WSM tower would stand out among local historic sites

Posted on by Listify Me

<!–Saxotech Paragraph Count: 9
–>

There are 138 Williamson County sites on the National Register of Historic Places.

Most are houses, and the vast majority list years of significance in the 19th century.

We don’t have anything similar to a National Register site in Pine Bluff, Ark.; the only known surviving single-arch McDonald’s hamburgers sign, erected in 1962 and listed on the register in 2006.

If the State Review Board recommends it today, and the Department of Interior agrees, Brentwood’s iconic WSM transmitting tower at Concord Road and Interstate 65 will become the newest historic site on the register. It was built in 1932.

The oldest site in Williamson County is called Old Town. It is off the Old Natchez Trace near the Harpeth River and was a Native American site inhabited some time between 500 and 1000 A.D. Ranking second in antiquity is another Brentwood site, the Fewkes Mounds. The site off Moores Lane includes large burial mounds and is thought to have been a holy place to Native Americans who inhabited the area up and down the Little Harpeth River between 1000 and 1500 A.D.

The WSM tower is unique as a technological/industrial structure. The only thing comparable on the register is the Harpeth Furnace in Fernvale, an early 19th-century smelter.

There aren’t many commercial sites on the register at all, aside from the late 19th-century Thompson Store in Thompson’s Station, the turn of the century era Huff’s Store in Burwood, and three banks from the early 1900s, the Bank of College Grove, the Bank of Nolensville and Thompson Station Bank.

I’m sure there was more than a little derision when the McDonald’s sign was listed in Arkansas. But it is hard to see what contemporary things will be considered historically significant, and which are expendable as society moves forward. I can imagine businesses opening in “the historic CoolSprings Galleria” years from now.

As for the WSM tower, I can’t imagine an argument against listing it. It truly is an amazing structure that, as the Register qualifications state, has “made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history.”