Curious Nashville

From the proper vantage point it materializes unmistakably: A gigantic peace sign, cut into roughly 3 acres of forest next to the Nashville International Airport. It can appear to anyone browsing satellite photography, and to air travelers like Nashville attorney Kelsey Bridges. She was the first person (of four) to ask Curious Nashville about what she’d seen. "There’s a giant peace sign, visible only from an aerial view, carved out of a wooded area near the airport. Who’s responsible for it?"

For most people, recycling means placing an empty soda can or some scrap paper in a blue bin. They might take that bin to the curb or to a drop-off site. But beyond that, the process is mysterious, filled with arbitrary rules and a vague reassurance that we’re doing the right thing for the environment. So WPLN listener Mark McCaw, an avid recycler, asked us this question: "What happens if I put the wrong item in the recycling bin?"

Even many Nashville natives don’t know about the head-on train crash at Dutchman’s Curve on July 9, 1918. It killed 101 people — mostly African Americans — and by most counts remains the deadliest train accident in American history. We started looking into it after listener named Russell asked us this question as part of our Curious Nashville series: "I’d like to know more about the wreck at Dutchman’s Curve. How did it happen and what changes resulted from it?"

We tackle a question that’s elemental to Nashville these days: What happens to the waste when old houses get demolished? To explore the subject, WPLN’s Meribah Knight picked a house in Inglewood and followed it from demolition permit to landfill. Then she tracked down the family that called it home for more than 50 years.

Before he was an international superstar, Jimi Hendrix spent a year on Nashville’s Jefferson Street. It’s a chapter in Hendrix’s musical life that many biographers gloss over. We explain why he came here — and what it says today about the city’s most prominent African-American neighborhood. Our question comes from Curious Nashville listener Joe Gramelspacher: "I understand that Jimi Hendrix played on Jefferson Street. What is the musical history of Jefferson Street?"

This episode wanders into supernatural territory in the search for unmarked graves. It began innocently enough: A listener asked us about Nashville’s oldest structures. But as we visited some of the city’s oldest homes, we found family graveyards that date back 200 years or more — and some owners, it turns out, relied on a generations-old practice with mysterious power to find unmarked graves. Which led us to the question: What’s up with “water-witching” in Nashville?

The Curious Nashville inbox has received several variations on the same question: What happened to passenger rail service in Nashville? Residents are right to be curious. Nashville is one of the largest cities in the country to have no rail connection to another city.

The winning question came from veteran Nashville record producer Mitch Dane. "I’ve heard rumors of a mysterious tunnel system winding beneath downtown Nashville. Is this true?" Here's what we found.

WPLN listener Rachael Edge asked the question: "In the Nashville City Cemetery, there’s a grave that says ‘Margaret H. McCutchen — She Turned From Bloodkin.’ What’s the story behind that?" Finding an answer led us on a circuitous path.