Nashville Tours

Downtown Nashville TN, East Nashville, Nashville Events, Nashville History, Nashville TN, Nashville Tours, Nashville Travel Planning

New Nashville Travel Planning Service

What’s Cookin’ Nashville has launched a new Nashville Travel Planning Service. It’s like having your own personal concierge helping your group maximize your visit to the Nashville TN area. Your vacation time is precious and valuable. Now you can take advantage of our 40 years of Nashville residence. We have also owned and operated Restaurants and the Music Venue The Boardwalk Café.
Not to toot our own horn but with over 8000 local trips we feel we are somewhat experts on the Nashville Experience.
We love our job of guiding visitors to the famous neighborhood restaurants and educating our customers about the history of Nashville. Nashville has a long rich history including being a vital location during the Civil War, Underground Railroad, the entertainment industry and civil rights movement.

Pre-Travel Planning

The Pre-Travel Planning will include a Zoom meeting where your group will be taken through each of the historic Nashville neighborhoods. Your zoom guide will point out attractions and those one of a kind local eateries. The downtown Broadway area is fun but there is so much more to experience in Nashville. Each neighborhood has it’s own story and offers different flavor of Nashville.

Logistics

Our travel planners will help you design schedules and transportation arrangements. To experience the Nashville area there is a lot of ground to cover and a missed calculation in travel plans can result in unnecessary travel costs and again your limited time.

Travel Concierge

We’ll stay in touch during your visit via phone and text. If you hear about something else to add to your schedule bounce it off your Travel Planner first.

Call us today and let us explain our service and your Travel plans to Nashville.
615-673-1112 – Info@WhatsCookinNashville.com

Nashville Travel Planning. Nashville Tennessee

Nashville History, Nashville TN, Nashville Tours, What's Cookin' Nashville

Tennessee State Capitol

A MUST STOP FOR VISITORS TO NASHVILLE

The prominent Nashville hilltop site of what is now the Tennessee State Capitol was formerly occupied by the Holy Rosary Cathedral (no longer extant), the first Roman Catholic cathedral church in Nashville (with the Diocese of Nashville at that time once comprising the entire territory of the State of Tennessee).^[3]^[4]^[5]

The State Capitol was designed by renowned Philadelphia architect William Strickland, who modeled it after a Greek Ionic temple. The prominent lantern structure located above the roof line of the Tennessee state capitol is a design based upon the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens that honors the Greek god Dionysus doing battle with Tyrrhenian pirates.^[6] The cornerstone of the Tennessee state capitol was itself laid on July 4, 1845 and the building was completed fourteen years later in 1859.^[7]

View from the capitol ca. 1865

The American Society of Civil Engineers has listed the building as a civil engineering landmark in recognition of its innovative construction, which made unusually extensive use of stone and was an early example of the use of structural iron. Both the interior and exterior are built with limestone from a quarry about 1-mile (1.6 km) from the site. Some interior columns were built from single pieces of stone, requiring massive wooden derricks to hoist them into place. Wrought iron, instead of wood, was used for the roof trusses to reduce the building’s vulnerability to fire.^[8]

Tennessee State Capitol depicted on an 1864 Confederate $20 banknote

Commercial, convict, and slave labor were used in the project. Fifteen enslaved Black men worked on carving the Capitol’s limestone cellar from 1845 to 1847; Nashville stonemason A.G. Payne was paid $18 a month for their labor. It is believed to be “the most significant project where the [Tennessee] state government rented slave labor.”^[9]

Strickland died five years before the building’s completion and was entombed in its northeast wall. His son, F. W. Strickland, supervised completion of the structure. William Strickland also designed the St. Mary’s Cathedral (located along the base of the capitol hill), as well as Downtown Presbyterian church located just a few blocks away from the state capitol.^[4]

Samuel Dold Morgan (1798–1880), chairman of the State Building Commission overseeing the construction of the Tennessee State Capitol, is entombed in the southeast corner near the south entrance.

Monuments[edit]

Monuments on the Capitol grounds include statues of two of the three Tennessee residents who served as President of the United States: Andrew Jackson by Clark Mills and Andrew Johnson by Jim Gray. The second President from Tennessee, James K. Polk, is buried in a tomb on the grounds, together with his wife, Sarah Childress Polk.^[10]^[11] Other monuments on the grounds include the Sgt. Alvin C. York Memorial by Felix de Weldon, the Tennessee Holocaust Commission Memorial, the Sam Davis Memorial at the southwest corner of the Capitol grounds, the Sen. Edward Ward Carmack Memorial located above the Motlow Tunnel near the south entrance, and the Memorial to Africans during the Middle Passage at the southwest corner of Capitol grounds. The Charles Warterfield Reliquary is a group of broken limestone columns and fragments removed and saved from the State Capitol during the mid-1950s restoration, located near the northern belvedere on Capitol Drive.

The building has housed a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest thanks to Democratic state senator Douglas Henry since 1978.^[12] The presence of the bust has been controversial since its dedication.^[12] Legislation was proposed in 2017 towards moving it to the Tennessee State Museum.^[13]

How ro see nashville in one day, Nashville TN, Nashville Tours, Old Town Trolley Tours, Tennessee Tours, Tourist Services, Uncategorized, What's Cookin' Nashville

Your Vacation…
All Mapped Out For You!

We want you to make the most of your Nashville vacation, so we’ve come up with a tool that’ll help you plan before you go and discover even more once you get there. Our easy-to-use interactive map will help you maximize your Trolley Tour experience, so you won’t miss all the excitement that Nashville has to offer! And since it works great on mobile devices, you’ll have all the information you need during your trip, right in your pocket.

Trolley Routes & Stops
Helpful information
Points of Interest
Shopping & Entertainment
Restaurants & Bars
And much more!
KNOW BEFORE YOU GO
How to See Nashville in 1 Day
VIEW TOURS and ORDER ON-LINE TO SAVE 10%
USE DISCOUNT PROMOTION CODE: # 8412
Nashville & Country Music Hall of Fame Tickets

As the vibrant capital of Tennessee, Nashville has earned several monikers over the years. Once a sparsely settled trading post founded in 1779, the cosmopolitan city is now a popular tourist destination. A leading center of higher education for more than 100 years, it was dubbed the Athens of the South in the 19th century. Because of its reputation as a mecca for singers and songwriters as well as its music publishing industry, Nashville is also heralded as the Country Music Capital of the World. The area centered on the intersection of Second Avenue and Broadway is a popular destination for locals and tourists with its shopping, dining and entertainment venues.

Trolley departs at 9:00 am daily.
Country Music Hall of Fame: Daily 9:00am – 5:00pm.
Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day.
For more information, go to Trolley & Country Music Hall of Fame schedule.

Nashville Night Tours
Sundays through Thursdays: 7pm
Fridays and Saturdays: 7pm and 7:45pm