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Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist, feminist, and civil rights activist, launched an antilynching campaign in the 1890s that made her one of the most outstanding African American women of the nineteenth century. The eldest of eight children born to James "Jim"…

Kitty Wells, pioneering female country music vocalist, was born Muriel Deason in Nashville on August 30, 1919. She learned to sing and play guitar at an early age and was performing with Johnny Wright and the Harmony Girls by 1936.…

Industrialist and philanthropist Joe Werthan entered the modest family business, Werthan and Company, in 1908. It dealt in scrap metal and the accumulation, reconditioning, and distribution of burlap bags to grain elevators and feed mills. In 1911 Werthan married Sadie…

Located near Cedar Hill, Robertson County, Wessyngton Plantation specialized in dark-fired tobacco from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Joseph Washington, a native of Virginia, established Wessyngton in 1796, the year of statehood, when he acquired property along…

The West Tennessee Historical Society is the successor of four other historical societies. Prior to September 28, 1950, the West Tennessee Historical Society (WTHS) was an unincorporated society whose origins can be traced to the antebellum period. Organized in 1857,…

Ben West, mayor of Nashville (1951-63), was born in Columbia, Tennessee, in 1911. West came to Nashville as a boy and grew up with his parents in a working-class neighborhood in the Woodbine district. He worked his way through school…

James Edward “Ed” Westcott, Oak Ridge’s official photographer during the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on January 20, 1922. Ed Westcott’s photography is featured in nearly every book, magazine, documentary, and newspaper article about the…

Western State Mental Hospital, located near Bolivar, was the last state mental hospital to be constructed and habitually the one least funded. In December 1885 the site commissioners chose the farm of Paul T. Jones as the location for the…

May C. Wharton, early twentieth-century medical pioneer on the Cumberland Plateau, was born on a Minnesota farm. A sickly child, she was inspired and encouraged by a family friend and physician who gave her the Home Doctor Book. She attended…

Confederate cavalry commander Joe Wheeler rose from lieutenant to major general in the Army of Tennessee in less than two years. He is best known for daring raids behind Union lines in Middle Tennessee that were sensationalized at the time…

The Tennessee General Assembly established White County on September 11, 1806, from a part of Smith County and named the new county for John White, one of the first settlers in the area. The Knowels, Rascos, and Swindells were among…

Andrew Nathaniel White III, the only child of Reverend Doctor and Mrs. Andrew White, was born in Washington, D.C. In 1946 the family moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where Rev. White was the president of a local chapter of the National…

Hugh Lawson White was a U.S. senator whose 1836 presidential candidacy helped to establish the Whig Party both in Tennessee and in the South. The son of General James White, the founder of Knoxville, White briefly served as private secretary…

James White, statesman, military figure, and philanthropist, was born in 1747 in Rowan County, North Carolina. He married Mary Lawson in 1770, and the Whites had seven children; their oldest son, Hugh Lawson White, achieved national prominence as a presidential…

James Herbert White achieved a national reputation for innovation and excellence in African American education. He successfully created and developed notable institutions and academic programs in social and financial climates that were indifferent, sometimes even hostile to the education of…

The first woman basketball player inducted into the National Basketball Hall of Fame (in 1992), Nera White of Macon County has become a legendary figure in the annals of women's basketball. Born in Macon County on November 15, 1935, she…

Tennessee's first state historian, Dr. Robert H. White was born in Crockett County in 1883. He graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1910 and completed his graduate work at George Peabody College and the University of Chicago. From 1911 until 1919…

Sue Shelton White, suffragist, equal rights advocate, attorney, and writer, was born and reared in Henderson, the sixth of seven children born to James Shelton White and Mary Calista Swain White. As teachers and liberal thinkers, White's parents stressed the…

Chattanooga attorney and businessman Joseph B. Whitehead, along with Benjamin F. Thomas and J. T. Lupton, pioneered the Coca-Cola bottling industry. Born in Oxford, Mississippi, he received a law degree from the University of Mississippi. In the late 1880s he…

Chattanooga businesswoman Harriet Whiteside was born May 3, 1824, in Wytheville, Virginia, and educated at the Moravian School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to be a teacher. At the age of nineteen she arrived in Chattanooga to teach music to one…