Richland Creek Bridge

The bridge opened a subdivision carved from the old Belle Meade Farm, which was dissolved in 1906 when a syndicate formed the Belle Meade Land Company. The company sold lots, and Luke Lea worked to build the roads, a water main and a streetcar line. Jackson Boulevard's name honors the Harding-Jackson family of the earlier plantation. A plat of November 1915 later divided fourteen larger tracts into 161 lots in the adjoining golf links subdivision, which has curving streets and planted trees. The landscape designer Ossian Cole Simonds is very likely to have designed neighbouring subdivisions.

What the plaque says

Richland Creek Bridge In 1906 O. C. Simonds and Co. of Chicago designed this graceful 50-ft concrete arch, stone-faced, closed spandrel bridge over Richland Creek as the entry to a new 250-acre residential subdivision named Belle Meade Park. Jackson Boulevard is named after the Harding-Jackson family, which had owned the earlier Belle Meade Plantation. The entry helped to retain the natural and picturesque beauty of the plantation's old deer park.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 5.1 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.
• Fort Negley — 5.4 mi
  The largest inland stone fort of the Civil War, built in 1862 on St. Cloud Hill by more than 2,700 conscripted Black laborers, hundreds of whom died.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 5.7 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.
• Tennessee State Capitol — 5.7 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.

More markers nearby

• Belle Meade Deer Park — 0.4 mi
• West Meade — 1.3 mi
• Battle of Nashville: Harding Road — 1.4 mi
• Richland — 2.1 mi