Objects

A. N. C. Williams, prominent African American merchant and community leader in Williamson County, was born into slavery in Spring Hill, Tennessee, in 1844. At age six, he was sold to D. R. Crutcher and moved to Franklin, Tennessee, where…

Educator, suffragist, and Democratic Party worker Charl Ormond Williams was born in Arlington, Tennessee, the third of six children of Crittenden and Minnie Williams. She graduated from Arlington's "high school on the hill" in 1903 and began teaching at Millington…

Few entertainers have conveyed the sincerity and realism reflected in Hank Williams's southern working class lyrics and singing style. Even fewer have enjoyed the lanky Alabaman's phenomenal degree of success. His songs permanently etched the nation's consciousness in the brief…

A powerful advocate for African Americans, Avon N. Williams Jr. became the leading African American lawyer in Tennessee in the protection and advancement of the rights of blacks in education, the workplace, criminal justice, and voting. Born in 1921 in…

Jurist and historian Samuel Cole Williams was born in Gibson County in 1864 and educated in the schools of Humboldt. Encouraged by Judge Horace Lurton--a family friend and later a U.S. Supreme Court justice--he enrolled in the Vanderbilt University law…

Centuries before Europeans settled in what was to become Williamson County the area was home to at least five prehistoric cultures. Over many centuries these occupants of the Harpeth Valley progressed from a nomadic existence to a settled lifestyle in…

Civil rights lawyer and Memphis businessman A. W. Willis Jr. was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on March 16, 1925. Willis received his B.A. from Talladega College in 1950 and a law degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1953. He…

The Tennessee General Assembly created Wilson County on October 26, 1799. Its prehistoric heritage is rich. The Sellars temple mound on Spring Creek, for example, yielded an outstanding piece of pre-Columbian sculpture that has been the emblem of the Tennessee…

Originally known as the Ashland Manufacturing Company, Wilson Sporting Goods was created in 1913 in Chicago as a subsidiary of the Swarzchild and Sulzberger meat packing concern. The company moved into the sporting goods trade by manufacturing gut strings for…

In 1951 Kemmons Wilson, his wife, and five children drove from Memphis to Washington, D.C., for a vacation. Appalled by the uncomfortable and cramped rooms with no air conditioning in the motels in which they were forced to stay, as…