Neighborhood Story Project Spotlight: Pulaski’s North End
The Neighborhood Story Project (NSP) is a place-based research project that brings together neighbors to gather research, share stories, and have an active voice in the future of their home communities. Wolf Gap Education Outreach, a history and nature education center in Giles County, Tennessee, was in the first NSP facilitator training cohorts led by Amie Thurber.
The Project
When Kelly Hamlin, Wolf Gap’s Executive Director, saw the concept for Humanities Tennessee’s NSP project, she saw it as an opportunity to expand their existing local history, research, and advocacy work. She reached out to her community contacts in Pulaski’s North End neighborhood to collaborate on a project, which they undertook in 2018.
Pulaski is the seat of Giles County, which is located in Middle Tennessee near the Alabama border. Highway 31 bisects the city, and the North End is the area to the north of Courthouse Square and branching off of the highway. After the Civil War, a free Black community formed in the North End where there had been a strong Union Army presence during the war. It was a predominantly Black area with a thriving Black business district during the Jim Crow era and remains a center of Pulaski’s African American community today. In recent years, development and civic investment has occurred on the other side of town while largely bypassing the North End.
The North End NSP focused on researching the community’s history, discussing what the neighbors wanted, and deciding what to do about it. The Pulaski team did interviews and surveys with residents to pull out themes to highlight at a community event attended by North End residents and elected officials. These themes included highlighting what people love about the North End, housing issues arising with decreased home ownership, a desire to see community events grow and expand, safety concerns, a hope to see economic development in their area, and the need to build connections between residents and public officials.
The NSP team pulled five specific requests for elected officials from the process. These included improvements to sidewalks in residential areas along the highway and to W.D. Savage Park, partnerships with police to maintain open communication and police presence, fixing a longtime drainage problem, and a standing advisory group of North End residents to help with communication as growth occurs.
The Lasting Outcomes
According to Hamlin, some of these requests have panned out. The county addressed the drainage issue, sidewalk improvements, and beautification along North First Street through a large grant in coordination with the Tennessee Department of Transportation. There are more community events taking place at W.D. Savage Park, which is something residents have initiated. Hamlin believes, “it may be that starting to have these conversations with people about their community and the things that they like and that maybe they used to like more and we’ve lost has made people think more about using [the park] for events.”
Another positive development in the North End is that the city invested significant funds to renovate and beautify a small park in the area. During the NSP research, residents discussed the negative activities that had become associated with the park in recent years. As part of the city’s Community Advisory Council on Inclusive Recognition & Acknowledgement (CACIRA), they installed the life-sized bronze sculpture “Resurrection of Valor” to commemorate the area’s United States Colored Troops who fought in the Union Army during the Civil War. Hamlin says, “Reframing what that park is has helped have another view of [the North End] because it’s bringing people to that side of town who wouldn’t have otherwise because there’s news about this statue.”
Hamlin has observed that in the six years since the NSP project, there has been a higher representation of Black folks “who live in the North End, who are connected to the things that matter to people who live in the North End, who are willing to speak truth to City Hall and [are] not afraid to do that.” Additionally, one of the NSP committee members was appointed to the County Commission to fill an empty seat and has since been reelected twice to represent the North End of Pulaski.
Future Implications
Hamlin believes that the North End NSP is still impacting the community. “Bringing people together to not just talk about these things as a community and to be heard as a community…was an important galvanizing moment that helped shape expectations going forward,” she observes.
In 2021, the University of Tennessee opened the UT Southern Campus at the former Martin Methodist College, which is located close to the North End. While this is an opportunity for the city and community, it also puts the North End in a potentially vulnerable position as the college expands. Hamlin says, “the process we went through doing [the NSP] and the experience people had was a valuable exercise in building your muscles for continuing to defend your community going forward. People recognize that it’s going to continue and these are things we’re going to have to continue to speak up about, but now City Hall is used to hearing from people in the North End.”
On an individual level, Hamlin feels that the NSP process built up her skill set “of pulling together what this place means to different people, and processing that to [ask] what does that mean to us today and how do we go forward.” She continues to put the framework into practice with her work at Wolf Gap Education Outreach.
NSP 2025
Humanities Tennessee is currently accepting letters of interest for the 2025 Neighborhood Story Project cohort. The application period ends on December 6, 2024. If you’re interested in bringing the Neighborhood Story Project to your community, contact Melissa Davis to schedule a meeting.