Encyclopedia

Under construction from 1972 to 1985 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway is a 234-mile thoroughfare extending from the Tennessee River to the junction of the Black Warrior-Tombigbee River system near Demopolis, Alabama. It links commercial…

An archive is a repository for an organized body of records produced or received by a public, semipublic, institutional, or business entity in the transaction of its affairs and preserved by it, or its successors. The development of the archives…

In 1959 African Americans in Fayette and Haywood Counties fought for the right to vote. The concern for voting emerged as a by-product of the absence of black jurors for the trial of Burton Dodson, an African American farmer in…

The Tennessee Electric Power Company (TEPCO) was the largest private-sector electrical power monopoly in Tennessee's early twentieth-century history. It was formed on May 27, 1922, when the Tennessee Power Company, Chattanooga Railway & Light, and the Chattanooga, and Tennessee River…

The Tennessee Emergency Relief Administration (TERA) was an important early New Deal agency in Tennessee. Shortly after the inauguration of President Franklin Roosevelt, Congress passed the Federal Emergency Relief Act on May 12, 1933, and its implementation began on May…

Founder of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896, Mary Church Terrell was one of the leading twentieth-century African American women activists. For more than sixty-six years, she was an ardent champion of racial and gender equality. Born…

Published by Elihu Embree at Jonesborough in 1820, the Emancipator was the first newspaper in the United States solely devoted to the abolition of slavery. Embree had previously published a weekly newspaper, the Manumission Intelligencer, in 1819, and it was…

An intentional community occupying some 1,750 acres in southeastern Lewis County, The Farm is located near Summertown. In 1971 San Francisco resident and New Age religious leader, Stephen Gaskin, and his followers founded The Farm as a spiritual community. The…

The Fugitives were a group of influential early twentieth-century poets and writers. In 1914 John Crowe Ransom and Walter Clyde Curry, both of whom taught English at Vanderbilt University, began meeting informally with a group of their undergraduates to discuss…

The home of Andrew Jackson, now a public museum, is eleven miles east of Nashville. Andrew Jackson bought the Hermitage farm in 1804, and it was his home for the remainder of his life. The Jacksons had lived on two…

This Nashville landmark is the world's only exact-size replica of the original temple in Athens, Greece. For the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, Nashville drew upon its nickname "Athens of the South" and built the art building as a copy of the…

The Patrons of Husbandry, or Grange, was the first general farm organization in the United States. Established by the Minnesota agricultural reformer Oliver H. Kelly in December 1867, it briefly flourished in Tennessee during the 1870s, providing Tennessee's small farmers…

In mid-July 1925 much of the nation's attention was focused on the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where John T. Scopes was on trial for teaching about evolution. Four months earlier, the Tennessee General Assembly had overwhelmingly passed a bill…

The Sewanee Review, founded by William Peterfield Trent in 1892 at the University of the South in Sewanee, is the nation's oldest continuously published quarterly. It changed from a general journal devoted to the humanities to a literary and critical…

Recognized as the oldest door-to-door sales company in the United States, the Southwestern Company publishes Bibles and educational reference books that college students sell over summer vacation. The Reverend James R. Graves, a prominent Baptist minister, began publishing religious tracts…

The history of theater runs throughout the Tennessee past. Early touring theater groups performed in the larger towns, with plays such as Child of Nature, or Virtue Rewarded presented in Nashville in 1807. Nashville residents established their first theater in…

In the early 1950s, a young immigrant named Sam Moore arrived in New York and launched his own business by selling Bibles door-to-door. His success in this endeavor provided Moore with the funds to establish the National Book Company, which…

Chattanooga philanthropist Anne Taylor Jones Thomas was a native of Cincinnati, Ohio. Anne Thomas met her future husband, Benjamin Franklin Thomas, while he was attending law school at the University of Cincinnati. The couple married in 1894 in Chattanooga. She…

Chattanooga businessman and industrialist Benjamin F. Thomas pioneered the development of the Coca-Cola bottling industry in America. A native of Maysville, Kentucky, Thomas began his business career as a bank clerk, stone quarry operator, and manager of a hosiery mill.…

Union General George H. Thomas, nicknamed the "Rock of Chickamauga," played a pivotal role in several significant Tennessee Civil War battles. Born July 31, 1816, in Southampton County, Virginia, Thomas gained local fame as a boy when he rode through…