Ridley Wills II

John Harding founded Belle Meade Plantation in 1807. From his initial 250-acre purchase on the "Old Natchez Road," seven miles from Nashville, Harding built Belle Meade into a twelve-hundred-acre plantation. During the three decades of his management, Harding sold blacksmith…

Leading Tennessee agriculturist and nationally acclaimed stock breeder William G. Harding was born in 1808 near Nashville. Harding was educated at the American Literary, Scientific, and Military Academy in Middletown, Connecticut. Two years after his first wife, Mary Selena McNairy,…

In 1882 a group of Tennessee Sunday school workers organized an assembly patterned after that in Chautauqua, New York, which had been founded in 1873 to train Sunday School teachers during the summer. That fall, a site selection committee accepted…

Of the more than one dozen boys' schools established in Middle Tennessee at the turn of the nineteenth century, only Montgomery Bell Academy (MBA) remains in operation one hundred years later. Founded in 1867 as the preparatory department of the…

As early as 1790, a number of thoroughbred stallions were brought into the Watauga and Holston settlements, and between 1790 and 1795, the Knoxville Register and Star Gazette advertised at least nine stallions as standing in what is now East…

Nashville's Wallace University School was established in 1886 through the leadership of A. G. Adams, J. B. O'Bryan, and R. B. Throne. Desiring to establish a boys' school that emphasized character and scholarship, these men offered the position of headmaster…

Sawney Webb was born in a North Carolina farmhouse on November 11, 1842. His father, Alexander Webb, died when he was six years old, leaving most of his rearing to his mother. She taught Sawney the value of hard work…