Fred S. Rolater

Ray Blanton, three-term congressman and one-term governor, was born in April 1930, in Hardin County and grew up on a farm close to the small town of Adamsville in McNairy County. His "dirt-poor" upbringing in the cotton fields of West…

Gordon W. Browning, three-term governor and U.S. congressman, was born in Carroll County in 1895. He attended local schools and opened a law practice in Huntingdon in 1915. He served in the National Guard in World War I. In 1922…

The Chickamaugas were a diverse group of Cherokees, Creeks, dissatisfied whites, and African Americans who stymied white settlement in Tennessee for approximately nineteen years. On March 19, 1775, one month before the outbreak of fighting in the American Revolution, Richard…

Albert V. Goodpasture, writer, editor, and Tennessee historian, was born on November 19, 1855, in Overton County. He attended school in Cookeville and New Middleton, and received his B.A. from East Tennessee University in 1875, having absorbed the view of…

In the early 1880s Westin A. Goodspeed, a successful Nashville-based publisher, discovered that volumes combining local history, biography, and state historical records had sold well in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and several other northern states. In the South, except for…

Marvin T. Runyon, past president of Nissan, U.S.A., chairman of the board of Tennessee Valley Authority, and postmaster general, was born in Ft. Worth, Texas, on September 16, 1924. He did not become a Tennessean until 1980, but in the…

Relationships between Tennessee's Native Americans and the Europeans who came to settle most of the state were regulated by various treaties negotiated between 1770 and 1835. A series of ten treaties defined the areas assigned to both groups and the…

Jesse Walton, pioneer soldier and settler, was born in Virginia. By the outbreak of the American Revolution, Walton was living in Surry County, North Carolina, along the Virginia border north of Winston-Salem. A patriot, Walton was active in the Surry…