Institution

Located at the former site of the Lorraine Motel at 450 Mulberry Street in Memphis, the National Civil Rights Museum is the state's preeminent museum dedicated to the history of the Civil Rights movement in the United States from the…

While destined to become one of the top insurance companies in the nation, the National Life and Accident Insurance Company barely survived its first winter. C. A. Craig bought it for $17,250 on the Davidson County Courthouse steps on December…

This Memphis craft art and design art institution, dedicated to the collection, exhibition, and preservation of fine metalwork, opened in 1979. The site was formerly a part of the U.S. Marine Hospital, which dated to the late nineteenth century with…

As early as 1871 Nashville had African American baseball clubs, but it was not until 1886 that the nation's first professional league of black teams was organized. The Southern League of Colored Base Ballists (SLCBB) fielded teams from Jacksonville, Savannah,…

At the urging of Elise Massey Selden, a group of elite white women assembled at the Gayoso Hotel in May 1890 and founded what was soon to become the largest and most influential women's club in Memphis. Its stated objectives…

Tennessee's tenth largest private employer (2001 figures), the Nissan Motor Manufacturing Corporation, U.S.A., is headquartered in Smyrna. It initially represented the single largest foreign investment by a Japanese corporation anywhere in the world. Led by Marvin Runyon, president and chief…

In October 1926 American Bemberg began the manufacture of "artificial silk," or rayon, at its new plant in Elizabethton. The parent company, J. P. Bemberg, was the German affiliate of Vereinigte Glanzstoff Fabriken (VGF), one of the international giants in…

On October 17, 1946, the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies (ORINS) received a charter of incorporation from the state of Tennessee, and with fourteen southern universities as its charter members, the consortium of ORINS began to work toward the…

Established during World War II by the Manhattan District, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) occupied the X-10 site on the fifty-six-thousand-acre reservation between Clinch River and Black Oak Ridge purchased by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1942. Initially…

With America's declaration of war on April 6, 1917, a general mobilization of U.S. Armed Forces was ordered. War Department General Order #95 on July 18, 1917, created a National Guard division, designated the Thirtieth Division, to be filled by…

The first women's club in Knoxville and in Tennessee and the first club in the South to join the General Federation of Women's Clubs, Ossoli Circle was organized on November 20, 1885, when Lizzie Crozier French called twelve other women…

Shocked by reports and letters about the South's Civil War devastation, George Peabody (1795-1869) founded the $2 million Peabody Education Fund (PEF, 1867-69) to aid public education in eleven former Confederate states and West Virginia. Born in Massachusetts but a…

A group of black women, wives of prominent black leaders in Nashville's church, business, and professional arenas, organized the Phillis Wheatley Club in 1895. The club, established its headquarters at the AME Publishing House on the public square in Nashville,…

The Pi Beta Phi Settlement School in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, is one of the best extant examples of the early twentieth-century settlement school movement. The school’s origins date to 1910, when Pi Beta Phi, the first women’s fraternity, which was founded…

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…

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…

The Proffitt’s department store chain was started by D. W. Proffitt in Maryville, Tennessee, in 1919. Son Harwell Proffitt opened another Proffitt’s in Athens in 1965, and the first Knoxville location opened in West Town Mall in 1972. The Proffitt…

Organized with funds from the National Industrial Recovery Act of June 1933, the Public Works Administration (PWA) was one of the New Deal's several attempts to revive the nation's depression-ridden economy. Designed to provide unemployed workers with wages as well…

The only remaining dairy in Davidson County, Purity Dairy was established in 1926 as Ezell's Dairy by Miles Ezell Sr. with eighty rented cows, a rented farm, and rented equipment. With quality products, hard work, and tenacity, the Ezells transformed…

In 1963 East Tennessee State University President Burgin E. Dossett, Dean John P. Lamb, Charles E. Allen, M.D., and various civic leaders and legislators called attention to the need for a regional health center in Upper East Tennessee. When Dossett…