The MTSU Bass Street Community Archaeology Project at Fort Negley

Project Background

The MTSU Anthropology Program’s Bass Street Community Archaeology Project began in 2017 as part of professor Dr. Andrew Wyatt‘s Introduction to Archaeology class. The objective was to teach the students in the class the basics of archaeological fieldwork, with upper-level students and MTSU Alumni assisting with the instruction. Dr. Wyatt wanted the students to get hands-on experience at a real archaeological site in the local area that held significance to the history of Middle Tennessee. At the suggestion of MTSU Geoscience Department faculty member Zada Law, Dr. Wyatt decided to focus on the site of the 19th-century Bass Street Community at Fort Negley Park- one of the earliest African American neighborhoods in post-Civil War Nashville. 

Since 2017, Dr. Wyatt and project Co-Director MTSU alum Clelie Cottle Peacock have continued conducting excavations at the site, teaching Intro to Archaeology students and volunteers, sharing their work with the public, and building relationships within the Middle Tennessee community- including collaborations with descendants and former residents of the neighborhood, the Nashville African American Cultural Alliance, Metro Parks, and Vanderbilt University’s history department.   

The neighborhood at Bass Street was a thriving yet marginalized community up until the 1960s when it was demolished and the residents forcibly relocated for the construction of the interstate system. The project’s research questions, developed with descendant input, focus on how residents of the Bass Street Community constructed and maintained their collective identity within the Jim Crow Era South and through the Civil Rights Era. Together with our collaborators, MTSU is helping to write a more inclusive history of our nation by recovering a significant chapter in Nashville’s past that was almost lost to time. 

Acknowledgements

We would like to recognize and thank the former residents and descendants of the Bass Street neighborhood, the Fort Negley Visitors Center and Park staff, our professional and community collaborators, the Friends of Fort Negley organization, Metro Nashville Parks and Recreation, and the Tennessee Wars Commission, which contributed grant funding and support for the creation of this website.