by the river.

Begin the tour at 108 1st Ave South at the bus station and WeGo train terminal.