Cain-Sloan Co. Inc. was a department store chain based in Nashville, Tennessee

Nashville, Tennessee

Nashville is the capital of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat of Davidson County. It is located on the Cumberland River in Davidson County, in the north-central part of the state. The city is a center for the health care, publishing, banking and transportation industries, and is home...

, United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. Paul Lowe Sloan, Pat Cain and John E. Cain founded Cain-Sloan in Nashville in 1903. The company merged with Allied Stores

Allied Stores

Allied Stores was a department store chain in the United States. It was founded in the 1930s as part of a general consolidation in the retail sector by B. E. Puckett. See also Associated Dry Goods. It was the successor to Hahn's Department Stores, a holding company founded in 1928...

 Corp. of New York in 1955 and remained under its umbrella before being sold to, and renamed, Dillard's

Dillard's

Dillard's, Inc. is a department store chain in the United States, with 330 stores in 29 states. Headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, Dillard's locations are concentrated in Texas and Florida; with a major presence in other states including Arizona, Iowa, Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Missouri,...

 in 1987. The chain had four locations: Downtown Nashville, Hickory Hollow Mall

Hickory Hollow Mall

Hickory Hollow Mall is a regional indoor shopping mall in Antioch, Tennessee, a neighborhood of Nashville. The mall was built in 1978. In 1982, a JCPenney and several other stores were added. Another expansion project in 1991 resulted in a new building for Dillard's, with a mall expansion built...

, Rivergate Mall

Rivergate Mall

Rivergate Mall is a shopping mall located in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. Built in 1971, the mall originally included three anchor stores: JCPenney, Cain-Sloan, and Castner Knott. A wing featuring Sears, dozens of new parcels, and a food court was added in 1989...

, and The Mall at Green Hills.

Civil Rights movement

Cain-Sloan was a target of one of the earliest sit-in protests

Nashville sit-ins

The Nashville sit-ins, which lasted from February 13 to May 10, 1960, were part of a nonviolent direct action campaign to end racial segregation at lunch counters in downtown Nashville, Tennessee...

 by young African-Americans in Nashville during the Civil Rights Movement

Civil rights movement

The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations it was...

. On December 5, 1959, future Congressman John Lewis

John Lewis (politician)

John Robert Lewis is the U.S. Representative for , serving since 1987. He was a leader in the American Civil Rights Movement and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee , playing a key role in the struggle to end segregation...

 led a group of college students who entered the store intending to sit at its lunch counter. They were politely asked to leave, and they did so. After the march of 19 April 1960 on Nashville's courthouse and the admission by Mayor Ben West that lunch counters "ought to be desegregated" , Cain-Sloan and other downtown Nashville stores quietly opened their counters to all races as of May 10, 1960.

Conversion to Dillard's

In 1987, shortly before Allied Stores merged with Campeau Corporation, the four Cain-Sloan stores were sold to Dillard's in a separate deal. Dillard's entered Nashville as it took over operations of the three mall stores, but closed the downtown store instead of converting it, the first blow to the fledgling Church Street Center mall, which had built a connector to Cain-Sloan. In 1991, Dillard's replaced the former Cain-Sloan with a new building at Hickory Hollow Mall as part of a mall expansion.

Since then, Dillard's has expanded in the Nashville market by building two new stores (Bellevue Center

Bellevue Center

Bellevue Center was a regional shopping mall in the western Nashville, Tennessee suburb of Bellevue. It had capacity for over 90 stores on two floors totaling ....

 and Cool Springs Galleria

Cool Springs Galleria

CoolSprings Galleria is an enclosed regional shopping mall in the Cool Springs commercial and residential corridor between Franklin and Brentwood, Tennessee, south of Nashville. The mall opened in 1991, and has 5 department stores and over 165 stores on two floors totaling , including the 500-seat...

) and acquiring three former Castner Knott

Castner Knott

Castner Knott Company was a Nashville, Tennessee-based regional department store chain. The chain was in business for a century from 1898 to 1998, in its later years as a division of Mercantile Stores Company....

 stores (Donelson Plaza, Harding Mall

Harding Mall

Harding Mall was a shopping mall located in suburban Nashville, Tennessee, southeast of downtown at the corner of Nolensville Pike US 31A/US 41A and Harding Place in the Paragon Mills neighborhood....

, and Murfreesboro's Stones River Mall

Stones River Mall

The Stones River Mall is an enclosed regional shopping mall in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, USA. Built in 1992, it was expanded and renovated in 2008. The mall comprises more than fifty stores, including Dillard's, JCPenney and Sears as anchor stores, as well as a food court...

). Dillard's has since rebuilt the Stones River location and closed the Harding Mall, Donelson Plaza, Bellevue Center and Hickory Hollow Mall locations. Hickory Hollow was the first of the converted Cain-Sloan locations to close, though it left its original building in 1991.