Thematic Essay

Corn was the chief agricultural product almost from the beginning of human settlement in Tennessee. Referred to as "Indian corn" throughout the 1800s, the cereal was widely cultivated by the Cherokees and formed a basic element of their diet. Most…

Cotton was not an aboriginal crop in Tennessee, nor was it widely cultivated by the earliest settlers in mountainous East Tennessee. Gins for separating cotton seed from fiber were brought into Middle Tennessee during the 1780s, however, and soon appeared…

Without the cotton gin Tennessee never would have evolved into a major antebellum cotton market; the cotton fibers produced here were too short for hand ginning or roller ginning, which could be performed on the long-staple cotton found along the…

The Cox Mound, or Woodpecker, gorget style is a particularly beautiful and enduring symbol of Tennessee's prehistoric inhabitants. A gorget was a pendant, or personal adornment, worn around the neck as a badge of rank or insignia of status and…

Crab Orchard stone is a rare sandstone quarried from the Crab Orchard Mountain of the Cumberland Plateau. Predominately rose in color, this mottled stone is streaked in irregular patterns by different shades of brown. Its unique and beautiful color was…

The traditional dances of clogging and buckdancing are popular forms of percussive dancing that originated in the southern Appalachian mountains. Though the eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish settlers brought with them the clog, a step dance characterized by a very erect…

There are many historic examples of decoratively painted interiors across the state of Tennessee. While some of the paintings have been lost, many works from the late eighteenth century to the New Deal era have survived, indicating the wide variety…

A number of natural and technological tragedies, as well as epidemics, have shaped the Tennessee experience. Many resulted in massive property damage and/or loss of life and immeasurable human suffering. Storms have inflicted terrible damage in Tennessee throughout the last…

In 1889 the Tennessee General Assembly passed four acts of self-described electoral reform that resulted in the disfranchisement of a significant portion of African American voters as well as many poor white voters. The timing of the legislation resulted from…

Dueling, defined as private combat governed by formal rules, was a manifestation of the romantic spirit that once existed in the South. A relic of feudalism, the duel was popularized among rank-conscious southern gentry by European officers who participated in…

The first explorations by Europeans in what is now Tennessee took place in 1540, when a Spanish expedition under the command of Hernando de Soto entered the region from the southeast. Soto had set out from Florida the year before…

Long before Tennessee became famous for the Tennessee Walking Horse in the mid-1900s, the state was known throughout the country as the center for thoroughbred horses. For most of the nineteenth century, Tennessee, not Kentucky, was acknowledged as the center…

For early houses in Tennessee, three house plans were common: the central passage plan, the hall-parlor plan, and the Penn-plan. The central passage plan, also called an I-house by cultural geographers, is a house with two rooms on either side…

Tennessee is an Upper South state approximately 432 miles long and 112 miles wide, constituting 42,244 square miles, with elevations ranging from peaks of over 6,000 feet to sea level, containing a wide variety of natural and human environments. A…

From Tennessee's earliest beginnings, the state's inhabitants have expressed concern about the education of their children. In fact, even before Tennessee became a state, residents established private educational institutions. Despite these private efforts, however, the state's first constitution in 1796…

Tennessee contains 19,200 miles of streams, including 1,062 miles of navigable waterways. These streams initially served as a major means of transportation that allowed early settlers access to markets and permitted travel between isolated communities. Future urban centers such as…

Tennessee towns host over thirty fiddle and old-time music contests every year. Many of these current music festivals date only to the 1970s as Tennesseans rediscovered their local musical and folklore traditions, but fiddle contests have a long history in…

Tennessee boasts 649,000 acres of productive fishing waters--the finest anywhere. Twenty-nine major reservoirs, nineteen thousand miles of warm and cold water streams, and thousands of smaller lakes and ponds provide unlimited fishing opportunity and variety year-round. Fish stories told in…

On the Tennessee frontier before 1796 the terms "station" and "fort" were used interchangeably to mean a structure, or adjacent structures, that could temporarily house more than one family and provide protection from Native American attacks. The traditional meaning of…

Tennessee is a narrow state over 500 miles long, with its long axis running east-west across the grain of the geology. Most of the geological provinces of the east-central United States are represented somewhere in Tennessee. Since geology exercises a…