Growing up at Hundred Oaks was quite an experience for young Carolyn Smartt.
“My first word was ‘ice,’” she says. It was a word she would have heard a lot from the bustling commercial
kitchen at the log house. While her mother was working and overseeing the staff
that kept the business running, keeping
an eye on young Carolyn was a communal project.
“They used to put me in a box in the kitchen so the help could watch me while
they were cooking,” she says.
It was a desire to have time with her daughter that led Virginia to close her
business in 1955, when Carolyn was 3. For the next 10 years, Hundred Oaks was
simply home. Carolyn grew up with her menagerie of pets, exploring the grounds
and having elements of a rural childhood within sight of two of the busiest
streets in Nashville.
But the area was changing. Their next door neighbor’s property was sold and a Pepsi bottling plant was built, complete with rumbling
delivery trucks streaming in and out all day long. By 1965, Hundred Oaks was an
island in the midst of what had become a commercial district, and the Smartt
family decided to sell the property to the mall developers, Belz Investment
Company of Memphis.
“I was excited,” Suschnick says. Most of her school friends lived in neighborhoods surrounded by
other families with children. She didn’t. Most of her friends could ride their bikes around the neighborhood. She
couldn’t.
“In ’65, I was excited,” she says. “I thought it would be great to have a new house in a subdivision.
“I know now what [my parents] lost when [they] sold that house.”
Suschnick’s parents wanted to have the log house moved to another plot of land, but those
plans didn’t work out and the house was torn down when mall construction began in late
1965. She believes some of the logs were salvaged and were used in the
construction of other log houses in Middle Tennessee.
A retailing wonderland
It had J. C. Penney, Harvey’s, Woolco and Woolworth’s. At its groundbreaking, the mayor, the wife of the governor, a U.S.
Congressman, and several prominent businessmen all smiled for newspaper
photographers as the VIPs turned over shovelfuls of dirt.
On the day 100 Oaks Mall opened, the superlatives were like signposts to a
retailing wonderland. Almost 19 acres of shopping under one roof! A project
cost of more than $15 million! Sixty stores! Parking for 4,000 cars!
The first multi-screen movie theater (two screens under one roof!), the Martin
Twin, was located in a separate building at the south end of the mall.
The newly constructed interstate system made it easier for shoppers from all
over Middle Tennessee to stream into Nashville, although, in a quirk that was
to haunt the mall for two decades, somehow there was no exit that led to 100
Oaks, despite the fact that traffic streaming by on I-65 was clearly visible from its parking lot.
Still, shoppers came. For years one of the most popular Christmas tree lots in
Nashville would set up across the street every year to accommodate people who
wanted to purchase their gifts and their tree in one convenient location. Local
favorites such as Mills Book Store, Shoney’s and Port o’ Call Records located inside did a brisk trade.
But retailing continued to evolve, as it does, and that was not a good thing for
100 Oaks. Several other malls opened in the region, most of them bigger and
more fabulous and with better highway access, and began doing to 100 Oaks what
100 Oaks had earlier done to downtown Nashville—stealing its customers.
As the flow of customers dried up, most of the stores closed, including
flagships J.C. Penney and Woolco. Some stores hung on and tried to make a go of
it, and some new ones opened, including Burlington Coat Factory and a
MegaMarket grocery store on the south end of the property.
