09/02/2026
The Building of the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway: The Transformation of Southern Cheatham County, 1911–1926
The construction of the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway during the second and third decades of the twentieth century represented one of the most consequential changes in the transportation history of Middle Tennessee. In southern Cheatham County, the project was particularly significant because it transformed an older transportation landscape that had been dominated for more than a century by the Nashville–Charlotte Road, later known as the Charlotte Turnpike or Charlotte Pike. The new highway did not simply create an entirely new route across the countryside. Instead, engineers and highway officials frequently utilized portions of older roads while simultaneously straightening, widening, grading, bridging, and in some places completely bypassing the nineteenth-century road.
The result was a remarkable transition. A transportation corridor that had once carried horses, wagons, stagecoaches, mail, livestock, iron, agricultural products, and travelers was gradually redesigned for the automobile and truck. In southern Cheatham County, this transformation can still be traced in the landscape. Modern U.S. Highway 70 follows much of the old transportation corridor between Kingston Springs, Shacklett, and White Bluff, while isolated remnants of the old Charlotte Pike survive in the woods and hollows where the highway bypassed the older road.
The Memphis-to-Bristol project therefore deserves to be understood not merely as a road-building project, but as the final transformation of one of Middle Tennessee's oldest transportation corridors.
The Good Roads Movement Comes to Tennessee
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Tennessee's road system remained primitive by modern standards. Outside the larger towns and cities, many roads were little more than dirt paths that became deeply rutted in wet weather and dusty during dry periods. Farmers frequently faced enormous difficulties transporting their crops to market.
The national Good Roads Movement had begun gathering momentum during the late nineteenth century. Farmers, bicyclists, automobile enthusiasts, businessmen, manufacturers, railroad interests, and Progressive-era reformers increasingly argued that improved roads were essential to economic development.
The arrival of the automobile gave the movement additional urgency.
A road that had been adequate for a horse and wagon could be entirely unsuitable for an automobile traveling at twenty or thirty miles per hour. Steep grades, sharp curves, inadequate bridges, poor drainage, mud, and loose gravel became increasingly problematic.
Tennessee officials increasingly recognized that roads could no longer be treated simply as local conveniences. They were becoming part of a statewide transportation system.
The Tennessee Department of Highways and Public Works was established in 1915. The department's creation represented a major change in the state's approach to road construction and maintenance. Rather than leaving the responsibility almost entirely to individual counties, Tennessee began developing a statewide system of designated highways.
Among the most important of these routes was the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway.
The Tennessee Department of Transportation's official history identifies 1911 as the year the Memphis-Bristol Highway Association was formed, when advocates began working toward a continuous route across Tennessee. The department's historical material also preserves an image of an automobile commission surveying the proposed route.
The Tennessee State Library and Archives likewise identifies the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway as one of the state's earliest major highway projects and preserves a 1911 map of the proposed Memphis–Nashville–Bristol route.
The significance of the project was enormous. The proposed highway eventually extended for roughly 500 miles across Tennessee, connecting Memphis on the Mississippi River with Bristol on the Virginia line.
In the first state highway numbering system, it became State Route 1.
The 1911 Automobile Expedition
The story of the highway's creation is particularly interesting because the route was not simply drawn on a map in a Nashville office.
In 1911, highway advocates actually traveled the proposed corridor by automobile.
The men involved encountered a Tennessee road system that was frequently difficult and sometimes nearly impassable. According to a later account of the project's history, the group traveled east from Nashville toward Bristol and then returned to Nashville before making another journey west toward Memphis. Along the way, they stopped in communities that hoped to persuade the highway planners to bring the new road through their towns.
This was an important moment in Tennessee transportation history. The automobile was still a relatively new technology, and long-distance automobile travel was itself an adventure.
The road planners were therefore confronting two questions simultaneously:
Where should the highway go?
and
What kind of road would automobiles actually require?
Those questions became especially important in Middle Tennessee, where the proposed route had to cross ridges, valleys, streams, and the rugged terrain around the Harpeth River.
Why Southern Cheatham County Was Important
The portion of the proposed Memphis-to-Bristol Highway through southern Cheatham County occupied a particularly important position between Nashville and Dickson County.
The route westward from Nashville was generally planned through Bellevue, Pegram, Kingston Springs, and then into Dickson County. From there it continued through White Bluff, Burns, Dickson, and Tennessee City before proceeding westward toward Memphis.
This was significant because the highway entered an area where an established transportation corridor already existed.
For more than a century, travelers heading west from Nashville had used the Charlotte Road and its successor, the Charlotte Turnpike. The older road crossed the Harpeth River near the mouth of Dog Creek, passed through the region that would become Shacklett, and continued toward White Bluff.
The highway planners therefore had an obvious corridor available to them.
But using an old road did not mean simply paving it.
The old Charlotte Pike had been engineered primarily for horses, wagons, stagecoaches, and agricultural traffic. Its alignment reflected the limitations of nineteenth-century transportation. Roads followed ridges, avoided difficult grades where possible, followed creek bottoms, and used crossings that were practical for wagons.
Automobiles introduced different requirements.
The new highway needed a wider and more stable roadbed. Curves needed improvement. Grades needed to be reduced wherever practical. Drainage had to be improved. Bridges had to accommodate increasingly heavy motor vehicles.
Consequently, the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway would follow the general corridor of the Charlotte Pike in some places while departing from it in others.
Cheatham County Takes Action
The development of the highway required more than state enthusiasm. Local governments had to cooperate.
Cheatham County's early twentieth-century road legislation provides an unusually valuable record of how the project was financed and administered.
In 1917, the Tennessee General Assembly passed a private act creating a Board of Road Commissioners for Cheatham County. The board received broad authority over county roads and could employ district road supervisors.
Two years later, Private Acts of 1919, Chapter 696, authorized the board to borrow up to $40,000 for road purposes, with $15,000 specifically designated for the Memphis-Bristol Highway.
That provision demonstrates how important the highway had become to Cheatham County.
The project was not merely something being imposed on the county by state officials. Local government was expected to contribute financially and administratively to the construction of the road.
The county also had to provide labor and right-of-way under the road laws of the period.
This illustrates one of the central characteristics of early Tennessee highway construction: the new highway system was being built through a partnership among county governments, the State Highway Department, federal funding, and local property owners.
Newspaper Campaigns and the Public Debate
Newspapers played an important role in promoting and debating the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway.
Contemporary newspaper coverage reveals that the route was not universally accepted as a predetermined line on a map. Communities competed for the economic advantages they believed the highway would bring.
This was entirely understandable.
In an era before Interstate 40, a major highway could determine whether a rural community prospered or remained isolated.
A highway brought travelers.
Travelers needed food, gasoline, lodging, repairs, supplies, and services.
Businesses therefore had an obvious incentive to locate near the highway.
A newspaper account from Dickson County illustrates the intense local enthusiasm surrounding the project. Residents understood that having the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway pass through their communities could fundamentally change their economic prospects. In 1917, citizens of Dickson reportedly raised $760 in less than fifteen minutes to pay for surveying the proposed highway through the county.
This was not an insignificant amount for a rural community at the time.
It demonstrates the degree to which local residents regarded the highway as an investment in their future.
Newspaper coverage elsewhere in Tennessee reveals similar enthusiasm. The Cannon Courier, for example, reported in August 1917 that the State Highway Commission had selected the Memphis-to-Bristol and Dixie highways for federal assistance. The newspaper reported that Cannon County expected approximately $19,000 in federal funds over four years for the Memphis-to-Bristol route, combined with state and county funds.
The same article explained that counties along the route were expected to eliminate toll gates and provide right-of-way. If toll gates were not removed voluntarily, condemnation proceedings could be initiated.
This is an important piece of evidence because it demonstrates that the highway project was simultaneously an infrastructure program and a dismantling of the old private turnpike system.
The End of the Toll Road Era
For generations, Tennessee travelers had been accustomed to paying tolls to use privately operated turnpikes.
The Charlotte Turnpike represented this older system.
The Memphis-to-Bristol Highway represented the new one.
Federal and state highway financing was based upon the idea of publicly accessible roads. Consequently, the existence of toll gates was increasingly incompatible with the new highway system.
The 1917 newspaper report from Cannon County makes this transition particularly clear: counties along the designated highway were expected to remove toll gates and provide public right-of-way in order to qualify for the new system of state and federal assistance.
Thus, the construction of the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway contributed to the final disappearance of the private turnpike system.
The Charlotte Pike had already declined substantially because of railroad competition. But the automobile highway represented something different.
The railroad had taken away much of the Charlotte Pike's long-distance traffic.
The automobile highway took away the road itself.
The Route Through Southern Cheatham County
The route through southern Cheatham County is especially interesting because surviving legal descriptions allow portions of the highway's course to be reconstructed with considerable precision.
A 1933 Cheatham County statute describes the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway, State Highway No. 1, crossing the eastern boundary of Dickson County and proceeding eastward to the Dog Creek bridge over the Harpeth River. The same legal description refers to the "old Charlotte Pike" separately from the newer highway.
That distinction is extremely important.
It demonstrates that by 1933, the legal documents recognized the new highway and the old Charlotte Pike as separate transportation features.
The same legislation describes the new concrete bridge over the Harpeth River on State Highway No. 1.
This provides documentary confirmation that the highway's development involved substantial new infrastructure rather than merely renaming the old Charlotte Turnpike.
The old road continued to exist in places alongside the new highway.
In other places, the highway incorporated the old road.
And in still other places, the old road was bypassed entirely.
The Harpeth River Crossing
One of the most important engineering challenges in southern Cheatham County was the Harpeth River.
The Charlotte Pike had crossed the river near the mouth of Dog Creek. This crossing had been important for generations.
The new highway required a modern bridge capable of accommodating automobile traffic.
The later Cheatham County legal description specifically identifies a "new concrete bridge" on State Highway No. 1.
This is an important clue to the physical transformation of the corridor.
The old Charlotte Pike had been designed around nineteenth-century transportation technology. The Memphis-to-Bristol Highway was increasingly being designed around concrete, engineered grades, improved drainage, and modern bridges.
The Harpeth River crossing thus became one of the physical symbols of the transition between the two transportation eras.
The Highway and the Landscape of Shacklett
The highway's arrival also transformed the community of Shacklett.
For generations, the Charlotte Pike had passed through the area, connecting Nashville and Charlotte and providing access to the Harpeth River crossing.
The new highway followed much of the same general corridor.
But its engineering requirements meant that certain portions of the old road could no longer serve as the principal route.
In southern Cheatham County, the modern Highway 70 corridor generally follows the old Charlotte Pike between Shacklett and White Bluff, but not continuously.
Some sections of the old road were bypassed.
The most striking example is the old road segment between the vicinity of Sam's Creek Road and the western end of Dog Creek Road. Historical research into the surviving roadbed indicates that this approximately two-mile section was ultimately isolated from modern traffic after the new highway was completed.
The old road did not disappear immediately.
It remained physically present in the landscape.
Trees grew into the abandoned roadbed. Drainage ditches gradually filled. Brush and forest reclaimed the roadway.
Yet the shape of the old road remained visible.
This is one of the most fascinating aspects of the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway's history: in certain places, the old Charlotte Pike and the modern highway can be viewed almost as layers of transportation history superimposed upon one another.
The 1921 Route Controversy
Newspaper coverage from the early 1920s also reveals that the precise route of the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway remained a subject of public discussion.
A 1921 newspaper article preserved in the South Cheatham County historical record specifically concerns the debate over which route the new Memphis-to-Bristol Highway should take.
This is significant because it demonstrates that the highway's alignment was still politically and geographically consequential even after the project had been underway for years.
The debate reflected a fundamental question facing highway planners throughout Tennessee:
Should the new highway follow existing roads and established communities, or should engineers construct a new alignment that provided a better route for automobiles?
Following an existing road reduced construction costs and simplified right-of-way acquisition.
But existing roads were not always engineered according to modern standards.
A new alignment could provide better grades, fewer curves, better bridges, and faster automobile travel.
The final highway through southern Cheatham County represented a compromise between these competing considerations.
The Highway Becomes State Route 1
The Memphis-to-Bristol Highway was ultimately incorporated into Tennessee's first formal statewide highway numbering system.
The Tennessee Department of Transportation's historical survey explains that the state's initial numbered primary roads included State Route 1, Memphis to Bristol, a highway approximately 550 miles in length. The report describes Route 1 as one of the highest priorities of the early Highway Department.
The numbering of the highway was an important development.
For generations, Tennesseans had identified roads by names:
Charlotte Pike.
Murfreesboro Pike.
Lebanon Pike.
Gallatin Pike.
Dickson Road.
The new system increasingly identified highways by numbers.
Thus, a traveler could now think of the road not simply as the Charlotte Pike but as State Route 1.
The road had become part of a statewide transportation network.
Federal Aid Changes Everything
The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 gave the states a new source of funding for highway construction.
This changed the scale at which roads could be built.
Instead of relying solely upon local property taxes, county road labor, tolls, or private turnpike companies, states could now participate in a coordinated federal-state highway program.
The Memphis-to-Bristol route was ideally suited to this new philosophy because it crossed the entire state.
It connected Tennessee's largest city on the Mississippi River with the important commercial center of Bristol on the eastern border.
The route could therefore be justified not simply as a local road but as an interstate transportation artery.
A federal highway project also brought engineering standards that local roads had previously lacked.
The Highway and the Rise of Concrete Construction
The 1920s witnessed a major change in highway construction materials.
Earlier roads had commonly been dirt, gravel, or macadam.
Concrete increasingly became the preferred material for major highways carrying heavy automobile traffic.
The Tennessee Highway Department's historical bridge survey notes the growing importance of concrete highway construction during this period and describes the Memphis-to-Bristol route as one of the state's most important early state highways.
The surviving legal description of the Cheatham County route specifically refers to the new concrete bridge over the Harpeth River.
This was not merely an aesthetic improvement.
Concrete and engineered road surfaces could withstand traffic loads that would rapidly destroy an unimproved dirt road.
The highway was being constructed for a new transportation economy in which automobiles and trucks were becoming increasingly important competitors to railroads.
The Highway's Economic Impact
The economic consequences of the new highway were profound. For communities along the route, the highway offered access to markets that had previously been difficult to reach. Farmers could move agricultural products more efficiently. Merchants could receive goods more quickly. Travelers could move between communities without depending upon railroad schedules. And businesses could locate directly along the highway. A new roadside commercial culture gradually developed.
Gasoline stations replaced some of the functions once performed by blacksmith shops. Automobile garages replaced wagon and harness repair businesses. Roadside restaurants and tourist accommodations eventually replaced some of the traditional inns and stage stops.
The transportation economy of southern Cheatham County was therefore transformed.
The road continued to carry travelers, but the nature of those travelers had changed.
The stagecoach passenger had become the automobile tourist.
The wagon hauling agricultural goods had become the truck.
The blacksmith had increasingly become the mechanic.
And the toll collector disappeared altogether.
The Highway and the Decline of the Charlotte Pike
The Memphis-to-Bristol Highway did not destroy the Charlotte Pike overnight.
The older road had already been in decline for decades.
The Nashville & Northwestern Railroad had taken away much of its long-distance passenger and freight traffic during the nineteenth century.
By the early twentieth century, the Charlotte Turnpike was already a shadow of the transportation artery it had once been.
The new highway nevertheless delivered the decisive blow.
In southern Cheatham County, some portions of the Charlotte Pike were incorporated into the new highway and effectively continued their transportation function.
Other portions were bypassed.
Once bypassed, those sections lost the traffic that had sustained them.
Eventually, some became local roads while others disappeared beneath vegetation.
The historical record indicates that sections of the old Charlotte Pike remained traversable into the twentieth century, even after the new highway was completed.
This explains why remnants of the old road can still be found today.
They are not simply abandoned nineteenth-century roads.
They are physical evidence of the moment when one transportation system gave way to another.
1926: The Highway Enters a New Era
By 1926, the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway had become one of Tennessee's major transportation arteries.
The creation of the U.S. Numbered Highway System in 1926 provided another major change.
The western and middle portions of the Memphis-to-Bristol route became associated with U.S. Highway 70, while the eastern portion toward Bristol was incorporated into U.S. 11 routes.
For southern Cheatham County, this meant that the road was no longer merely a state project.
It had become part of a national highway system.
The same corridor that had once carried travelers from Nashville to Charlotte in horse-drawn vehicles was now connected to a national network of automobile highways.
The transformation was extraordinary.
A Road That Was Built Over an Older Road
Perhaps the most important point to understand about the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway in southern Cheatham County is that its history cannot be separated from the history of the Charlotte Pike.
The modern highway was not simply constructed independently of the old transportation network.
Instead, it inherited the geography of the older road.
The Charlotte Pike had already discovered the practical route through the countryside.
It crossed the Harpeth at a historically advantageous location.
It followed valleys and ridges.
It connected settlements.
It provided access to White Bluff and Dickson County.
The highway engineers therefore inherited a corridor that had already been tested by more than a century of human travel.
But they modified it to accommodate an entirely different technology.
Where the old road was too narrow, it was widened.
Where curves were too sharp, they could be altered.
Where grades were too steep, they could be improved.
Where bridges were inadequate, new structures were constructed.
Where the old road wandered unnecessarily, the new highway could cut a straighter course.
And where the old alignment could not be economically or practically improved, the highway could bypass it altogether.
The result was a hybrid landscape in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transportation routes were incorporated into twentieth-century highway engineering.
A 1933 Legal Description Preserves the Old and New Roads
One of the most valuable documents for understanding this transformation is the 1933 Cheatham County legislation.
The document repeatedly distinguishes between State Highway No. 1, the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway, and the Old Charlotte Pike.
That distinction proves that the old road had not simply disappeared when the new highway was constructed.
Instead, both existed simultaneously.
This is exactly what we would expect to find in a landscape undergoing transportation transition.
The new highway carried through traffic.
The old Charlotte Pike increasingly served local purposes—or no purpose at all.
Eventually, nature and time erased much of it.
But the legal descriptions preserved the memory of the old alignment.
The Highway as a Monument to the Automobile Age
The construction of the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway coincided with a profound transformation in American society.
The automobile changed the concept of distance.
A trip that had once required a stagecoach, horse, wagon, or train could increasingly be made by private automobile.
Families could travel farther.
Farmers could reach larger markets.
People living in rural communities could travel to Nashville more easily.
Businesses could ship products by truck.
Tourism expanded.
The highway therefore did more than provide a road.
It changed the geographic relationship between communities.
Southern Cheatham County was no longer simply a rural region west of Nashville.
It became part of a major east-west automobile corridor crossing Tennessee.
The Legacy of the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway
The ultimate irony of the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway is that it eventually experienced the same fate that had overtaken the Charlotte Pike.
The old turnpike was displaced by the railroad.
The railroad was challenged by the automobile.
The automobile highway was eventually challenged by the interstate highway system.
When Interstate 40 was constructed through Middle Tennessee decades later, much of the long-distance traffic that had once traveled Highway 70 shifted onto the faster interstate.
Yet Highway 70 survived.
Today, much of the historic Memphis-to-Bristol corridor remains an important highway.
The Tennessee Department of Transportation continues to identify State Route 1 as part of this historic route, and modern U.S. 70 follows much of the old Memphis-to-Bristol corridor between Memphis, Dickson, Kingston Springs, and Nashville.
In southern Cheatham County, the road continues to pass through a landscape layered with transportation history.
Beneath and beside today's pavement are traces of the old Charlotte Pike.
Beneath that road are the older paths and trails that preceded the turnpike.
The corridor therefore represents not one road, but a succession of roads built upon the experience of those that came before.
Conclusion
The building of the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway in southern Cheatham County was one of the most important transportation developments in the region's history.
The project began amid the Good Roads Movement of the early twentieth century and gained momentum after the formation of the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway Association in 1911. The creation of the Tennessee Highway Department in 1915, federal highway assistance beginning with the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, and substantial county participation transformed the project from an ambitious proposal into a functioning statewide transportation system.
Newspaper accounts from the period demonstrate the intense public interest surrounding the project. Communities actively sought to secure the route, citizens contributed money for surveys and construction, and local governments were expected to participate financially. Newspapers also reported the allocation of federal money and the requirement that toll roads be converted into free public highways.
For southern Cheatham County, however, the significance of the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway extended far beyond the arrival of automobiles.
The highway represented the final transformation of the Charlotte Pike.
For more than a century, the Charlotte Road had been one of the principal westward routes from Nashville. It had carried mail, stagecoaches, travelers, agricultural products, soldiers, merchants, and freight through the countryside around Pegram, Kingston Springs, Shacklett, Dog Creek, and White Bluff.
The Memphis-to-Bristol Highway inherited that historic corridor but transformed it for a new technological age.
The old road's bends were straightened.
Its narrow roadbed was widened.
Its bridges were replaced.
Its toll system disappeared.
Its transportation function was transferred from horses and wagons to automobiles and trucks.
And in places where the old road could not be adapted, the new highway simply left it behind.
That process can still be seen today. The modern highway passes through southern Cheatham County, while portions of the old Charlotte Pike survive in the woods, hollows, and fields alongside it. The 1933 county legal descriptions even preserve the distinction between the new State Highway No. 1 and the Old Charlotte Pike, providing documentary evidence of the transition.
In this sense, the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway was not merely a new road.
It was the final chapter in the history of the Charlotte Pike.
The ancient trails of Native peoples had established the geography of movement through the Harpeth Valley. The early frontier roads followed those paths. James Robertson's road to his ironworks established a more permanent transportation corridor. The Charlotte Turnpike later transformed that corridor into a commercial stage and mail route. Railroads then weakened its importance. Finally, the automobile and the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway reshaped the corridor once again.
The highway therefore represents a remarkable continuity in Tennessee transportation history: the technology changed, the road surface changed, the name changed, and the method of transportation changed—but the fundamental geographic corridor survived.
What travelers see today along Highway 70 in southern Cheatham County is consequently more than a twentieth-century highway. It is the latest visible layer of a transportation landscape that has been evolving for centuries.
And in the quiet stretches between Kingston Springs, Shacklett, Dog Creek, the Harpeth River, and White Bluff, portions of that earlier history remain physically preserved—sometimes only a few yards from the modern highway that ultimately replaced it.
Selected Sources and Newspaper Evidence
Tennessee Department of Transportation, History of the Tennessee Highway Department — particularly valuable for the formation of the Memphis-Bristol Highway Association and early state highway development.
Tennessee State Library and Archives, "Happenings in Tennessee" — includes the 1911 map of the Memphis–Nashville–Bristol Highway and a 1923 letter concerning the route.
Tennessee Department of Transportation, A History of Bridge Building in Tennessee — discusses State Route 1, early highway numbering, federal aid, and the Memphis-to-Bristol route.
Cheatham County legislative history — documents the county's 1917 road commission, the 1919 authorization of $40,000 for road purposes including $15,000 for the Memphis-Bristol Highway, and the 1923 legislation establishing its route through the county.
Cheatham County Private Acts, 1933 — particularly useful for identifying the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway, State Highway No. 1, the new concrete Harpeth River bridge, and the separate "Old Charlotte Pike."
Cannon Courier, August 3, 1917 — contemporary newspaper reporting on state designation of the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway, federal funding, and removal of toll gates.
Dickson County newspaper research — documents the 1916–1917 local campaign to secure completion and surveying of the highway through Dickson County.
South Cheatham County historical research — preserves references to 1916, 1917, and 1921 newspaper articles concerning the development and proposed routing of the highway and its eventual effect on the Charlotte Pike.
I have included a couple of photos of the new highway when it was first opened to traffic in 1926 below, as well as many newspaper articles discussing the Memphis-Bristol Highway.
