A.N. Eshman and Radnor College

by Mike Slate

He is responsible for the "Radnor" name for Tennessee's first natural area, Radnor Lake. He was president of two colleges. He knew William Jennings Bryan. He wrote books and he ran a publishing house. He helped save a church. He conducted tours across the United States. He had two wives named "Annie B. Eshman." He was a pioneer in the field of automobile driving safety. Nevertheless, few Tennesseans would recognize the name of this gifted farm boy, Andrew Nelson Eshman.

A.N. Eshman, born near Mt. Pleasant, Tennessee, came to Nashville in 1905 from West Point, Mississippi. He was 40 years old, yet he had already served as Huntsville, Alabama's superintendent of schools and as president of West Point's Southern Female College. To the SFC campus in 1898 he had drawn a renowned speaker, William Jennings Bryan, who spoke to an audience of 5,000 there. In Nashville, Eshman bought 20 acres on the Nolensville Pike and built a 250-foot-long brick school building on a hill overlooking the pike. Like the SFC, it was a women's school, which he named Radnor College.

Eshman's use of the name "Radnor" was apparently the first in Nashville. Several years after the school was founded, the L&N Railroad opened Radnor Yards, located just to the west of the college. The railroad evidently appropriated the name of the school for its freight and switching yards. In turn, Radnor Lake was named after the yards. A man-made reservoir in the Overton Hills, the lake provided Radnor Yards with water. The larger question is how Eshman came by the name "Radnor" for his school. No one knows, but it is conceivable that he named the college after Radnor Township near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The famous women's school, Bryn Mawr, is located there, and Eshman, a frequent traveler, no doubt had ridden trains through Radnor on trips to Philadelphia.

Eshman was a Cumberland Presbyterian minister who, along with other dedicated leaders, fought to save the Cumberland Presbyterian Church from losing its identity after its 1906 merger with the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. Thanks to the efforts of these men, the C. P. Church survived, though greatly diminished in size. A casualty of the merger was the Cumberland Presbyterian Publishing House, which had operated for many years on Nashville's Cherry Street (today's Fourth Avenue). In 1913 the Federal District Court in Nashville granted control of the publishing house to the Presbyterians, U.S.A. At that point Eshman did the work of the C.P. publishing house in his own printing plant on the campus of Radnor College. Cumberland Presbyterian publishing continued there until 1924, on what came to be called "Radnor Terrace" on McClellan Avenue. Today the church building of the Radnor Church of Christ is thought to sit approximately where the old printing plant stood.

For reasons not fully understood today, Eshman closed Radnor College in 1914. No doubt a large factor was the death that May of his wife, Annie Bone Eshman, who had served as treasurer of the school. The rising popularity of co-education must also have contributed to the decision. Other local schools for females closed during this same era: Boscobel College in 1914, Buford College in 1920, Columbia's Athenaeum college in 1907, and Franklin's Tennessee Female College in 1913.

After closing the school Eshman converted the main building into apartments and subdivided the acreage into housing lots. He sold lot numbers 24 through 31 to the Board of Trustees of the Cumberland Presbyterian Theological Seminary, who were searching for a permanent location for a ministerial school. The Board did not use the site, however, and the C.P. Church continued to rely on its theological department at Bethel College in McKenzie, Tennessee. If fate had twisted in the other direction, we might today find imposing academic structures along McClellan Avenue and perhaps wrapping around onto Nolensville Pike.

Ostensibly, Eshman had named McClellan Avenue, which led from Nolensville Pike to the main college building, in honor of Judge J.J. McClellan of West Point, Mississippi, another leader in the C.P. Church. In addition to an "Eshman Avenue," West Point also has a street named after McClellan. Thus, Nashville and West Point are historically entwined, yet their interconnected stories have been virtually unknown to either city.

On April 15, 1919, Eshman married Annie Boardman Mack in Hartford, Alabama. This second Annie B. Eshman had been a student at Southern Female College and had taught music at Radnor College. She was younger than Eshman by 18 years.

After their marriage A.N. and Annie moved to the resort town of Estill Springs, Tennessee, where he engaged in writing and conducting tours across the country. On the evening of September 28, 1921, the Radnor Apartments, formerly Radnor College, was totally destroyed by fire. So spectacular was the nighttime fire on the hilltop, an L&N train engineer reportedly sighted the blaze from 47 miles away. The sad news of the loss of the building, however, was no doubt mitigated by the happy event of October 8, 1923. On this date Eshman and Annie, he at 58 and she at 39, became the parents of A.N. Eshman, Jr., born at Estill Springs.

In his later years Eshman served as an agent of the United States Sesquicentennial, pastored churches in Alabama and Tennessee, and authored books including Beauty Spots in America and the Life-Saving Brigade, in which he championed the safe driving of automobiles. He and Annie spent the last years of their lives in Columbia, Tennessee, Annie's home town. A.N. Eshman passed away on January 23, 1951; Annie died on October 26, 1965, and was laid to rest beside her husband in the historic cemetery of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church at McCains, Tennessee.

Now the site of a telephone relay tower, Eshman Hill was crowned with city water tanks for many years following the destruction of the college building. A Radnor College catalogue of 1911-1912 boasted that from the hill one could see up to 30 miles to the east. So prominent is the knoll that it can be seen from Ft. Negley (St. Cloud Hill), giving one pause to wonder what part it may have played in the 1864 Battle of Nashville. This and other captivating aspects of the hill's history await future research.

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