Perre Magness

Virginia Frazer Boyle, "Poet Laureate of the Confederacy," was born in Chattanooga on February 14, 1863, to Charles Wesley and Letitia Austin Frazer. After the Civil War, the family moved to Memphis, where her father practiced law. Boyle challenged tradition…

The Center for Southern Folklore, located in Memphis, is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to documenting and presenting the people and traditions of the South. Through films, video tapes, records, books, exhibits, and festivals, the center presents the life of indigenous…

Architect James B. Cook was born in England and studied at King's College and Putney College before becoming a supervising architect on the Crystal Palace for London's Great Exhibition of 1851. Cook immigrated to New York in 1855. Two years…

Belle Edmondson, Confederate smuggler, was born in Mississippi. On the eve of the Civil War her family moved to a Shelby County farm on Holly Ford Road (now Airways Boulevard), about three miles from the Mississippi border and eight miles…

After La Salle's failed attempt to colonize the lower Mississippi Valley in 1684, the French launched a new effort in the early eighteenth century. Under the leadership of Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, the French subdued the Natchez…

René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, was born in 1643, the son of a wealthy family in Rouen, France. At the age of twenty-three, he went to Canada and established an Indian trading post near Montreal. Indian tales aroused…

One of Memphis's most significant Victorian-era architects, Edward C. Jones was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and educated there and in Northampton, Massachusetts. He began his career as an architect in Charleston in 1848. After serving in the Confederate army,…

Memphis's Lemoyne Owen College opened its doors in 1871 as LeMoyne Normal and Commercial School, but it traces its ancestry to the schools for ex-slaves organized by members of the American Missionary Association (AMA) during and after the Civil War.…

Physician, journalist, and educator Myles Lynk was born in Brownsville on June 3, 1871, the son of former slaves. His father was killed when Lynk was only six years old, and he was running the farm by the time he…

The Memphis College of Art is the only independent college in the South dually accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) and the National Association of Schools of Art and Design. It opened on October 5, 1936,…

This important African American business institution in Memphis was founded in 1906 by Robert R. Church Sr., who had become the wealthiest African American in Tennessee through real estate and other interests. The bank was located on Beale Street across…

Located in Memphis, the Southern College of Optometry has educated over six thousand optometrists in its sixty-nine years of existence. It is one of only seventeen schools of optometry in the United States and has contracts with several states to…

Marcus B. Winchester, land developer and first mayor of Memphis, was born on May 28, 1796, at Cragfont, the eldest son of James Winchester and Susan Black. Winchester was educated in Baltimore but left school at age sixteen to serve…