Preston Taylor

Taylor's Greenwood Recreational Park, on Lebanon Road, was a destination as much as a business. It had elaborate fountains, gardens, a ballpark, rides and bandstands, and the annual State Colored Fair drew as many as fourteen thousand people in a day. Horse-drawn pleasure wagons met the streetcars to carry visitors to the gate. Fires twice threatened the park, and nothing challenged it until Hadley Park, the first city-owned park for Black residents, opened in 1912. Taylor's first wife, Georgia Gordon Taylor, had been one of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers.

What the plaque says

Preston Taylor Preston Taylor was born a slave on November 7, 1849 in Shreveport, Louisiana. He served as a drummer boy in the Union Army during the siege of Richmond, Virginia. After the Civil War, he secured a contract to build several sections of the Big Sandy Railway from Mt. Sterling to Richmond, Virginia. Taylor came to Nashville around 1884 and three years later purchased thirty-seven acres of land at Elm Hill Pike and Spence Lane. A year later, he established Greenwood Cemetery, Nashville's second oldest cemetery for African Americans. Continued: Founding minister of Lea Avenue Christian Church, Taylor, an undertaker, also founded Taylor Funeral Company, the African-American undertaking business in the city. A founder of the Citizens Savings Bank and Trust Company, in 1905 he established Greenwood Recreational Park, the first park for African Americans. Taylor was among those instrumental in Nashville securing Tennessee A & I State Normal College. Twenty years after his death, the Preston Taylor public housing complex was named in honor of one of Nashville's most powerful African-American leaders.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 1.7 mi
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• Tennessee State Capitol — 2.7 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 2.8 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• National Museum of African American Music — 2.9 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.

More markers nearby

• Lt. William McBryar, Buffalo Soldier Medal of Honor — 0.7 mi
• National Negro High School Basketball Tournament — 0.7 mi
• Tennessee State University — 0.8 mi
• Hadley Park — 0.9 mi