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The only dwelling designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Tennessee is the Shavin House in Chattanooga. In 1949 newlyweds Gerte and Seamour Shavin contacted Frank Lloyd Wright to design a home for them on Missionary Ridge in Chattanooga. Wright (1870-1959),…

The Shawnees, the most southerly located of all the Algonquian tribes, are one of several tribes who speak the Central Algonquian dialect. In most Algonquian languages they are called Shawunogi, which literally translates as "Southerners." Legends indicate that they were…

The Tennessee General Assembly established Shelby County on November 24, 1819, just a little over a year after the "Jackson Purchase" and Chickasaw treaty freed West Tennessee from Indian claims. The county is named after one of the successful treaty…

Isaac Shelby, early Tennessee settler, Revolutionary War veteran, and governor of Kentucky, was born in Hagerstown, Maryland, in 1750 to Evan and Letitia Cox Shelby, who moved their family to Sapling Grove, the present site of Bristol, in 1771. Their…

A significant figure in Tennessee’s early medical history, John Shelby submitted a medical dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania “On Gunshot Wounds,” the interest of a true frontiersman. Shelby was the first Caucasian child born in what became Sumner County.…

In 1852 Gillen, Webb, and Company established Sylvan Mills on the Duck River outside of Shelbyville as a woven cotton fabric mill. It produced fabric from raw cotton throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the early 1920s,…

In February 1862 a Union army-navy offensive succeeded in capturing Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, located respectively on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, near the Tennessee-Kentucky border, and the fall of the two forts initiated a series of Union triumphs…

Brigadier General Austin C. Shofner, retired, a native of Bedford County, was a career Marine Corps officer and soldier in World War II. Shofner's heroic exploits in the Philippines--his escape from a Japanese POW camp and his work in guerrilla…

Leap-year baby Fannie Rose Shore was the second daughter born to Russian Jewish immigrants Anna and Sol Shore on February 19, 1916, in Winchester. In 1923 the family moved to Nashville where they prospered. Poliomyelitis left Fannie Rose with a…

A noted feature of the Eastern Highland Rim landscape of Middle Tennessee is Short Mountain. Located in northeastern Cannon County, the mountain looms above adjacent portions of DeKalb and Warren Counties as well. Capped by Pennsylvanian sedimentary rocks that have…

Of all historical housing forms found in Tennessee, the shotgun house is perhaps the least understood and most burdened with confusion and misconceptions. The shotgun sometimes represented the worst evidence of the treatment of the impoverished and, therefore, was viewed…

A Nobel laureate who pioneered neutron diffraction research at Oak Ridge, Clifford Shull was born at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1915. He attended Carnegie Institute of Technology and New York University, where he earned his Ph.D. in nuclear physics in 1941.…

After the Civil War, industrialization greatly reduced the need to produce handmade goods because factories and machines could produce store-bought items more quickly, more cheaply, and in larger quantities than they could be made in the home. Nevertheless, the Dougherty…

For a short time in the antebellum period, many Tennessee farmers pursued what they thought would be a promising commercial opportunity in the production of silk. Fueling their optimism were discoveries in the 1830s that silkworms thrived on the native…

For many years it was assumed that there were few silversmiths in Tennessee because of its rural character and remoteness. However, early newspapers and available censuses reveal the existence of at least 535 silversmiths and allied craftsmen who worked in…

Benjamin "Pap" Singleton called himself the "father of the Black Exodus." Singleton and other grassroots black leaders developed the idea that former slaves should migrate to Kansas and other western homesteading sites, rather than remain in the South to suffer…

On February 1, 1960, four black freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, entered the Woolworth's store in downtown Greensboro, seated themselves at the store's lunch counter, and requested service. As they expected, they were…

In 1958, following the formation of the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC) by the Reverend Kelly Miller Smith Sr. and others, African American leaders and students launched an attack on Jim Crow segregation. The NCLC utilized the concept of Christian…

In the 1760s Anglo-American frontiersmen, determined to settle the land, planted slavery firmly within the borders of what would become Tennessee. Over time, East Tennessee, hilly and dominated by small farms, retained the fewest number of slaves. Middle Tennessee, where…

Created by the Tennessee General Assembly on October 26, 1799, Smith County was named in honor of General Daniel Smith. Carved out of Sumner County, the new county covered a large territory of 314 square miles. Immigrants of Scots-Irish, English,…