Franklin, Tennessee: One Hundred Twenty Years to Recover

Franklin, Tennessee was founded on October twenty-sixth, seventeen ninety-nine, named for Benjamin Franklin at the suggestion of Dr. Hugh Williamson, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention for whom Williamson County was already named. The town grew steadily through the early eighteen hundreds as a prosperous trading center, hemp, tobacco, cotton, and the seat of what became one of the wealthiest counties in antebellum Tennessee. By the eve of the Civil War, the plantation economy had made Williamson County genuinely rich. Two American presidents visited. Three Secretaries of War came from the surrounding area.

Then came November thirtieth, eighteen sixty-four. The Battle of Franklin left close to nine thousand men dead, wounded, or missing in five hours, and every home and building in town became a hospital overnight. The losses were not only human. The plantation economy that had sustained the county for decades collapsed with the Confederacy. Historians who tracked the local economy calculated that it took one hundred twenty years, until the nineteen eighties, for Williamson County's economic output to reach its pre-war level.

What Franklin did after that century-long recovery is itself a story. Rather than demolishing its antebellum streetscapes and Civil War sites, the community chose preservation. The Heritage Foundation of Franklin and Williamson County formed in nineteen sixty-eight specifically to resist the suburban development pressure spreading south from Nashville. The result is a downtown that retains much of its nineteenth-century built fabric, brick storefronts, historic churches, the Carter House with its bullet-riddled outbuildings still standing on the battlefield line.

Today Franklin is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, a wealthy suburb absorbing Nashville's overflow. The irony is not lost on anyone paying attention: one of the most prosperous communities in the modern South is built on the ground of one of the Confederacy's most catastrophic military defeats, in a county that spent over a century climbing back to where it started. The streets are lined with history, some of it celebrated, some of it still being reckoned with.