Project Overview

Margaret D. Binnicker


Carlyle Aerostructures
Names for this company have changed through the years, but the early factory site off Murfreesboro Pike in Nashville has not, and the importance of this plant cannot be overstated. Nashville's Ma... Continue Reading »
Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio Railway
The Carolina, Clinchfield, and Ohio (CC&O) Railway, best known as the Clinchfield Railroad, provided the "Quick Service, Short Route between the Central West and Southeast," crossing the Appalachian M... Continue Reading »
Dance: Clogging and Buckdancing
The traditional dances of clogging and buckdancing are popular forms of percussive dancing that originated in the southern Appalachian mountains. Though the eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish settl... Continue Reading »
Jane Eskind
The first woman to win a statewide election in Tennessee, Jane G. Eskind was raised and educated in Louisville, Kentucky. She attended Brandeis University, married Richard Eskind, completed her underg... Continue Reading »
Randall M. Falk
Randall M. Falk has advanced Jewish-Christian relations and understanding as an author, professor, and rabbi of The Temple, Congregation Ohabai Sholom in Nashville. Born in Little Rock and educated at... Continue Reading »
First Woman's Bank
Situated on the public square in Clarksville in the Arlington Hotel, the First Woman's Bank began operations on October 6, 1919. As a financial institution created, directed, and staffed entirely... Continue Reading »
Nikki Giovanni
Writer Nikki Giovanni expresses her version of the late twentieth-century African American experience through poetry and essays. Though her parents left Knoxville after her birth, Giovanni returned fo... Continue Reading »
Harpeth Hall School and Ward-Belmont
Harpeth Hall School opened in 1951 in Nashville on a twenty-six-acre campus that had previously been the Estes estate. While new in name and location, the school continued in spirit and manner the edu... Continue Reading »
Katherine Burch Warner
Suffragist Katherine Burch Warner was born in Chattanooga, raised in Nashville, and educated at Vassar. The well-traveled Kate learned about politics through her father, John C. Burch, editor and publ... Continue Reading »
King College
The Holston Presbytery founded King College in 1867 in Bristol and named the school for James King, an eighteenth-century settler in the region. Both the acreage and physical plant of the college have... Continue Reading »
Marathon Motor Works
The history of Marathon Motor Works provides a spectacular though short-lived example of new industry during one period of Nashville boosterism. Augustus H. Robinson, owner of the Maxwell House Hotel,... Continue Reading »
McKee Baking Company
As the creators and producers of Little Debbie Snack Cakes, O. D. and Ruth McKee transformed a small bakery into a terrific success that their two sons have turned into a business worth $770 million i... Continue Reading »
Frances Williams Preston
Frances W. Preston, a Nashville native who went to work for Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) at the age of twenty-one, serves now as that enterprise's worldwide president and CEO. While still a teenage... Continue Reading »
Scott County
The location of Scott County on the Cumberland Plateau abutting the Tennessee-Kentucky state line makes for beautiful landscape, poor soil for farming, and a small population. The region is blanketed ... Continue Reading »
Settlement Schools
At the end of the nineteenth century no universally accepted standards or requirements for any level of education existed in the South. Defeated in the Civil War and their economies devastated, the so... Continue Reading »
Southern Adventist University
After its founding as Graysville Academy in 1892, this educational institution evolved and expanded, changed its name twice, and moved in 1916 to what later became the town of Collegedale in Hamilton ... Continue Reading »
Southern Potteries, Inc.
Under the leadership of E. J. Owens, Southern Potteries, Inc., began operations in Erwin in Unicoi County in 1916-17 using skilled labor brought from Ohio and local unskilled workers. Its product was ... Continue Reading »
St. Andrew's-Sewanee
St. Andrew's-Sewanee School is the result of the 1981 merger of two older institutions, and it builds upon the heritage of three Episcopal schools founded on Monteagle Mountain in Franklin County... Continue Reading »
Tracy Caulkins Stockwell
Tracy Caulkins Stockwell ranks among Tennessee's most successful Olympians. She began swimming at age eight and, under the aegis of the Nashville Aquatic club, qualified for the Olympic Trials fi... Continue Reading »
Tennessee Shell Company
Robert Latendresse began Tennessee Shell Company in Camden in 1954 to ship Tennessee mollusk shells to Japan. There the shells were cut, ground into round beads, and inserted by Japanese pearl farmers... Continue Reading »
Van Buren County
Van Buren County encompasses 274 square miles straddling the Cumberland Plateau and the eastern Highland Rim. The western 30 percent of the county stands 960 feet above sea level; its limestone outcro... Continue Reading »
Percy Warner
Nashville businessman and civic leader Percy Warner followed the lead of his father, James C. Warner, in capitalizing upon the New South exploitation of natural resources with his Warner Iron Corporat... Continue Reading »
Worth, Inc.
This family-owned baseball and softball equipment company was founded by George Sharp Lannom Jr. in Tullahoma in 1912 as Lannom Manufacturing Company. It began as a producer of leather horse collars a... Continue Reading »
Harry and Mary K. Zimmerman
Harry and Mary Zimmerman founded in 1960 what became within a generation the nation's largest catalog showroom, Service Merchandise. Both grew up in Memphis, and, after graduating from Central Hi... Continue Reading »