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Last week, I was perusing Tennessean.com and stopped on this headline: "Southwestern former CEO Dortch Oldham mourned." I read about a tremendous man who had made his own success and helped countless others succeed.
The headline caught my eye because we've all driven down Oldham Drive a thousand times on the way to the post office or the library. And Dortch Lane is perpendicular to Oldham. "Dortch" and "Oldham" aren't common names. Surely this man and our streets are somehow related, right? Yes, they are.
Dortch Oldham Jr. told me the story. "He wanted to do something he'd never done," he says of his late father. And in the early '80s, creating a development out in the sticks was something he'd never done. He had a reputation for pushing himself. In 1919, Oldham had left home in Pleasant Shade, Tenn., at age 16 to seek a job he'd heard about with Southwestern Co. selling Bibles door-to-door. By the mid-1960s, Oldham, then president and majority owner of the company, and other shareholders sold the company. He later served on many boards and was very active in the Republican Party and had other business interests.
And, then, in 1980 or so, he and Sam Johnson started building a little community in Nolensville.
"I can remember when there was nothing out there, maybe an antique store," says Oldham Jr.
Nolensville was so far away to most Nashvillians at the time, that Oldham built the convenience store and the strip mall on Oldham Drive to entice people out here. For a time, the development was going to be named Oldham Heights. "But they decided that would just be too weird," says Oldham Jr. "Street names were enough."
So, in this case, names mean something. So, the next time we head to the post office, library or the convenience store, it's kinda cool to know what road we're really on. |