Agriculture

Without the cotton gin Tennessee never would have evolved into a major antebellum cotton market; the cotton fibers produced here were too short for hand ginning or roller ginning, which could be performed on the long-staple cotton found along the…

Hoping for relief from economic hardship, tobacco growers in western Kentucky and northern Middle Tennessee formed the Dark Tobacco District Planters' Protective Association of Kentucky and Tennessee (PPA) on September 24, 1904. A steady decline in dark-fired tobacco prices since…

Located at Brunswick, Davies Manor is recognized as the oldest extant dwelling in Shelby County and perhaps West Tennessee. The west section of the two-story, white oak log, central hall plan house dates to circa 1807 and has been attributed…

Stockly Donelson, early Nashville builder, was one of thirteen children born to Captain John Donelson and Mary Purnell Donelson of Davidson County. He grew up on the family plantation located on the Cumberland River ten miles northeast of Nashville and…

Long before Tennessee became famous for the Tennessee Walking Horse in the mid-1900s, the state was known throughout the country as the center for thoroughbred horses. For most of the nineteenth century, Tennessee, not Kentucky, was acknowledged as the center…

Fairvue was the home of Isaac Franklin and his young bride, Adelicia Hayes Franklin. Built in 1832, the property was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1977, but lost the designation in 2005. Historically, the house had identical facades…

The Farmers' Alliance made its first appearance in Tennessee in the winter of 1887, when J. T. Alsup, a national lecturer, organized the first Alliance in Wilson County. Perhaps Alsup selected Middle Tennessee for his first attempts because West Tennessee…

Farms and farming in Tennessee have experienced great changes during two centuries of statehood. For example, the number of farms in Tennessee ranged from 72,735 in 1850 to 273,783 in 1935, before sliding to just under 80,000 in 1997. The…

Oscar L. Farris spent almost forty years with the University of Tennessee Agricultural Extension Service. While serving in Maury County, he was responsible for the first "test and slaughter" attempt to control cattle brucellosis in Tennessee four years before the…

Isaac Franklin, slave trader and planter, was born in Sumner County, the son of a Revolutionary War soldier who had received a military land warrant in Tennessee. Franklin served in the War of 1812, and at age eighteen, while working…

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…

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…

Francis H. Gordon, pioneer in scientific agriculture, was born in Gordonsville, Smith County, on August 6, 1804. Though he rarely left Smith County, he exerted a lasting influence on Tennessee antebellum agriculture. In 1830 he joined a group that organized…

Leading Tennessee agriculturist and nationally acclaimed stock breeder William G. Harding was born in 1808 near Nashville. Harding was educated at the American Literary, Scientific, and Military Academy in Middletown, Connecticut. Two years after his first wife, Mary Selena McNairy,…

This Williamson County property is the most significant extant historic farm associated with the modern Tennessee Walking Horse industry. In 1935 Wirt Harlin established the farm, which included the historic Maney-Sidway House, on the northern outskirts of Franklin on U.S.…

Organized in Nashville in 1897, the Interstate Cotton Seed Crushers' Association operated from 1897 to 1929. It was the second cottonseed trade association, the first having been disbanded in 1887 after the American Cotton Oil Trust absorbed most of the…

An articulate advocate of scientific agriculture, Alexander Jackson completed a medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1824 and came to Tennessee five years later, establishing a medical practice at Paris in Henry County. Jackson soon demonstrated his interests…

New South advocate and first Tennessee Commissioner of Agriculture, Joseph B. Killebrew was born May 29, 1831, in Montgomery County, the son of Bryan Whitfield and Elizabeth Smith Ligon Killebrew. In 1835 Bryan Killebrew bought a farm in adjoining Stewart…

From earliest settlement, Tennesseans herded livestock--horses and mules, cattle, sheep, and swine--in addition to farming. Indeed, livestock became as important to Tennessee's antebellum economy as cotton or tobacco. Many early observers pointed to the grassy rangeland and the natural mast…

Established in 1923, Mayfield Dairy Farms has evolved into one of the major southern milk and ice cream products companies. It began as an antebellum family farm in McMinn County that continued as a family-run business into the late twentieth…