Encyclopedia

Influential chemistry professor and dean of the University of Tennessee Graduate School, Hilton A. Smith was born September 4, 1908, in Plymouth, New York, and reared in North Adams, Massachusetts. After earning a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Harvard in…

Executive secretary of the Memphis NAACP for over forty years, Maxine Smith was born in Memphis on October 31, 1929. She graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis at the age of fifteen, received her A.B. degree in…

Rutledge Smith enjoyed careers in journalism, banking, and railroads. He was called "Major" by most people and was best known for his role in preparing the state for mobilization in both World War I and World War II. Born in…

Stanton Everett Smith, local, state, and national officer in the American Federation of Teachers, the Tennessee Federation of Labor, and the Tennessee State Labor Council, was born in Wyoming, Ohio, in 1905, the son of Charles Henry Smith, an accountant.…

William M. Smith was the preeminent Radical Republican leader in Memphis during Reconstruction. As a judge, Smith confronted some of the most controversial legal issues of the period and led the Shelby County Republican Party through decades of Democratic dominance.…

William R. Snodgrass served as comptroller of the treasury in Tennessee for forty-four years (1954-99), longer than any other person in that office. Tennessee is unusual among the states in that the constitutional officers, such as secretary of state, treasurer,…

The Soloman Federal Building in Chattanooga exhibits the style known as "modernized" or "starved" classicism that became increasingly identified with American public architecture in the 1930s. The building, planned in 1931, built in 1932, and embellished with a courtroom mural…

This important African American business institution in Memphis was founded in 1906 by Robert R. Church Sr., who had become the wealthiest African American in Tennessee through real estate and other interests. The bank was located on Beale Street across…

The common term for sorghum syrup in Tennessee is "molasses" or "sorghum molasses," though educated agriculturists have unsuccessfully campaigned against the use of these vernacular synonyms. Molasses is a by-product of sugar making and may derive from sugar cane or…

An expedition led by Hernando de Soto conducted the earliest exploration of Tennessee by non-Native Americans in May, June, and July of 1540. The expedition of some seven hundred Spaniards and their slaves had landed at Tampa Bay the previous…

The South Cumberland State Recreation Area (SCRA) is a unique park within the Tennessee park system as it combines separate natural areas, trails, state forests, and small wild areas within one management unit. Its headquarters and visitor center are on…

After its founding as Graysville Academy in 1892, this educational institution evolved and expanded, changed its name twice, and moved in 1916 to what later became the town of Collegedale in Hamilton County. On its new one-thousand-acre campus the school,…

Southern Baptists in Tennessee represent a tradition born in Amsterdam and London in the early seventeenth century, transported to the American colonies in the 1630s, and carried south and west with frontier migrations. These Christians affirm the authority of Scripture,…

When a group of ministers met in Augusta, Georgia, in 1845 to establish the Southern Baptist Convention, they simultaneously created two separate boards to oversee the domestic and foreign missionary work of the convention. The Board of Domestic Missions, headquartered…

The short-lived Southern Citizen was a pro-slavery newspaper in the heart of antislavery East Tennessee; its editor, an Irish nationalist hero of 1848, worked in the midst of anti-immigrant Know Nothings. In October 1857 Knoxville mayor William Swan cofounded the…

Located in Memphis, the Southern College of Optometry has educated over six thousand optometrists in its sixty-nine years of existence. It is one of only seventeen schools of optometry in the United States and has contracts with several states to…

In 1884 two mechanics in Jackson established the Southern Engine and Boiler Works to build a line of small engines and boilers. In 1895 the mechanics sold their shop to local stockholders, who constructed a new complex on North Royal…

Under the leadership of E. J. Owens, Southern Potteries, Inc., began operations in Erwin in Unicoi County in 1916-17 using skilled labor brought from Ohio and local unskilled workers. Its product was known as Clinchfield ware, and the company's letterhead…

The first record Elvis Presley released in 1954 shows the inspired ways Tennesseans merged musical traditions into something new and exciting called rock music. The A side was "That's All Right," a blues song by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, and…

The Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio, often called the Southwest Territory, was created by an act of Congress on May 26, 1790. The State of North Carolina had ceded the lands and waterways encompassed by…