Tara Mitchell Mielnik

Organized as the Pittsburgh Reduction Company in 1888, the company changed its name in 1907 to the Aluminum Company of America and began using the acronym ALCOA in the early 1900s after applying the acronym to company-owned sites in Tennessee.…

According to archaeological investigations, long before Tennessee became a state, Native Americans occupied lands in present-day Anderson County. Permanent white settlement dates to 1796, when Thomas Frost built a cabin. After statehood, settlements soon expanded, increased by the arrival of…

Born in Iredell County, North Carolina, John H. Bills was one of the founders of Bolivar, in Hardeman County, and a leader of the Tennessee Democratic Party in the nineteenth century. He came to the West Tennessee area in 1818…

Blount County is one of the oldest counties in Tennessee. Established in 1795 before statehood, it was named in honor of Territorial Governor William Blount. Prior to white settlement the area was home to the Cherokee Indians, who established their…

Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, Blount Mansion was constructed between 1792 and 1830, with the first period of construction occurring between 1792 and 1796. As the home and office of William Blount, the governor of the Southwest Territory, Blount Mansion…

The Brock Candy Company dates to 1906, when William Emerson Brock, a traveling sales representative with the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, purchased the Trigg Candy Company of Chattanooga. Three years later, he reincorporated the company as Brock Candy Company.…

The now defunct Burritt College was founded in 1848 at Spencer, Van Buren County, as a preparatory school and junior college under the auspices of the Churches of Christ. The college was an early coeducational institution with a classical curriculum…

Alexander Cameron, British Indian agent among the Cherokees, was a native of Scotland who emigrated to Georgia in the 1730s and enlisted in the British army during the Seven Years' War. In 1764 the British appointed him commissary to Chota…

Arthur Campbell, a political and military leader in Virginia and frontier Tennessee, was born in Augusta County, Virginia, on November 3, 1743. A band of Wyandotte Indians captured fifteen-year-old Campbell and took him to the area of present-day Detroit where…

Francis Joseph Campbell, a leading educator for the blind in the United States and Great Britain, was born in Franklin County on October 9, 1832. A childhood accident left Campbell blind at the age of four. He attended regular schools…

The last county formed in Tennessee was Chester County, created by the Tennessee General Assembly from parts of neighboring Hardeman, Henderson, McNairy, and Madison Counties. In 1875 this land was used to create a county named Wisdom County, but Wisdom…

The earliest recognized Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) church in Tennessee is Capers Memorial CME Church in Nashville. It dates to 1866, and its leaders had a prominent role in the creation of the formal CME convention in 1870. In that…

An important ruling on the concept of self-defense resulted from one of the most famous murder trials in Tennessee history. On November 9, 1908, Robin Cooper shot and killed Edward W. Carmack in downtown Nashville. Cooper was the son of…

A prominent member of the U.S. House of Representatives for almost thirty years, Jere Cooper was born in Dyer County on July 20, 1893. Cooper attended local schools and graduated in 1914 from Cumberland University Law School. He was admitted…

Long before Tennessee became famous for the Tennessee Walking Horse in the mid-1900s, the state was known throughout the country as the center for thoroughbred horses. For most of the nineteenth century, Tennessee, not Kentucky, was acknowledged as the center…

Benjamin Lundy, pioneering abolitionist, was born in New Jersey on January 4, 1789, to Quaker parents, Joseph and Eliza Lundy. In 1808 Lundy moved to Wheeling, Virginia, to pursue a career in saddle-making. There Lundy experienced his first contact with…

The Emancipator, published in 1820 in Jonesborough, Tennessee, by Elihu Embree, was the first newspaper in the United States devoted entirely to the abolitionist cause. It was an outgrowth of Embree’s first newspaper, the Manumission Intelligencer, published the year before.…

Formerly the Tennessee and Alabama Female Institute, Mary Sharp College was chartered in Winchester in 1850. Opening in 1851, the school was named for an early benefactor. Under the direction of Dr. Z. C. Graves and the Baptist Church, Mary…

Samuel McAdow, one of the founders of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, was born on April 10, 1760, in Guilford County, North Carolina, the son of Scots and Irish immigrants. Raised a Presbyterian, McAdow attended the church and school led by…

A group of black women, wives of prominent black leaders in Nashville's church, business, and professional arenas, organized the Phillis Wheatley Club in 1895. The club, established its headquarters at the AME Publishing House on the public square in Nashville,…

The Tennessee branch of the American Colonization Society, which sought to free slaves and repatriate them to Africa, was organized as a debating society in Nashville in December 1829. Josiah F. Polk, an agent of the American Colonization Society, recruited…

Published by Elihu Embree at Jonesborough in 1820, the Emancipator was the first newspaper in the United States solely devoted to the abolition of slavery. Embree had previously published a weekly newspaper, the Manumission Intelligencer, in 1819, and it was…