Art & Architecture at the Main Library: Copper Panels

Alcove 11:
Turn of the Century Nashville

The year 1900 began an age of progress for Nashville. Panel 1 depicts the massive limestone Union Station railway terminal that opened that year. It was designed by L&N engineer Richard Montfort in the Romanesque Revival style first made popular in the 1880s by Boston architect Henry Hobson Richardson. Panel 2 shows the two-level interior of the 1903 Arcade, one of the country's first enclosed shopping centers, which still links 4th and 5th Avenues. Panel 3 portrays an entrepreneurial newsboy and two pioneering African-American businessmen: Richard H. Boyd, who founded the National Baptist Publishing Board in 1896, and James C. Napier, who started the One Cent Savings Bank in 1904. Panel 4 is a lively account of early automobile traffic in Nashville, in which bicyclists nearly collide with the latest model Marathon motor cars, produced in Nashville from 1910 to 1914. Panel 5 includes the 1890 brick brewery once operated by William Gerst and Company and the still-standing Nashville Stockyard, built in 1919.

Alcove 12: Nashville in the 1910s