Don H. Doyle

Beverly Briley, first mayor of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County (1963-75), was born in Nashville in 1914. Briley grew up in East Nashville, attended Vanderbilt University and Cumberland Law School, and in 1932 became the youngest Tennessean…

Edmund "King" Cole, a leading late nineteenth-century railroad entrepreneur, financier, and philanthropist, was born in Giles County, a descendent of a prominent Virginia family. Cole's father died when he was three months old, leaving his mother with a large family…

Tennessee's early patterns of commercial exchange determined the location and growth of its urban centers. Commercial centers typically formed at some junction of land and water that required a break in the mode of transportation, usually from animal-powered overland wagons…

Hilary Howse, significant Nashville politician and mayor in the early twentieth century, was born in Rutherford County. In 1884 Howse came to Nashville, found work in a furniture store, and helped five of his siblings get started in the city.…

The Tennessee Centennial Exposition, held in Nashville in 1897 to celebrate Tennessee's one-hundredth anniversary of statehood, was one of the largest and grandest of a series of industrial expositions that became hallmarks of the New South era. Modeled in particular…

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…