Encyclopedia

Headquartered in Nashville, Gibson Guitars has been making high-quality stringed instruments since 1896. The company has impacted the music instrument business as well as music culture through its various innovations. Gibson Guitars builds a variety of instruments, perhaps the most…

Violinist Noel A. Gilbert was born in Scott's Hill, where he learned the fundamentals of the violin. In 1925 he moved to Memphis and began studies with Joseph Henkel, teacher and conductor of the Memphis Philharmonic. After joining the Memphis…

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…