Encyclopedia

In 1947, the most popular song in the United States was “Near You.” It was listed for a record-setting seventeen consecutive weeks as the nation’s number one song on Billboard magazine’s Honor Roll of Hits. It has been called the…

Thomas B. Craighead was a 1775 "New Light" graduate of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton). He became Nashville's first minister when James Robertson and other pioneering settlers invited him to the Cumberland region to establish a Presbyterian church…

In 1854 Robert Cravens, a leading industrialist in Chattanooga, purchased a thousand acres of land on the side of Lookout Mountain, where he maintained an orchard and built several cabins as a summer retreat for his family. Two years later…

The hard-fought Creek War of 1813 and 1814, also known as the First Creek War, actually began in the spring of 1812, when a party of Creek warriors returning from a visit to the British in Canada attacked a small…

The desire for more convenient access to county government brought together the citizens of the outlying regions of Dyer, Gibson, Haywood, and Madison Counties to petition the Tennessee General Assembly for the formation of a new county first in 1832…

David Crockett, frontiersman, Tennessee legislator and U.S. congressman, folk hero, and icon of popular culture, was an intriguing composite of history and myth. Both the historical figure who died at the Alamo and the legendary hero kept alive in the…

Democratic boss of Memphis and state political power during the Great Depression, Edward Hull Crump was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1874, the son of a planter and former Confederate officer. Crump's father died of yellow fever soon after…

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…