Encyclopedia

In September 1916, entrepreneur Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly grocery store in Memphis. Despite its funny name and the flamboyance of its founder, this new style of store was serious business. Nearly a century later, Piggly Wiggly and…

Located in Bolivar, Tennessee, “The Pillars” was home to the politically and socially prominent Bills family. The house once accommodated such notable guests as Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, James K. Polk, and Jefferson Davis. Owners of the house…

Gideon J. Pillow, politician and general, was born in Williamson County and raised in Maury and Giles Counties. He received a classical education at local academies and graduated from the University of Nashville in 1827. He then read law and…

The area of North Memphis commonly known as the “Pinch District” has played an important role in local immigration since the early nineteenth century. The city’s first business district, the Pinch encompassed all of Memphis north of Adams Street. Although…

The Pink Palace is both a house and a museum. In 1922 Clarence Saunders, the father of self-service grocery shopping and founder of Piggly Wiggly, began building a mansion. Memphians called his 36,500-square-foot house, faced with pink Georgia marble, his…

The largest Middle Woodland Period (ca. 200 B.C.-A.D. 400) archaeological site in the Southeast, Pinson Mounds is located about ten miles south of Jackson on the South Fork of the Forked Deer River. Within an area of approximately four hundred…

Pittman Center was founded by Dr. John S. Burnett, a Methodist minister and educator who had long dreamed of establishing an educational and medical facility in one of the most isolated sections of East Tennessee. In 1921 funding for this…

Within a year of his birth in 1892 in Tupelo, Mississippi, Abe Plough moved with his family to Memphis, where his father Moses operated a clothing and furnishings store. Abe Plough attended Market Street School where a teacher taught him…

Pocket Wilderness Areas are part of a conservation program involving a corporate-state partnership. Beginning in 1970, the Hiwassee Land Company of the Bowater Southern Paper Corporation developed in Tennessee four pocket wilderness areas, defined as "a pocket of land set…

Established by the Tennessee General Assembly in 1839, Polk County was named to honor newly elected Governor James K. Polk. It is located in the extreme southeastern corner of the state, bounded by North Carolina and Georgia. Most of the…

James K. Polk, a native of North Carolina, served one term as United States president, 1845-49; won election seven times to Congress and presided over the U.S. House as its Speaker for the last four of his fourteen-year tenure (1825-39);…

Episcopal bishop and Confederate general Leonidas Polk was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, April 10, 1806. He briefly attended the University of North Carolina before entering the U.S. Military Academy. He graduated eighth in his class in 1827. He became…

Sarah Childress Polk, wife of the eleventh president of the United States, privately strengthened the role of first lady, acting as her husband's closest political ally while publicly dignifying her position in a manner her contemporaries held in highest esteem.…

William G. Pollard, nuclear physicist, Episcopal priest, and founder of Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU), was a native of New York state. Pollard moved to Tennessee with his family at age twelve. He received his B.A. from the University of…

A Williamson County native, Edith Drake Pope worked as the business secretary (1893-1913) and editor (1914-32) of Confederate Veteran for the magazine's entire forty-year history. As editor, she faced mounting financial problems caused by increased death rate among Confederate veterans,…

The thirty-four-acre site of Port Royal in Montgomery County preserves one of Middle Tennessee's earliest settlement areas. The first permanent settlers arrived in 1784, and the first meeting of the Tennessee County Court, North Carolina, was held nearby in 1788.…