Fort Nashborough was the stockade established in early 1779 in the French Lick area of the Cumberland River valley as a forerunner to the settlement that would become the city of Nashville, Tennessee. The structure that exists today is not the original settlement, but rather a reconstruction. The historic marker reads: “The original stockade fronted on the river slightly north of here, covering an area of about two acres. In that enclosure, on May 13, 1780, representatives of this and other settlements met and adopted the Cumberland Compact for the government of the new settlement. About 500 yards west, April 2, 1781, settlers, assisted by dogs, drove off the Indians in the Battle of the Bluffs.” Mayor West (Raphael Ben West), born in Columbia, Tennessee, was Nashville’s 62nd Mayor of Nashville in office from 1951 to 1963.
