of present downtown Nashville on Christmas Day, 1779. They cleared the land and built a log stockade they called the Bluff station. Richard Henderson had planned to call the settlement Nashborough in honor of General Francis Nash, who won acclaim in the American Revolution. For a brief time, court records did use the Nashborough designation but there is no evidence that any of the settlers did. Robertson's friend and fellow Watauga settler John Donelson, along with some 60 families, including women and children, came in 30 flatboats and several pirogues down the Tennessee River and up the Cumberland, arriving April 23, 1780. They founded a new community that was then a part of the state of North Carolina. The town was officially created and named Nashville in 1784, by an act of the North Carolina legislature. As the northern terminus of the Natchez Trace, the town quickly developed as a cotton center and river port and later as a railroad hub. It soon became the commercial center of the entire Middle Tennessee region. By 1800, the city had 345 residents, including 136 enslaved Blacks and 14 free Blacks. Early statehood After the failed experiment of the State of Franklin, North Carolina ceded its land from the Allegheny Mountains to the Mississippi River to the federal government. In 1796, that territory was admitted to the union as the state of Tennessee. Nashville at that time was still a small settlement in a vast wilderness, but its central location and status as the state capital made it the political, commercial, financial and religious center of the state. In 1806, Nashville was chartered as a city. The city's first debt and first large-scale public works project was the building of the Nashville Water Works, centered around the reservoir located on a bluff south of the city, now known as Rolling Mill Hill. The money was loaned by Philadelphia businessmen, and part of the amount was used to purchase around 12 enslaved Black men in Virginia to work on the project. The $50,000 loan was insufficient to cover the $55,000 cost of construction, but the rising value of the slaves purchased by the city covered the difference when all but one or two were sold at the end of the project. Water from the Cumberland River is pumped by steam engine into the reservoir, which remains in use today. Andrew Jackson In the War