Centennial Park

Centennial Park is a large urban park located approximately two miles (three km) west of downtown Nashville, Tennessee, across West End Avenue (U.S. Highway 70S) from the campus of Vanderbilt University and adjacent to the current (2016) headquarters campus of the Hospital Corporation of America. Blacks were banned from the park until the 1960s.This area of Nashville, popular to young professionals, is known as the West End. Its vicinity has seen tremendous recent growth, including two very nearby large-scale apartment developments—Elliston23 and ParkCentral.HistoryThe 132acre park was originally farmland that had belonged to Anne Robertson Johnson Cockrill (1757–1821). She was the first teacher in the state and sister of General James Robertson (commonly referred to as the "Father of Middle Tennessee"). She and her family came from Wake County, North Carolina to Fort Nashborough (now Nashville) in the Donelson Flotilla, led by Andrew Jackson's wife Rachel's father, John Donelson. They stopped for the winter in 1776 when the river iced over and, while the men were out hunting, Indians attacked Fort Wautaga. Anne, although wounded, led the women in a bucket brigade of boiling wash water to fend off Dragging Canoe and other Chickamauguan Indians attempting to set fire to the fort, ultimately driving off the Indians and saving the fort and families. For her valor, she was given a land grant for the land which was turned into the state fairgrounds after the Civil War.