A-Z

The Tennessee General Assembly created Giles County in 1809 from land once part of North Carolina. Andrew Jackson suggested the name "Giles" to the legislature in recognition of the strong support Congressman William Branch Giles had given to Tennessee in…

Shelbyville's historic Gilliland House is a unique vernacular stone building completed by locally renowned African American stone mason James S. "Jim" Gilliland in the late nineteenth century. Born near Shelbyville on November 15, 1858, Gilliland began as a builder of…

Writer Nikki Giovanni expresses her version of the late twentieth-century African American experience through poetry and essays. Though her parents left Knoxville after her birth, Giovanni returned for summers with her grandparents and graduated from Knoxville's Austin High School before…

The Girl Scouts came to Tennessee as word of the movement spread across the United States during World War I. Individual, or lone troops, unaffiliated with any council, established independently in Tennessee cities during this era of patriotic fervor. Girls…

The Girls Preparatory School is the largest independent secondary day school for girls in the country. Three highly respected public school teachers established the school in 1906. Tommie Duffy, a history and science specialist, Eula Jarnagin, a language teacher, and…

U.S. Navy Admiral Albert Gleaves was born in Nashville on January 1, 1858, the only son of Henry Albert and Eliza Tannehill Gleaves. Entering the Naval Academy in 1873, Gleaves graduated four years later, and for the first eight years…

This twenty-seven-room, five-story Victorian house of handmade brick was built in 1868-69 in Mossy Creek (now Jefferson City). Considered one of the state's most nearly perfect examples of Second Empire style, Glenmore is now an Association for the Preservation of…

Located near Adams in Robertson County, Glenraven Plantation is the last large-scale, consciously designed tobacco plantation landscape in Tennessee. Its founders were Felix Ewing, a wealthy Nashville businessman and Arkansas Delta plantation owner, and his wife Jane Washington Ewing, who…

The Golden Circle Life Insurance Company was first established in 1950 as a fraternal organization through the efforts of Charles Allen Rawls, a Haywood County mortician who believed that the African American community should unite and create a cash benefit…

Jacob Goldsmith and his older brother, Isaac, were significant Memphis merchants in post-Reconstruction Memphis. Jacob Goldsmith established one of the state’s best-known department stores, Goldsmith’s, which operated in downtown Memphis until 1990. Goldsmith’s was a family-controlled business until 1959, when…

Goldsmith's is a well-known Memphis department store which traces its origins to the antebellum period and German immigrant Louis Ottenheimer. After moving to Memphis from Arkansas, where he had operated a provisions store, Ottenheimer opened a store on Main Street…

By the early twentieth century, the inadequate road system in Tennessee, and the South generally, was impeding the region's economic progress. Dust in the dry season and mud in the wet, delays in waiting for ferries to cross the many…

Organized by nineteen farmers in May 1877, the Goodlettsville Lamb and Wool Club has the distinction of being the oldest cooperative livestock organization in the United States. This farmer-owned association was the progenitor of future cooperative marketing organizations that, by…

Albert V. Goodpasture, writer, editor, and Tennessee historian, was born on November 19, 1855, in Overton County. He attended school in Cookeville and New Middleton, and received his B.A. from East Tennessee University in 1875, having absorbed the view of…

Ernest W. Goodpasture was a distinguished figure in pathology and a pioneer in modern virological research. He contributed significantly to the advance of knowledge in many fields, particularly the pathogenesis of infectious diseases, the problems of parasitism, the laboratory cultivation…

In the early 1880s Westin A. Goodspeed, a successful Nashville-based publisher, discovered that volumes combining local history, biography, and state historical records had sold well in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and several other northern states. In the South, except for…

Twentieth-century novelist Caroline Gordon was born into the Kentucky line of the extensive Meriwether family in 1895. Exploration of the family's past and its evolution is a major theme of her fiction. She grew up at Merry Mont in Todd…