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Richard Henderson, land speculator and representative for North Carolina on the western Virginia/North Carolina survey team, drew up the Cumberland Compact in 1780. Signed on May 1, 1780, by 250 men of the new Cumberland settlement, it served as a…

The land that is now Cumberland County existed as an Indian hunting ground when Tennessee became a state in 1796. Bands of settlers making the perilous journey from Virginia, Maryland, and North and South Carolina to the Cumberland River settlements…

Located in northern Dickson County is the historic village of Cumberland Furnace, the site of the first ironworks in the region which later became Middle Tennessee. The village is the oldest community south of the Cumberland River between Nashville and…

Few areas in the United States symbolize the American pioneer spirit more than Cumberland Gap. Crossing the gap meant encountering America's first western frontier and symbolically severing European ties. Between 1760 and 1850 more than 300,000 people walked, rode, or…

A rural resettlement community established during the Great Depression, Cumberland Homesteads is located in Cumberland County. This homestead community currently encompasses approximately 10,250 acres, less than half of the original total of 27,802 acres held by the cooperative association in…

The 1,720 acres of Cumberland Mountain State Park once served as the outdoor recreational center for the massive Cumberland Homesteads project of the Resettlement Administration (RA). From 1935 to 1938 Company 3464 of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built a…

The Cumberland Presbyterian Church grew out of the revivals on the Tennessee-Kentucky frontier in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The formation of the independent Cumberland Presbytery on February 4, 1810, at Dickson, Tennessee, by ministers Finis Ewing, Samuel…

From its headwaters in Lechter County, Kentucky, to its mouth at Smithland on the Ohio River, the Cumberland River travels almost 700 miles and drains a watershed of 18,000 square miles. Over 300 miles of the river flow through Tennessee,…

Established in June 1998, Cumberland Trail State Park is the state's first and only linear park, running for 230 miles through ten Tennessee counties and connecting the Cumberland Gap National Historic Park to Signal Mountain in Chattanooga. The park will…

Established as Cumberland College at Lebanon in 1842 under the patronage of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, Cumberland University received a charter as a university in 1843. Except for the period from 1962 to 1982, when the name was officially Cumberland…

The "Lebanon Law School" opened its first term in October 1847 as the first school of law in the Old Southwest. Professor Abraham Caruthers was soon joined by state Supreme Court Justice Nathan Green Sr., his son Nathan Jr., and…

An influential leader in the Tennessee General Assembly in the mid-twentieth century, James H. “Mr. Jim” Cummings was born on November 8, 1890, in Cannon County, Tennessee. He was the second of the five children of John Morgan and Lula…

Sumner A. Cunningham was the founder and editor of the Nashville publication Confederate Veteran. The magazine was one of the New South's most influential monthlies and made Cunningham a central figure in the "Lost Cause" movement of the late nineteenth…

Mike Curb is the owner of one of the most successful independent record labels in the history of the music business, as well as an artist, producer, songwriter, and philanthropist. Born in Savannah, Georgia, on December 24, 1944, he grew…

Richard O. Currey, the first person with an earned doctorate to teach science at what is now the University of Tennessee, was a prolific author, an innovative educator, and a newsworthy minister. A Nashville native, Currey graduated from the University…

Nancy Cox McCormack Cushman, internationally recognized sculptor, was born in Nashville August 15, 1885, to Nannie Morgan Cox and Herschel McCullough Cox. After the deaths of her parents, she attended an Arkansas boarding school but soon returned to Nashville, entered…