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The Mother Church of the Diocese of Tennessee, St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Franklin is the state's oldest Episcopal church and serves its oldest Episcopal congregation. Built with handmade bricks eighteen to twenty-four inches thick, the forty-by-eighty-three-foot church was organized…

James G. Stahlman was publisher of the Nashville Banner from 1930 until 1972, when he sold the newspaper to the Gannett Corporation. He inherited part of the newspaper from his grandfather, Major Edward Bushrod Stahlman, when he died in 1930;…

The maker of the famous Goo Goo Candy Cluster began as Anchor Candy Company, founded in 1901 in Nashville by Howell H. Campbell Sr. The son of Millard and Anna Hooper Campbell, Howell Campbell was born in 1883 in Nashville.…

A huge animal-shaped monolith standing beside the Avery Trace in Putnam County mystified the eighteenth-century travelers who first encountered it. McClain's History of Putnam County (1925) describes the figure as a "sphinx-like sculpture which may have belonged to a cultured…

Located in Overton County on the Cumberland Plateau, Standing Stone State Rustic Park was acquired from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through the Land-Use Area program of the 1930s. The program allowed submarginal property to be obtained from the federal…

John C. Stanton was a controversial railroad contractor who brought economic prosperity and ruin to Chattanooga in the post-Civil War era. A New Hampshire native, persuasive and energetic, he rose by his wits from the laboring ranks to a position…

Few issues have dominated an era of Tennessee politics like the debate over the state debt which raged for six years (1877-83) as a predominant political issue. Having first been incurred in support of antebellum railroad construction, the debt dramatically…

A short-lived attempt to create a new state in the trans-Appalachian settlement of present-day East Tennessee, the State of Franklin arose from the general unsettled state of national, regional, and local politics at the end of the Revolutionary War. Under…

Peter Staub, a prominent figure in late nineteenth-century Knoxville business, culture, and politics, was born in Switzerland on February 22, 1827. Orphaned at eight years old, Staub immigrated to the United States when he was twenty-seven. He finally settled in…

Memphis's great soul music recording company was founded in 1960 by siblings Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton. Aspiring to break into the music business, Stewart, a bond salesman, convinced his schoolteacher sister to mortgage her home for $2,500. Their company,…

In 1811 the voyage of the steamboat New Orleans ended the silent world of pre-steam Tennessee riverboatmen. When Nicholas J. Roosevelt successfully sailed his wood-fired steam craft down the Mississippi past the Chickasaw Bluffs, the "Steamboat Age" officially began in…

With the end of the Civil War and restoration of communications and travel, investors identified and then developed many of the resources of the South. A land agent for the Stearns Salt and Lumber Company of Ludington, Michigan, traveling through…

Almira S. Steele, teacher and missionary, founded the South's first African American orphanage in Chattanooga. Born of Puritan forebears in Chelsea, Massachusetts, (neighboring Boston) on July 23, 1842, the daughter of Benjamin H. and Almira Sylvester Dewing, she was reared…

The Stencil House, also known as the Johnson-Dillon House, is a log house featuring an elaborately stenciled interior. Built sometime after 1830, the house was originally located near Hardin Creek and Eagle Creek in rural northwestern Wayne County. To ensure…

The foremost promoter of railroads in antebellum Tennessee and the founder and first president of the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad, Vernon K. Stevenson arrived in Nashville in 1831 and soon opened a dry goods store. Hoping to ensure his financial…

Created in 1803 from Montgomery County, Stewart County is named for an early pioneer and speculator, Duncan Stewart. Originally inhabited by nomadic hunters and mound builders, the area received white settlers in the 1780s, as Revolutionary War veterans arrived to…

Alexander P. Stewart, educator and Confederate general, was born in Rogersville on October 2, 1821. Known among his men as "Old Straight," Stewart graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1842. Three years later, he resigned his…

Writer and editor Randall Stewart was born in Fayetteville in 1896. In 1898 his family moved to Nashville, where he grew up and was educated through his undergraduate years at Vanderbilt, from which he was graduated in 1917 as the…

Kate Bradford Stockton, a socialist and the first woman to run for governor in Tennessee, was born in Stockton, California, in 1880. She was a direct descendant of William Bradford, second governor of Plymouth Plantation. Her grandfather, Arthur Bradford of…

Tracy Caulkins Stockwell ranks among Tennessee's most successful Olympians. She began swimming at age eight and, under the aegis of the Nashville Aquatic club, qualified for the Olympic Trials five years later. At fourteen, Caulkins won her first national title,…