Making history with a passion for the public

Making history with a passion for the public

Alumnus Ken Fieth worked to make history more than preservation at the Metro Archives for three decades.

Janel Shoun-Smith | 08/12/2026

When Ken Fieth (LA '76, BA '80), walked into the Davidson County Metro Archives 33 years ago, he came with a particular passion in his heart: The history profession is not just about preserving the past, it's about sharing the past and making it a valuable tool and resource for the public.

As the new director, Fieth proceeded to carry out that vision, building the Metro Archives almost from the ground up, until he retired in 2024. The archives of today, housed in the Nashville Public Library downtown, have become a well-known and respected research resource for the community at large.

When Fieth, a native of Nashville and Brentwood resident, became director of the Metro Archives in 1993, it didn't have much of a public-facing presence, he said. During his tenure, Fieth computerized the department, established its presence on social media, started a podcast, increased the full-time staff and made a big push to let the community know about the valuable resource they have at their fingertips.

"Once they understood what I was doing, and how determined I was to make sure these records were preserved, people got onboard," said Fieth. "At one point, we had about 40 volunteers coming in to do the basic work or raise money for us. My dreams were to make people realize that it is important. Nashville is a young city and still has a lot of boosterism in it."

Fieth was well-prepared to take on the curatorship of the city's historical records by his education at both Lipscomb Academy and Lipscomb University and by a lifelong love of history, a characteristic inherited from his mother and stoked by an 1852 antebellum home that sat across from his home in South Nashville when he was young. He would go play in the empty home before it was torn down. "History was right there in front of me when I was 10 years old," he said.

Lipscomb Academy helped mold him into a well-rounded individual, he said, and Lipscomb University introduced him to various paths of historical inquiry and exposed him to various opinions among many people different from himself.

In regards to his own personal historical interests, Fieth described himself as a World War II buff and sometimes re-enactor, sparking from his childhood when "every male I knew was in the war, and every female I knew was on the homefront," he said.

Upon graduation, Fieth earned a master's degree in historic preservation from Middle Tennessee State University before landing a job at the Tennessee State Library and Archives. While there, Fieth did a lot of processing of donations, putting the items and documents into a logical arrangement and into safe storage containers, he said. "You have to go through the whole thing and make sense of it," he said.

His preservation training at MTSU taught him how to test for acids in documents, how to deacidify paper and proper safe storage methods such as Mylar envelopes, which resist moisture and block gases.

Fieth also acted as recorder for the State House and Senate, audiotaping the legislative discussions and creating a minute-by-minute index of the debates and decisions. "That's where I developed a love of state government," he said.

After 10 years, he took the job as the Metropolitan Government Archivist of Nashville and Davidson County and his work moved to the city archives building, then located at 1113 Elm Hill Pike. The move gave him the opportunity to run his own archives, but there was little staff or technology available at the time.

He started by reaching out to various city departments and the court system, asking them to send their records to the archives. There was a lot of trust-building involved, he said. But after the archives started to get publicity and an established presence on Facebook, submissions to the library began to increase, Fieth said.

"Then I started talking to staff about how we needed to promote better. My big passion is getting this stuff out so people can know it and use it," he said.

He also served on the city's Public Records Commission, which by state law makes decisions on which records to permanently preserve, determining the historical material that it considers relevant to the history of Davidson County.

Back in the 1990s, the archives received a lot of requests for genealogical work from people around the South researching their family heritage, Fieth said. To fulfill such requests, the archivists use their collection of court records-deeds, wills, marriages and trial records-from the 1790s to the 2000s (now so large it is stored in three buildings).

As the demographics of Nashville have changed over the years, so has the public's interests. Today's most popular requests are for documents researching the history of properties, Fieth said. Historic photographs of the city are also useful to the public.

Besides the common requests, scholars of all types can find useful historic information in the archives. Fieth remembered one Italian professor who was researching the history of prisoner roadwork crews. The archives provided him with the actual logbooks for such crews in Davidson County.

And archivists are always on the lookout for interesting historical facts. For example, Metro archivists learned through their collections that an African American woman in Nashville was fined for not giving up her seat on the city bus 10 years prior to Rosa Parks' famous act of protest in Montgomery, Alabama.

"There are so many different things you can learn about society in general from the government records the archives have," said Fieth.

He recalled one time when he worked with a local woman who had lost all her mementos of her grandmother in a house fire. When Fieth found her grandmother's will in the archives, she burst into happy tears.

"That's why I do it," he said.