E. Thomas Wood’s Old News Is Good News

Anyone who reads the Nashville City Paper or NashvillePost.com with regularity is familiar with the work of E. Thomas Wood, the veteran reporter who’s been alive and kicking in local journalism since the 1980s. These days, in addition to his regular journalism duties and assorted other projects, Wood has taken on a project that brings back words written about Nashville long before he was even born. Old News takes a look back at the stories that Nashville was talking about – and the stories from Nashville that the rest of the country heard – as far back as the 1780s. From tales of Captain Tom Ryman, to the goings-on at legendary radio station WSM, to the origin of East Nashville’s own Lockeland Springs, the site offers those of us who live here today a glimpse into our city’s past that you’ll rarely find anywhere else without the benefit of some serious library time.

Wood took some time out of his busy schedule last week to answer a few questions about his new site. Here’s what he had to say about Old News.

Downtown Nashville has changed a lot since the 1880s

East Nashville Blog: What sources do you draw on to write your posts? And more specifically, how do you get your hands on those sources?

E. Thomas Wood: Directly or indirectly, most of my source material has an online origin.

Much to my wife’s dismay, I have filled half our garage with bound volumes of old Nashville newspapers purchased off eBay since 2003. I have a partial volume from 1884, a full three-month one from 1886 that the Library of Congress deaccessioned, and many from the 1920s and early 1930s. The closest thing I have to a hobby is that I spend all-too-infrequent moments of spare time down there going through the volumes.

Because most are in advanced states of decay, I try to preserve interesting items by clipping them and putting them into protective materials. In no systematic fashion, I have scanned several hundred of those clippings into image files. In working on history-related news items over the years, I have had occasion to process some of the scans into text with OCR software. Much of the fodder for Old News comes from the garage.

I am also discovering more and more historical documentation that others have digitized in recent years. The Google Books initiative has scooped up a random assortment of long-forgotten texts from a few major university libraries around the country, and when they are old enough to be definitely in the public domain, Google makes it possible to download entire books as .pdf files. For example, there’s an 1881 Nashville city directory that is fully available online – you’d otherwise have to pull library microfilm to access that resource.

I hope to add a page of online resources to Old News soon, pulling together as many as possible of the library and archive sites out there that now include free access to local newspapers from around the country. Out-of-town papers often picked up Nashville news in the 19th century, even before the Associated Press was formally organized after the War.

Google Books has been a boon to historical researchers

ENB: When they come into contact with old sources, people who aren’t steeped in history are often quick to note the differences between our modern society and the folks they’re reading about. While there are certainly many differences between us and our forebears, there must be plenty that we share with them as well. Are there any particular concerns that past residents of Nashville shared with those of us who live here today – perhaps something that we might not expect to have in common with them?

ETW: Oh, sure:

• I remember reading a mid-1880s account about the growing menace of what we would call prescription drug addiction in Nashville.
• In a Tennessee Gazette notice from the early 1800s, Dr. John Sappington vigorously rejects the accusation that he has violated an agreement among local physicians not to undercut each other’s billing rates. OK, the good doc would be in trouble with the regulators today, but it’s interesting to ponder how Nashville was already a place where healthcare entrepreneurs were trying to find ways to fiddle the maximum reimbursement rate from whoever was paying.
• In an item on President-elect Zach Taylor’s sojourn through town in 1849, I suspect I may have stumbled on the origins of “Yee-haw!” – “We do not huzzah, nor hurrah, we Western folks; but show our popular gratification by a sort of a cross between an Indian war-whoop and a whoorooh.”
• And with Christine O’Donnell’s warnings fresh on our minds, we moderns surely cannot fail to pay heed to the 1864 Nashville newspaper ad that promised a cure for “Onanism or Self Abuse.”

Martha O'Bryan never married after her fiancé was executed by the Union army.

ENB: On the About page at Old News, you mention upcoming material about “maritime pirates, con men and domestic terrorists that worked for the Confederate States of America, one being the beau of a certain Martha O’Bryan, who never married after the Yankees hanged him in 1865.” Can you give our readers a snippet of what they can expect when you begin publishing about this nefarious group?

ETW: All I can say at the moment is that I own the domain names piratesoftheconfederacy.com and rebelpirates.com – and that I have gotten to know a rogues’ gallery of dashing and despicable men in gray whose story has been heretofore untold. I have some great material, and I just hope I can carve out time someday to make a book of it.

I’m committed to finishing another untold story first, also full of surprises – the biography of Lt. Gen. Frank M. Andrews, Nashville boy for whom Andrews Air Force Base was named and who might have been Eisenhower had he lived until 1944. I have done a huge amount of research on that one.

The MacArthur Genius Grant has persistently passed me over in recent years, so barring a lottery win or other liberation from quotidian word-slavery, I may have to wait for some future period of unemployment or imprisonment to get either of those projects completed.

ENB: Much as your writings stand with one foot in the present and the other in the past, your work stands with one foot in traditional print outlets and the other online. What advantages does working online have that traditional print work never afforded you? What aspects of publishing online are less satisfactory than getting your words out the old-fashioned way?

ETW: The simplest advantage is that I have been able to put out as many stories as I like on Old News, at the length I see fit. When I did a year-long local history series for the Nashville Scene in 1993, I put a lot of effort into producing 225-word items every week. I enjoyed that challenge, and today I try to make sure I don’t fall so in love with any historical material that I run on at excessive length, but I can write to the extent I see fit on the blog. Since I’m only updating it once a week, I have erred on the side of long posts with several points of entry, so far.

As a journalist in general, I am of course living through a revolution. How my work reaches the public has changed, and how I do my work has changed. I count myself lucky that I learned to gather certain forms of information when it was not easy to get at it – going to federal and county courts in person to look for newsworthy litigation, for example. But I’m infinitely more productive now than I was on the business desk of The Tennessean in 1994. I sift through hundreds of bits of data from government records and a host of other online sources from my desk every day. I still use shoe-leather where it makes sense to do so, but the technological edge is what lets me turn daily stories at a pace that allows me to divert to longer-form investigations several times a year while still holding up my day-to-day obligations at The City Paper and NashvillePost.com.

Personally, I can’t see much downside to the fact that people are rapidly moving toward online news as the primary way they keep up with community happenings. I’ll hedge there: It’s certainly a problem that online advertising has tended to lag online eyeballs throughout my industry, but I suspect things will soon change on that front. And I am vain enough to enjoy having a cover story out in the CP on a Monday morning, knowing some folks will read the issue who will never go to our website. Overall, though, I’m just grateful to be able to report on the news that matters in whatever forum is available to me. It feels quirky and random to have survived in this business since the late 1980s, when the industry has flushed out some very fine talent during that time for reasons unfathomable.

Edgefield (now East Nashville) almost became the home of Vanderbilt University

ENB: And finally: With its high concentration of artists, musicians and other creative types, East Nashville has developed a reputation as one of Nashville’s hippest areas. What would do you think residents of this area from bygone years think of what’s become of their part of town?

ETW: Well, it’s not hard to imagine the burghers of Shelby and Fatherland from a century ago being absolutely appalled at what their bedroom community has turned into – and I hope the old stuffed shirts are, somewhere in the ether – leaving aside of course the unknown number of them who were privately gay or otherwise freethinking.

But imagine how the place would have developed as a college town. It almost happened. My wife Nicki Pendleton Wood wrote about it in her book Nashville: Yesterday & Today, published last summer:

In 1873, railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt offered $500,000 in funding to the Methodist church if it would establish a new university “in or near Nashville.” Westside leaders seem to have taken it for granted, at first, that Bishop Holland N. McTyeire would choose a site within the city limits. But Edgefield’s leaders had other ideas.

Edgefield pitched two locations to Bishop McTyeire. One was on the lands of the Hobson family, due south of Hobson’s Chapel, the 1853 Methodist church that stood where the 3 Crow Bar now presides over Five Points. The other was Payne’s Hill, in what is now the Maplewood area.

Citizens of “the lovely eastern suburb,” as press accounts referred to Edgefield, passed the hat and committed some $30,000 in incentive funding that would go toward the cost of land acquisition. Nashville proper came up with only $18,000.

The competition from across the river jolted Nashvillians. “Now what will Nashville do?” asked the Union and American. “Will her citizens stand longer idle?” Announcing a urgent strategy meeting at McKendree Church, the newspaper fretted: “We hope that something will be done to awaken the people of Nashville to the importance of the opportunity they seem about to lose.”

In the end, though, McTyeire selected the Taylor farm, across the river and west of the city, for his university.

Thanks again to E. Thomas Wood for taking the time to answer these questions – and for creating Old News, which looks like it will be a fantastic resource on local history for many years to come.

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