Goodlettsville: Mansker's Station to the Goodlett Family

The land where Goodlettsville now sits was first marked on the map by Kasper Mansker, a long hunter who built a fortified station here in the winter of seventeen seventy-nine to eighty along Mansker Creek, near a salt lick that drew both game and settlers. Mansker had been ranging Middle Tennessee since at least seventeen sixty-nine, one of the scouts who opened the Cumberland basin to Anglo settlement. Indian raids repeatedly threatened the station in its early years.

The community later took the name Goodlettsville, honoring a pastor named Goodlett, who led the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in the late eighteen forties and early eighteen fifties. Goodlettsville formally incorporated in nineteen fifty-eight, straddling both Davidson and Sumner counties.