Encyclopedia

Rufus Thomas, legendary R&B singer, was born on March 26, 1917, in Cayce, Mississippi, just south of Memphis. He began performing in the 1930s at the Palace and Handy theaters in Memphis and as a traveling entertainer with such troupes…

Fred Thompson, U.S. senator, Watergate committee counsel, and movie actor, was born August 19, 1942, in Sheffield, Alabama. He grew up in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, the son of a used car dealer, and attended Lawrence County High School. He graduated from…

Born on February 8, 1885, in Knox County, Tennessee, Laura Thornborough was a local-colorist writer who, through her writings and photographs, promoted a romantic and anti-modernist depiction of the Smoky Mountains and their inhabitants. Dramatic scenery, opportunities for hiking and…

Lucille Thornburgh, union organizer and labor newspaper editor, was born in 1908 in Strawberry Plains, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Thornburgh. After graduating from Rhea County High School in Dayton she lived in Denver, then Los Angeles, and…

As early as 1790, a number of thoroughbred stallions were brought into the Watauga and Holston settlements, and between 1790 and 1795, the Knoxville Register and Star Gazette advertised at least nine stallions as standing in what is now East…

Poet Richard Tillinghast was born in Memphis to Raymond Charles Tillinghast, a mechanical engineer from Massachusetts, and Martha Williford, daughter of a West Tennessee farmer and lawyer turned politician. This dual background of New England and agrarian South has given…

Although Tennessee's earliest settlers appreciated the vast timber resources they discovered, the greatest timber extraction in the state's history occurred between 1880 and 1920. Rapid deforestation by industrial loggers during this period caused long-term environmental changes and notable revision of…

Colonial journalist and cartographer Henry Timberlake was born in Virginia in 1730 and died in England on September 30, 1765. He joined Virginia military forces in 1756 and served in several campaigns during the French and Indian War. In 1761…

If one could describe Justin Timberlake’s career in terms of a lifespan, his career would be nearly as old as Timberlake himself. His rise to fame as the daydream of adolescent girls certainly handicapped him in the eyes (and ears)…

Tims Ford State Park is a 431-acre park adjacent to a 10,700-acre lake, the Tims Ford Reservoir, in Franklin County. In 1970 the Tennessee Valley Authority finished the Tims Ford Dam to provide recreational opportunities and to control repeated flooding…

The area forming West Tennessee was part of the Chickasaw Nation until 1818, when the territory was opened for settlement under the terms of the Jackson Purchase. An 1819 act by the general assembly divided the new territory into five…

The Tipton-Haynes Historic Site in Johnson City represents several eras of early Tennessee history. Woodland Period Indians and later the Cherokees frequented the area, hunting the buffalo that traveled to its natural spring. In later years, that buffalo trail became…

Isabel Hanson Tipton, physicist, was born in Monroe, Georgia, June 17, 1909. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Georgia in 1929 and graduate degrees with majors in physics and minors in chemistry from the University…

Prominent backcountry era settler and political leader best known for his opposition to the Franklin statehood movement, John Tipton was born in Baltimore County, Maryland, in 1730. He served in Lord Dunmore's War, was a recruiting officer for the Continental…

When the early settlers came to Tennessee and began to till the soil, the production of tobacco was one of the first crops. Since those early days, dollars received for tobacco crops have paid for farms and homes, provided money…

Although she rarely held elective office, Molly Todd played an important role in fashioning public policy in Nashville and Tennessee in the second half of the twentieth century. She mobilized support for reform in areas as diverse as birth control,…

Toqua was an eighteenth-century Overhill Cherokee village located on the Little Tennessee River in present day Monroe County. Toqua means "place of a mythic great fish." Toqua (site 40MR6) also designates a late Mississippian Dallas culture (ca. A.D. 1200-1600) village…

The Trail of Tears (or Nunna-da-ul-tsun-yi in the Cherokee language: "the place were they cried"), next to the practice of black slavery, is arguably the most tragic story in Tennessee history. Covering the period from May 1838 to March 1839,…

The Transylvania Purchase occurred on March 14, 1775, when Richard Henderson, a North Carolina land speculator, met with Cherokee representatives at Sycamore Shoals near the present site of Elizabethton. Henderson wanted to purchase a tract of land in what is…

Travellers Rest was the Nashville home of Judge John and Mary Overton and their descendants for 150 years. In 1954 the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in Tennessee rescued the house from threatened demolition by the Louisville…