How Jacksonville Became Old Hickory

The village on Hadley’s Bend was not always called Old Hickory. In 1918 the powder-plant town was named Jacksonville, for Andrew Jackson and for The Hermitage a few miles away. In 1920, after the wartime plant had gone idle, the Nashville Industrial Corporation bought the complex for about $3.5 million. In 1923, DuPont returned, bought the plant site and a large part of the village, and converted the works for rayon, with production underway by 1925 and cellophane by the end of the decade. It ran Old Hickory as a company town until it began selling homes to employees in 1946.

The new name arrived with that second beginning. On October 30, 1923, George Gruver Wilson of the corporation asked the Post Office Department to replace Jacksonville with Old Hickory, Jackson’s nickname, citing mail confusion with Jacksonville, Florida. Acting Postmaster General John H. Bartley replied that the post office name would change effective December 1, 1923. The wartime name had honored Jackson. The one that stuck did, too.

Full story coming in the first issue of The Old Hickory Citizen.