NASHVILLE-ON-THE-BRAZOS, TEXAS. Nashville was on the southeast bank of the Brazos River two miles below the mouth of Little River and five miles northeast of Gause in what is now Milam County. Sterling C. Robertson founded the town in 1835 and named it in honor of his birthplace, Nashville, Tennessee. Nashville was headquarters for Robertson's colony in the early 1830s. Immediately after the Texas Revolution, Nashville was considered by the Texas Congress as a possible site for the capital of the Republic of Texas. The town served as county seat of Milam County from 1837 to 1846, but after the state legislature made Cameron the Milam county seat in 1846, Nashville began to decline. Construction of the Houston and Texas Central Railway at nearby Hearne in 1868 provided the remaining residents with the incentive to move. The post office at Nashville was discontinued in 1868. In 1927 a chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, aided by Milam County, bought seven acres of the Nashville site and deeded the land to the state for a memorial park.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lelia M. Batte, History of Milam County, Texas (San Antonio: Naylor, 1956). Margaret Eleanor Lengert, The History of Milam County (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1949).
