Road to Nashville by Frank Hohenberger, January, 1920.
Brown County Roads
~ by Julia Pearson
Driving through Brown County today often has“ Take me home, country roads” as a soundtrack in our minds. Not in the beginning, though. An estimated 150 settlers, with needed supplies for homesteading loaded into oxen-pulled wagons, made their way on narrow paths through hardwood forests, populating the hills by 1830.
On February 4, 1836, the Indiana State Legislature passed a bill to form Brown County from sections of Bartholomew, Monroe, and Jackson Counties. The county is 320 square miles of rugged wilderness. Jacksonburg was chosen as the county seat in 1836 and the town was renamed Nashville, after Nashville, Tennessee, in 1837. Records show that by 1840 the population had risen to 1,364.
Villages evolved in pockets of the countryside and were self-contained, with busker wagons bringing hardware and household supplies to homesteads. These communities had their own blacksmith, church, post office, medical doctor, and one-room schoolhouse. Dirt trails were often rutted so deep that wagons pulled by oxen or horses were not possible, and horseback was the only alternative. Brown County family-lore mentions that some folks never made the trip to Nashville in their entire lives.
Cars showed up in Nashville in 1913, before the county roads were ready for them. In the special-issued hardbound pictorial by the Brown County Democrat entitled 175 Years of Brown County, the black and white photos show the story of Brown County roads better than any wordsmith listing dates and descriptions. The late Rob Lawless was quoted:“ Nashville was very isolated. The road into town was a riverbed. A lot of artists walked into town— that was a means of getting here in the early 1920s.”
State Road 135 from Nashville north to Morgantown was built and hard-surfaced in 1933. On the four mile stretch of highway between Nashville and Bean Blossom is the Bean Blossom Overlook, a panoramic view of the entire Bean Blossom Valley. This was a popular pullover for day trippers making a Sunday afternoon one-
46 Our Brown County Jan./ Feb. 2023