Germantown | Nashville Traveler

Nashville's oldest neighborhood — settled by German immigrants in the 1850s — is now one of its most desirable. Cobblestone streets, Victorian architecture, Monell's, City Winery, and a farmers market that locals guard jealously. The neighborhood that most feels like a European city district.

Germantown started as Nashville's first suburb, settled in the mid-1800s by German immigrant artisans, brewers, and butchers, and it was folded into the city limits in 1865. What survived from that era is a genuinely unusual concentration of Victorian architecture for a Southern city — enough of it that the neighborhood is on the National Register of Historic Places and has its own city-designated arboretum status from the Nashville Tree Foundation. It's the closest thing Nashville has to a European city district, right down to the narrow, brick-lined streets.

The Nashville Farmers' Market, which traces its roots to the early 1800s, anchors the neighborhood's daytime life — two open-air sheds, a year-round international food hall with roughly two dozen vendors, a garden center, and a culinary incubator that's launched more than one Nashville restaurant. Monell's, housed in a building constructed in 1905, has served family-style Southern food since 1995 — you sit at a communal table, and the fried chicken and biscuits arrive on platters meant for sharing with whoever else is seated there.

Germantown's German heritage isn't just historical trivia — the neighborhood throws an Oktoberfest street festival every year that draws heavily from that history, with beer, music, and food built around it. Between the Farmers' Market, Monell's, and City Winery's live music calendar, it's a neighborhood built for a slow half-day rather than a quick stop.