Timeline | Volume 1

1897 – The Centennial Exposition opens with the Parthenon as its centerpiece.

1900 – Union Station opens.

1902 – Centennial Park is acquired by the city, marking the beginning of Nashville's public park system.

1902 – National Life Insurance Company is founded.

1903 – The Arcade opens.

1904 – The city's first Carnegie Library opens at the corner of 8th Avenue, North, and Union Street.

1904 – Downtown street names are changed to numbered streets.

1904 – Nashville's first skyscraper is constructed at the southeast corner of Fourth Avenue, North, and Church Street.

1904 – The One-Cent Savings Bank, now Citizens Bank, opens.

1904 – Lockeland Spring water wins a prize at the St. Louis Exposition.

1905 – The African American community institutes a streetcar boycott to protest a new law requiring separation of the races on electric streetcars.

1907 – Tony Sudekum opens the first movie theater, The Dixie, on 5th Avenue, North, next to the Arcade.

1907 – Theodore Roosevelt visits Nashville.

1908 – Ex-Senator and Prohibitionist leader Edward Ward Carmack is shot on 7th Avenue, North, near Union Street by his political adversaries.

1909 – The college descended from Davidson Academy, Cumberland College, the University of Nashville, and Peabody Normal College becomes George Peabody College for Teachers.

1909 – Statewide Prohibition is passed over Governor Patterson's veto.

1910 – The Marathon Motor Car is manufactured in Nashville.

1910 – The Hermitage Hotel opens in downtown Nashville.

1910 – The world's first night airplane flight takes off from Cumberland Park in Nashville.

1911 – A Model T Ford climbs the steps of the Capitol to prove that the automobile could replace the horse.

1911 – Nashvillian James C. Napier becomes Registrar of the U.S. Treasury.

1912 – Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State Normal School, later Tennessee State University, opens.

1912 – The Eighth Avenue Reservoir ruptures, flooding the South Nashville area nearby.

1912 – Goo Goo Candy Bar is concocted.

1914 – The National American Woman Suffrage Association meets in Nashville.

1916 – East Nashville is devastated by fire.

1917 – World War I Begins

1918 – The town of Old Hickory and a powder plant are built by DuPont.

1919 – World War I Ends

1919 – 18th (Prohibition) amendment is ratified.

1919 – "Hampton Field" becomes Nashville's first airfield.

1920 – Tennessee becomes the 36th and deciding state to vote for ratification of the 19th (Woman Suffrage) Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

1920 – The first Nashville symphony orchestra was organized.

1925 – Grand Ole Opry begins.

1925 – The War Memorial Building is constructed to expand state office space.

1927 – The city buys 131 acres in West Nashville for the first airport, McConnell Field.

1927 – Percy Warner Park, Tennessee's largest municipal park, is established.

1929 – Black Tuesday, the great depression begins.

1931 – The Parthenon reopens in its permanent form.

1933 – Roosevelt announces the New Deal.

1933 – A tornado wreaks havoc on East Nashville.

1937 – The present Davidson County Courthouse is completed and opened.

1937 – Nashvillian William Edmondson becomes the first African American to be given a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

1937 – American Airlines lands the first plane in the new airport.

1938 – The Nashville Housing Authority is created.

1941 – World War II begins with attack on Pearl Harbor.

1941 – Buses replace electric streetcars.

1941 – The first Iroquois Steeplechase is run.

1943 – Cornelia Fort becomes the first woman pilot to die on war duty in American history.

1943 – The Grand Ole Opry moves to Ryman Auditorium.

1945 – World War II ends.

1945 – Three WSM engineers open "Castle Studio," the first recording studio, in the Tulane Hotel.

1945 – The Children's Museum, now the Cumberland Science Museum, opens on Rutledge Hill.

1946 – Walter Sharp leads the founding of the Nashville Symphony.

1949 – The Capitol Hill Redevelopment Project is approved as the nation's first urban renewal project.

1950 – Capital Records becomes the first major company to locate its director of country music in Nashville.