A-Z

Tennesseans participated in virtually every aspect of the Spanish-American War of 1898. Commander Washburn Maynard (a Knoxville native) of the gunboat Nashville is credited with firing the first shot of the war on April 22. The same vessel was assigned…

Three miles east of Sparta along U.S. Highway 70 is the Sparta Rock House, built initially as a toll house and stage stop along a busy antebellum turnpike between Sparta and Crossville. It is considered a significant and rare artifact…

How Tennesseans talk expresses their regional identity and often draws comment by people from elsewhere. Whether they call it a "Tennessee twang" or an "East Tennessee brogue," Tennesseans and others often consider it distinctive. It is quite difficult, however, to…

Thomas S. Spencer is usually regarded as the first white settler in Middle Tennessee. On a long hunt to the area from 1776 to the spring of 1779, he staked out land, planted it, and built cabins on it, and…

The only Tennessee high school athlete to go on to win the Heisman Trophy as the nation's outstanding college football player, Steve Spurrier is best known today as the head football coach of the University of Florida, a fierce rival…

St. Andrew's-Sewanee School is the result of the 1981 merger of two older institutions, and it builds upon the heritage of three Episcopal schools founded on Monteagle Mountain in Franklin County. The junior department of the University of the South,…

Maury County's landmark St. John's Episcopal Church, constructed between 1839 and 1842, exemplifies rural simplification of the prevailing Gothic Revival architectural style used in Episcopal churches of the antebellum South. Five sons of the North Carolina planter William Polk, who…

The world's only institution devoted solely to the study and treatment of catastrophic childhood illnesses, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital was built on one man's promise. Then a struggling radio actor with seven dollars in his pocket, Danny Thomas offered…

This Nashville landmark is one of the first Catholic Church buildings constructed in Tennessee and served as the Catholic Cathedral for almost seventy years. The oldest extant church building in downtown Nashville, St. Mary's dates to 1844-47. Its architect was…

The oldest private school in Memphis is St. Mary's Episcopal School. It has operated continuously since its founding in 1847, and during most of its existence the school has been exclusively for girls. During the Civil War, Headmistress Mary Foote…

St. Michael's Catholic Church, incorporating the state's oldest Catholic church building, began as a small log meeting house near Cedar Hill in Robertson County. Four families (the Byrnes, Redmonds, Traughbers and Watsons) who settled near Turnersville between 1838 and 1840…

St. Patrick’s Catholic Church is one of Memphis’s most historic institutions. Tennessee’s Catholic Diocese in Nashville decided that another Catholic church should be established in Memphis because of the city’s population growth during and after the Civil War. The largest…

The Mother Church of the Diocese of Tennessee, St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Franklin is the state's oldest Episcopal church and serves its oldest Episcopal congregation. Built with handmade bricks eighteen to twenty-four inches thick, the forty-by-eighty-three-foot church was organized…

James G. Stahlman was publisher of the Nashville Banner from 1930 until 1972, when he sold the newspaper to the Gannett Corporation. He inherited part of the newspaper from his grandfather, Major Edward Bushrod Stahlman, when he died in 1930;…

The maker of the famous Goo Goo Candy Cluster began as Anchor Candy Company, founded in 1901 in Nashville by Howell H. Campbell Sr. The son of Millard and Anna Hooper Campbell, Howell Campbell was born in 1883 in Nashville.…

A huge animal-shaped monolith standing beside the Avery Trace in Putnam County mystified the eighteenth-century travelers who first encountered it. McClain's History of Putnam County (1925) describes the figure as a "sphinx-like sculpture which may have belonged to a cultured…

Located in Overton County on the Cumberland Plateau, Standing Stone State Rustic Park was acquired from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through the Land-Use Area program of the 1930s. The program allowed submarginal property to be obtained from the federal…

John C. Stanton was a controversial railroad contractor who brought economic prosperity and ruin to Chattanooga in the post-Civil War era. A New Hampshire native, persuasive and energetic, he rose by his wits from the laboring ranks to a position…

Few issues have dominated an era of Tennessee politics like the debate over the state debt which raged for six years (1877-83) as a predominant political issue. Having first been incurred in support of antebellum railroad construction, the debt dramatically…