Fort Nashborough was the original stockaded settlement from which the city of Nashville grew, built in the winter of 1779 to 1780 by parties of settlers led by James Robertson, who traveled overland from East Tennessee, and John Donelson, who brought additional families down the Tennessee, Ohio, and Cumberland rivers by flatboat. Sited on a bluff above the Cumberland River at a salt lick known as French Lick, the two-acre log stockade enclosed roughly twenty cabins and blockhouses and was not a military garrison but a civilian refuge, built so pioneer families could live, sleep, and store provisions behind protective walls while clearing land, hunting, and planting corn and other crops in the surrounding bottomlands. In May 1780 settlers meeting at the fort adopted the Cumberland Compact, an early self-governing charter that organized courts and militia for the scattered Cumberland stations before any formal territorial government existed. As the threat of attack eased through the 1780s, families gradually moved out to establish farms and stations of their own, and the fort was effectively abandoned by the mid-1790s as the town of Nashville, incorporated in 1784, expanded around and beyond it. No original structure survives; a 1930s log reconstruction stood on the original riverfront site until it was removed in 2015, and the site is now interpreted through the Fort Nashborough History Center, a renovated plaza and exhibit space that commemorates the fort's founding role and the Native American history of the area.