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ADELICIA ACKLEN
1817-1887
One of the wealthiest women of the antebellum South, Adelicia Acklen was born March 15, 1817, the daughter of Oliver Bliss Hayes, a prominent Nashville lawyer, judge, Presbyterian minister, land speculator, and cousin to President Rutherford B. Hayes. At age twenty-two she married Isaac Franklin of Sumner County, a wealthy cotton planter and slave trader, who was twenty-eight years her senior. They had four children, none of whom survived childhood. After seven years of marriage Franklin died, leaving his widow an inheritance valued at approximately $1 million that included seven Louisiana cotton plantations, a two-thousand-acre farm in Middle Tennessee, and 750 slaves.
Three years after Franklin's death, Adelicia married Colonel Joseph A. S. Acklen, a lawyer from Huntsville, Alabama, who signed a prenuptial contract giving his wife complete control of all her businesses, property, and assets. The couple began immediate construction of Belmont, a twenty-thousand-square-foot summer villa, now maintained as a house museum. The Acklens lived a sumptuous lifestyle, traveling between Belmont in the summer and their Louisiana plantations in the winter. The couple had six children, two of whom died young. Acklen, a superb businessman and plantation manager, had tripled his wife's fortune by 1860.
After her husband died during the Civil War, Acklen faced financial ruin when the Confederate army threatened to burn 2,800 bales of her cotton to keep it from falling into Union possession. Acklen boldly rushed to Louisiana and secretly negotiated with both sides to save her fortune. She secured Confederate promises not to burn her cotton, while the Union army agreed to help her move the cotton to New Orleans. Acklen ran the Union blockade and sold her cotton to the Rothschilds of London for a reported $960,000 in gold. Three weeks after Robert E. Lee's surrender in 1865, Acklen and her children left for Europe to retrieve the money made from this cotton sale.
In 1867 the fifty-year-old Acklen married Dr. William Archer Cheatham, a respected Nashville physician. Cheatham also signed a prenuptial agreement. The couple was married twenty years, spending most of their time at Belmont in Nashville. In 1886 Acklen sold Belmont, left Nashville and Cheatham, and moved to Washington, D.C., with three of her adult children. The exact cause of her separation from Cheatham is not known. Acklen died on May 4, 1887, while on a shopping trip to New York City. She is buried in Nashville's Mt. Olivet Cemetery in a family mausoleum with her first two husbands and nine of her ten children.
Mark Brown, Belmont Mansion
See Also: BELMONT MANSION; WILLIAM A. CHEATHAM; ISAAC FRANKLIN; SLAVERY
ACTORS
See Also: TENNESSEE IN FILM; TELEVISION AND MOVIE PERFORMERS; THEATER
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ROY C. ACUFF
1903-1992
Roy Acuff, known as the "King of Country Music" due to his long association with the Grand Ole Opry, was born in Maynardville, Union County, on September 15, 1903. At age sixteen, he moved with his family to a Knoxville suburb. A good athlete, Acuff played baseball until felled by a sunstroke in 1929. While recuperating, he learned to play the fiddle his father owned. In 1932 he joined a medicine show selling Mocatan Tonic, and in 1934 he performed on WROL radio in Knoxville. He then moved to the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round on station WNOX, but in 1935 returned to WROL, where his group acquired the name the "Crazy Tennesseans." Sometime during this period, Acuff began singing "The Great Speckled Bird," and it soon became so popular that the American Record Company (later Columbia) recorded Acuff and his group in Chicago in October 1936.
Since 1934 Judge George Hay had rebuffed Acuff's attempts to sing on the Grand Ole Opry. Acuff persisted in his efforts, though, and on February 5, 1938, he made his audition appearance on the Opry singing "The Great Speckled Bird." The Opry received a favorable mail response, and he was offered a regular spot on the show two weeks later. WSM general manager Harry Stone insisted, however, that the group change its name to the "Smoky Mountain Boys." Stone felt that "Crazy Tennesseans" might be interpreted as a slur against the state, and he wanted to avoid confusion with "Crazy Water Crystals," an advertiser for a popular laxative as well.
Acuff decided to cast his future with the traditional string band sound, but his band disagreed and quit early in 1939. Acuff quickly hired Pete "Brother Oswald" Kirby, Lonnie Wilson, and Jake Tindell to replace Clell Sumney, Red Jones, and Imogene "Tiny" Sarrett. Later that year he hired Rachel Veach.
Acuff supplemented his income by compiling and selling songbooks of his songs, a venture that eventually led to the establishment of Acuff-Rose Publishing in October 1942. Acuff-Rose became a cornerstone for Nashville's growing music industry and the first successful business outside the Grand Ole Opry. During the 1940s, Acuff's hits included "Pins and Needles," "Beneath That Lonely Mound of Clay," "The Precious Jewel," "The Wreck on the Highway," "Fire Ball Mail," "Wait for That Light to Shine," "Two Different Worlds," and "The Wabash Cannonball."
Acuff began hosting the "Prince Albert" segment of The Grand Ole Opry radio show in October 1939. The exposure on the NBC radio network broadcast made him a national star. In April 1946 Acuff left the Grand Ole Opry and the "Prince Albert" show, however, out of frustration with the Opry's requirement that he return every Saturday night to perform. Acuff's popularity kept him in constant demand for personal appearances at much higher fees than what the Opry paid. After leaving Nashville, Acuff toured the West Coast and appeared in seven movies. Red Foley, a smooth-voiced singer from WLS's National Barn Dance in Chicago, replaced Acuff on the Opry. Without regular network exposure, the demand for Acuff's appearances dwindled, and he returned to the Opry to reestablish himself as a major performer.
In 1948 Acuff became the Republican nominee for governor of Tennessee and won a large vote but lost the election. That same year, he opened his Dunbar Cave resort just outside Clarksville, where he performed regularly.
After the early 1950s, Acuff was no longer a major recording artist, though he continued to tour until he was involved in a near-fatal accident in 1965. In 1962 he became the first living artist elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame. Acuff gained recognition and appreciation from young fans after the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band recorded "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" in 1971. Acuff considered the opening of the new Opry House one of the highlights of his career. On that date, March 16, 1974, he performed with President Richard Nixon on the Opry stage.
After Acuff's wife Mildred died in 1981, the Opryland Music Group purchased Acuff-Rose Publishing, which was actually in her name. Roy Acuff spent his final years living in a home on the grounds of Opryland and performing on the Opry each weekend. The widely respected icon of country music died on November 23, 1992.
Don Cusic, Belmont University
See Also: ACUFF-ROSE; DUNBAR CAVE STATE NATURAL AREA; GRAND OLE OPRY; MUSIC
ACUFF-ROSE
The Acuff-Rose music publishing company was founded by Roy Acuff and Fred Rose and officially incorporated on October 13, 1942. The company's start-up capital included $25,000 from Acuff (which was never touched) and $2,500 from BMI, a performance rights organization. Roy Acuff wanted the company to supplement his income from performances. He had been selling songbooks, and by 1942 this sideline had become so extensive that Acuff approached Rose with a plan to establish a music publishing company.
Fred Rose (1897-1954), a pop music songwriter, had written songs like "Deed I Do" and "Honest and Truly," and played piano for Paul Whiteman's band. In 1938 he gave up a popular show on WSM and moved to Hollywood to write songs for Gene Autry movies. When Autry joined the Army Air Corps as a pilot in 1942, Rose returned to Nashville and quickly landed an afternoon radio show.
Acuff chose his future partner well. Rose was an ASCAP songwriter with connections in New York, Chicago, and Hollywood. A gifted editor and talent scout, Rose willingly offered his expertise to other songwriters. A practicing Christian Scientist, Rose held himself to the highest ethical standards and gained a reputation for honesty and fairness. Fred Rose was in a unique position. He knew the people at WSM and the Opry, he had learned about the huge market for country music--and the money involved--through his work with Autry and the singing cowboys in the movies, and he was a pop songwriter who had come to Nashville as country music was changing from a folk-based music into a major commercial music. Rose would play a major role, introducing the pop song format with country topics to replace the folk song format. This had already been done with western music, most of which was composed by Tin Pan Alley writers who used pop song structures with western themes. Fred Rose would take that same process to Nashville and apply it to southern-based country music.
In September 1946 Acuff-Rose signed songwriter Hank Williams and soon obtained a recording contract for him with the Sterling label. Although Williams later switched to MGM, his songs became the cornerstone for the Acuff-Rose catalog. The company's first major pop hit was "Tennessee Waltz" by Patti Page in 1950. In addition to Hank Williams hits such as "Your Cheatin' Heart," "Jambalaya," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," and "Hey, Good Lookin'," Acuff-Rose also published songs by Pee Wee King, Don Gibson, Felice and Boudeleaux Bryant, the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, John D. Loudermilk, Marty Robbins, Bob Luman, Leon Payne, Doug Kershaw, and Mickey Newbury. Songs published by Acuff-Rose include: "Bye Bye Love"; "I Can't Stop Loving You"; "Dream, Dream, Dream"; "When Will I Be Loved"; "Oh, Lonesome Me"; "Oh, Pretty Woman"; "I Love You Because"; "Lost Highway"; "Making Believe"; and "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain."
Don Cusic, Belmont University
See Also: ROY C. ACUFF; K. FRED ROSE; HANK WILLIAMS
JESSE F. ADAMS
1881-1964
Jesse F. Adams, rural Middle Tennessee medical pioneer and entrepreneur, was born in Cannon County on October 19, 1881. He married Laura Elizabeth Hudson, a Texas native, in 1907, and they had nine children. Adams graduated from Vanderbilt University Medical School in 1911 and established a practice at Short Mountain in Cannon County. In 1912 he shifted his practice to Bradyville; in 1918-19 he served one-year active duty in the U.S. Army Reserve Medical Corps. In 1924 Adams moved his practice to Woodbury, the county seat, where he purchased and converted the remaining dormitory of the Baptist Female College of 1859 into his private home and office. This house is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
His vast medical contributions to this rural region included two terms as county health officer and establishing the first county hospital, the Good Samaritan Hospital, from 1933-34 during the Great Depression. Few rural Tennessee counties at that time had such modern facilities at their disposal. Adams created the hospital as his own "public works" project and accepted no direct governmental assistance. He also was a small-town example of a "civic capitalist," playing an instrumental role in Woodbury's acquiring the Armour and Company Cheese Plant in 1935. Twelve years later, he helped to convince the Colonial Shirt Corporation to establish a Woodbury factory. The Colonial factory was the county's chief industrial employer for the next forty years. Adams served as well as the president of the Bradyville Bank, the Cannon County Banking Company, and the Woodbury Bank of Commerce.
In 1950 Adams donated the hospital to the county and announced his retirement. But by 1955 he was back in practice and continued to work until his death on May 4, 1964. He and his wife Laura, who died in 1973, are buried in the Riverside Cemetery in Woodbury. Their son, Carl E. Adams, continued the family tradition of local medical service by founding both the neighboring Murfreesboro Medical Clinic and the National Health Corporation, a major medical company based in Murfreesboro managed now as National Healthcare by his sons W. Andrew Adams and Robert G. Adams.
Carroll Van West, Middle Tennessee State University
See Also: CANNON COUNTY; MEDICINE
AFRICAN AMERICAN DECORATIVE ARTS
African American decorative arts embrace many forms, from the practical utility of bed quilts and baskets to the traditional crafts of blacksmithing and wood carving to the skill in design and construction of residential architecture or boat building. Whether the objects are practical or beautiful, the artistic creations are based on decades of learned tradition and natural instinct.
The tradition of African American folk and craft artisans began in Tennessee with the settlement of the land and the introduction of slavery to the emerging agrarian society. Slaves brought from Africa not only traditional skills but also a sense of color and pattern that made their craftsmanship unique. The strong African sense of family enabled artists to learn their skills from their parents, what African American artist and historian Pecolia Warner called "fireplace training."
Decorative arts in the early nineteenth century began as practical objects such as bed quilts, basketry, woven goods, iron work, and funerary art were created for daily utility. Richard Poynor (1802-1882) of Williamson County was a noted craftsman and carpenter. His chairs are prized possessions today among many Tennessee furniture collectors. Later works, less dependent on practical need, nevertheless maintained African color schemes and design patterns in creations of artistic expression and improvisation, as found in the gravestones and markers of William Edmondson of Nashville.
Although European in tradition, bed quilts were adapted to reflect distinctly African origins through the alteration of patterns and color selections. Quilts were used not only to cover beds but also as barriers between rooms in slave quarters to provide privacy and insulation. In the twentieth century, quilts became less utilitarian and more unique pieces of fabric art. The collections of the McMinn County Living Heritage Museum in Athens contain a striking cotton quilt titled "Schoolhouse," made by Sarah Moore, an African American woman, in the 1920s. The Nashville-born fabric designer Viola Burley Leak has given a strong voice to African American history through her sewn fabric pieces, which depict scenes from black experiences.
Early African American craftsmen produced basketry to serve the needs of plantation life in everything from cotton baskets to egg and market baskets. These forms also gave way to the improvisation inherent in African American craft tradition. Twentieth-century basketmaking was no longer driven by need, but by a new monetary value, which allowed for creative license in the design of unique objects such as woven purses, pocketbooks, and flower baskets.
African American artistic talent expressed itself more often in blacksmithing than in any other trade except carpentry. Unlike fabric and cloth hand crafts, which were passed in fireplace training among females, the smithing tradition was the only craft passed down by males from generation to generation. Rural blacksmiths crafted utilitarian objects from horseshoes to hinges but had few opportunities for creative expression. These rural craftsmen acquired many opportunities to achieve independence, however, and were often able to purchase their freedom with money earned through work for their owners and neighboring farmers and plantation owners. Smithing proved lucrative enough for some freedmen to be able to purchase their families with their earned incomes. Urban blacksmiths had more opportunities to demonstrate their artistic skills than rural blacksmiths, when they were hired to produce fences and commissioned works. Twentieth-century Shelbyville artist Vanoy Streeter carries on the African American tradition in metalwork with his sculptures created with yards and yards of formed wire.
African American traditions continue to thrive in Tennessee decorative art while allowing artists to rely on improvisation to guide their creations. Twenty-first-century artists produce creations using the traditional techniques of their ancestors while allowing contemporary events to influence design and form.
Susan Goodsell, Benton Harbor, Michigan
Suggested Reading(s): William Ferris, ed., Afro-American Folk Art and Crafts (1983); Robert L. Hall, Gathered Visions: Selected Works by African American Women Artists (1992); Maude Southwell Wahlman, Signs and Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts (1993).
See Also: ISAAC DOCKERY; WILLIAM EDMONDSON; GILLILAND HOUSE; FRED MCMAHAN
JAMES R. AGEE
1909-1955
James R. Agee was born in Knoxville on November 27, 1909. His father, Hugh James Agee, was of southern Appalachian yeoman background; his mother, Laura Tyler, came from a family of means and education. The couple also had a younger child, a daughter, Emma. When the boy was six, his father was killed in an automobile accident. Shortly before his tenth birthday, Agee was enrolled in the St. Andrew's boarding school for boys, which was run and staffed by the Episcopalian monastic Order of the Holy Cross near Sewanee. It was there that Agee got to know Father James Harold Flye, a priest and teacher--their many letters would eventually see the light of day. Agee stayed at St. Andrew's until 1924. His mother had taken a house close by, but that year she returned to Knoxville because of her father's failing health, and so her son attended high school there during the school year of 1924-25, after which he was sent to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
While at Exeter, Agee began his writing career in earnest. He published fiction, poetry, and book reviews in the school's literary magazine, The Monthly. Soon enough he was at Harvard (1928), where he wrote for The Advocate--again publishing fiction, poetry, and essays. He became president of The Advocate in 1931, graduated in 1932, and thereafter became a reporter, then staff writer, for Fortune magazine, where between 1932 and 1936 he wrote major pieces on a broad range of subjects including "Housing," "Sheep and Shuttleworths," "Strawberries," "Steel Rails," "Cockfighting," "U.S. Ambassadors," "The American Roadside," "Drought," "Williamsburg Restored," and not least, "T.V.A." The latter was an important matter to him, one that required that he return to his native state in an effort to understand the (then) hugely ambitious (and controversial) attempt to gain control of the mighty and sometimes aberrant Tennessee River.
Meanwhile, in 1933, he married Olivia Saunders, whom he had met as a Harvard undergraduate. In 1934 his poetry, which he had been publishing since his Exeter years, was collected under the title Permit Me Voyage (Hart Crane's phrase) and published by Yale Press. He was given the Yale Younger Poets award, a most auspicious and distinguished beginning for a twenty-five-year-old man.
In 1936 Fortune commissioned Agee and his photographer friend Walker Evans to do a major study of the rural South's agricultural life--a landmark assignment that would change the very nature of his personal and writing life. In Hale County, Alabama, the two men lived with white tenant farm families and observed carefully their way of life, the work they did, and the manner in which they spent their time. Agee never would do justice to that experience as a writer for Fortune. Instead, he devoted himself to a prolonged literary and documentary "study" of the three families he had come to know best. The result, in the autumn of 1940, was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, an idiosyncratic masterpiece that willfully defies description or categorization. It is a great, sprawling, lyrical, provocative, immensely edifying, soulful, and engaging celebration of humble but worthy farm folk, and too, a mix of social reportage, a narrative rendering of a particular human landscape, moral introspection, spiritual yearning. The book's appearance was untimely--the nation was by then turning its attention away from its social and economic problems in favor of its possible international role in a European war whose stakes were by then high, indeed. The book, too, was stubbornly, at times fiercely sui generis, and so a real challenge to reviewers who were limited by the demands of their work and the confines of the space allotted them. Soon enough the book was out of print, a financial failure for its publisher, Houghton Mifflin.
In 1939 Agee had embarked upon his second marriage, to Alma Mailman; their son Joel Agee (now a writer of both fiction and nonfiction) was born a year later. Agee began writing (unsigned) book reviews around 1941 for Time, and in 1942 he began writing signed film reviews for The Nation. He quickly became a much respected authority on the movies. His generous spirit, keen eye for detail, fluent writing, wonderful sense of humor, and knowing mastery of the techniques that enabled a good "moving picture" earned him a wide, devoted audience of readers.
After the war, in 1946, he entered into a third and final marriage, to Mia Fritsch, which would produce two daughters, Julia and Andrea, and a second son, John. During those last years of the 1940s he moved from writing about film to the writing of film scripts. He wrote the commentary for Helen Levitt's film about a troubled Harlem boy, The Quiet One, and wrote scripts for The Blue Hotel and The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky (both movies based on Stephen Crane stories). He also worked with John Huston on the script for The African Queen.
In the early 1950s he published The Morning Watch--another return to Tennessee: the story of a boy's unfolding adolescence, his awakening to the world, to his body. He did two more film scripts, one for Noa-Noa, based on Paul Gauguin's diary, and another for The Night of the Hunter. By the middle of the decade, years of heavy smoking, heavy drinking, all-night bouts of exuberant conversations in Manhattan bars, restaurants, apartments--a life lived intensely, sometimes recklessly--had worn down his once tall and powerful body. He developed coronary heart disease, suffered repeated bouts of angina, and on May 16, 1955 (the same day his father was killed, thirty-nine years earlier), he died in a taxicab on his way to see his physician at Manhattan's New York Hospital. At the time he had been completing a novel, A Death in the Family, published posthumously in 1957, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was eventually turned into a successful Broadway play, All the Way Home. The novel turned out to be James Agee's final "visit" to his native Tennessee--the reader is told, in hauntingly evocative prose, of a young boy's loss of his father. The Knoxville of this century's second decade is poignantly, suggestively evoked, and as in Dickens's David Copperfield, family loss, in all its melancholy and perplexity, is chronicled through a child's eyes and ears, his mind and heart and soul. A forty-five-year-old novelist's voice became, finally, one which (calling upon an experience of early sorrow in Tennessee) would teach people across the nation and abroad how the young come to terms with life's disappointments, tragedies, and turmoil.
Robert Coles, Harvard University
See Also: LITERATURE; ST. ANDREW'S-SEWANEE SCHOOL; TENNESSEE IN FILM
AGRARIANS
The Agrarians were a group of social critics centered around Vanderbilt University in the 1930s. They drew their name from their frankly reactionary resistance to industrial capitalism and their insistence that southern rural and small-town culture offered the best antidote to it. The theory of agrarianism, they argued in their anthology of essays, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930), "is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers." (1)
I'll Take My Stand, a complex amalgam of southernism and economic radicalism, grew out of a circle of Vanderbilt students and professors who began meeting informally to discuss ideas in the 1910s. The membership and interests of the group changed over time; in the 1920s a collective shift toward poetry resulted in The Fugitive, a literary magazine published between 1922 and 1925. The Agrarian effort, organized by Vanderbilt professors and poets John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson and their former student, poet Allen Tate, represented a distinctive intellectual offshoot of the old circle. Of the twelve contributors to I'll Take My Stand, six were current or former members of the Vanderbilt faculty (Ransom, Davidson, psychologist Lyle Lanier, economist Herman C. Nixon, historian Frank L. Owsley, and English professor John Donald Wade) and four were former students (Tate, Henry B. Kline, Andrew Nelson Lytle, and Robert Penn Warren). The final two contributors--critic Stark Young and poet John Gould Fletcher--were literary acquaintances of Tate.
The Agrarians were bound tightly by ties of mutual affection but only loosely by shared intellectual commitments. The contributors attempted to adopt a unified tone and platform but differed in rhetoric, approach, and social attitudes. Some were frankly elitist, identifying with the aristocratic pretensions of the antebellum southern slaveholding elite; others were populist, upholding the hardy folk culture of the southern yeoman farmer. Although appearing on the cusp of the Great Depression, the volume represented a fundamental act of resistance to the consumer-driven mass culture that had emerged in the 1920s.
The leading Agrarians--Ransom, Davidson, and Tate--were discouraged by the banal sloganeering of American culture, and yet they were equally disgusted with conservative cultural critics such as the New Humanists, led by classicists Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. In Tate's view, the Humanists proposed nothing better than an ersatz religion of great books; in Ransom's mind they were 100 percent schoolmasters who made no effective appeal to the American public. Ransom, Davidson, and Tate envisioned an alternative southern humanism. Unlike the literary program of the Humanists, Agrarianism was an economic program. The Agrarians disdained the notion that social change occurred as elites introduced cultural material "from the top." As Davidson wrote, "A movement of reform must begin at the base of our life--that is, with its economic base. And the Humanists have practically nothing to say on the subject of economics." (2)
The Agrarians believed industrial society undercut the dignity of human labor. Modern man, they argued, was bereft of vocation and glutted with the surfeit of consumer goods churned out by the industrial economy. Industrialism eviscerated local cultures; it was antithetical to religion, arts, and the social "amenities," including manners, conversation, hospitality, sympathy, family life, and romance. The Agrarians rejected not only northern economic imperialism, but also the cultural imperialism of an incipient commercial juggernaut. They favored subsistence over commercial agriculture. "Do what we did after the war and the Reconstruction," Lytle memorably enjoined his fellow southerners. "Return to our looms, our handcrafts, our reproducing stock. Throw out the radio and take down the fiddle from the wall." (3)
Despite their robust call for economic resistance to consumer capitalism, the Agrarians' actual economic program was rather thin. In the mid-1930s the Agrarians attempted a strategic alliance with the Distributists, a group of Anglo-American thinkers who advocated a return to small property holding. Their joint manifesto, Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence (1936), was a lackluster follow-up to I'll Take My Stand. In addition, the Agrarians' decision to adopt the pose of unreconstructed southerners (the original symposium included a rather moderate defense of racial segregation authored by Warren) left them open to damaging attacks from critics, who accused them of romanticizing the Old South, overlooking the South's inequalities, ignoring the impoverished reality of much southern farm life, and fruitlessly attempting to roll back progress.
Furthermore, the Agrarians were deeply divided among themselves. Ransom, Tate, and Warren saw southernism as an alternative mythology for modern Americans. In a disenchanted age, an intense emulation of an older southern culture held out the promise of a more secure sense of moral values. At the time of the writing of I'll Take My Stand, all three embraced religious skepticism but yearned for the certainties of a faith they could not accept. Their concerns tended to be universal in nature, and Tate wearied of the book's sectionalism early on and was horrified by the title, a lyric from the Confederate tune "Dixie" which was adopted over his strenuous objections. Davidson, on the other hand, viewed the Agrarians' southernism not as myth but as an alternative faith he wholeheartedly accepted. As the attention of Ransom, Tate, and the other leading Agrarians wandered to new projects, Davidson dug deeply into regionalist commitments. His ability to reinterpret the Agrarian project as a politics of cultural identity and a thoroughgoing resistance to the "leviathan" nation-state profoundly affected the legacy of Agrarianism. Davidson's fusion of a generalized traditionalism with a conservative politics of antistatism and anti-cosmopolitanism shaped postwar neo-Agrarian thinkers such as Richard M. Weaver and M. E. Bradford. Agrarianism survived into the postwar period not only as a much-studied literary episode involving some of the South's most accomplished writers but also as a vital source for southern conservatives, who remembered I'll Take My Stand less as an anticapitalist manifesto than as the taproot of their conservative politics of philosophical antiliberalism and cultural traditionalism.
Paul V. Murphy, Truman State University
(1) Louis D. Rubin Jr., introduction to I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners (1930; reprint, 1977), xlvii.
(2) Paul V. Murphy, "The Social Memory of the South: Donald Davidson and the Tennessee Past," Tennessee Historical Quarterly 55 (1996): 260.
(3) I'll Take My Stand, 244.
Suggested Reading(s): Paul K. Conkin, The Southern Agrarians (1988); Daniel J. Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945 (1982).
See Also: DONALD DAVIDSON; FUGITIVES; ANDREW N. LYTLE; HERMAN C. NIXON; FRANK L. OWSLEY; JOHN CROWE RANSOM; RANDALL STEWART; JOHN O. ALLEN TATE; VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY; ROBERT PENN WARREN
AGRICULTURAL JOURNALS
Over the last two hundred years, a number of agricultural journals have been published in Tennessee. The first, The Tennessee Farmer, began publication in 1834 and ran through 1840, when it and the short-lived Southern Cultivator and Journal of Science and Improvement (1839-40) merged with a new journal, The Agriculturalist and Journal of the State and County Societies, which itself lasted only until 1845. These three periodicals not only initiated a long line of farm publications, but their experience also typified the history of antebellum agricultural journalism.
Most magazines existed for a few years, experienced a set of common problems, and ended up dissolving or merging with another magazine. They were usually founded and managed by well-intentioned men who had an abiding interest in the advancement of agriculture but little journalistic or publication experience. Their editors--often the same people who initiated the projects--came from various occupations and included educators, businessmen, employees of state government, ministers, and successful farmers. Although internal disputes over content and external disputes over leadership within the agricultural community sometimes weakened the journals, their main problems involved financial insolvency. Most found it impossible to attract advertisers and subscribers sufficient to meet their expenses. None of the antebellum journals survived the Civil War; neither did the agricultural community's penchant for founding journals. The occasional new periodical appeared in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, only to fail a short time later. There was sporadic publication of a magazine under a version of the appellation The Tennessee Farmer; for instance, one by the name of The Tennessee Farmer and Homemaker was published as late as the 1960s.
Despite their short lives and numerous problems, these magazines performed useful functions in the rural community. The most important was to inform their readers of recent developments in technology and practice. They discussed new tools and machinery and suggested guidelines to aid farmers considering implementing them. They evaluated and compared imported livestock strains to assist those wishing to upgrade their animals through the introduction of blooded lines. They recommended changes in farming routines, such as the use of better cultivation techniques, more effective fertilizers, and improved seed varieties. Less frequently, they advised readers on commercial and financial matters--on what products offered the greatest profit potential, on marketing strategies, and on investment options. Even less frequently, they commented on political issues of concern to farmers, e.g., tariffs, banking policies, and internal improvements. The journals also surveyed farming conditions across the state, reported on agricultural fairs and conventions, and carried letters and other communications on matters of interest to rural residents. Not everything dealt directly with the crops and animals. Women received hints on managing the household, children on performing their responsibilities, and the entire family on proper moral conduct.
Over time, the state farm journals played a declining role in rural life. Other media--the state agricultural college's experiment station and extension service, demonstration trains, agricultural organizations, and suppliers of farm goods and services--increasingly assumed the journals' function as a dispenser of information.
Donald L. Winters, Vanderbilt University
See Also: AGRICULTURE
AGRICULTURAL SOCIETIES
County agricultural societies played an important role in rural affairs in the period before the Civil War. Local leaders formed the organizations for the purpose of exchanging information and promoting agricultural improvement. The first of these, the Cumberland Agricultural Society, appeared in Davidson County in 1819; the second, the Washington Agricultural Society, was formed in Washington County five years later. Gradually other counties followed these early examples, and by the 1840s a number of societies were in operation.
The organizational movement waned in the late 1840s, in part because many farmers came to view societies as elitist in their membership and dilettante in their activities. But the legislature's establishment of the State Agricultural Bureau in 1854 breathed new life into the movement. The bureau subsidized the formation and operation of county societies that met certain membership and financial conditions. In addition, the bureau actively encouraged their creation, arguing that the advancement of agriculture in the state depended upon cooperation and union among farmers, beginning at the local level. The agency's involvement also instilled a more egalitarian and practical orientation in the movement, which attracted the support of a wider portion of the rural community. The bureau's activities invigorated existing societies and stimulated the formation of more societies. By the end of the 1850s, organizations operated in many counties.
The early county societies were primarily discussion groups. They met, often at the farm of a member, to discuss a predetermined topic, review a piece of new equipment, or observe the results of an improved farming technique. Sometimes they sponsored guest lectures or stock shows to which the entire community was invited. With the proliferation of societies in the 1850s came a shift in focus. Several agricultural societies had held county fairs in the 1840s; a decade later, fairs became the primary activity of all the organizations. The main purpose of the fairs was to demonstrate improved farming methods and to encourage their adoption. Expert judges evaluated samples of crops and livestock produced by local farmers and equipment displayed by manufacturers and awarded prizes for the top entries. Most importantly, those in attendance had the opportunity to inspect the best of the county's produce and the latest in farm technology. The county societies also cooperated with the State Agricultural Bureau in organizing fairs at the three divisional levels and at the state level. A few of the larger ones, like that in Davidson County, held their own conventions and exhibitions. All of the activities emphasized conveying useful knowledge to practicing farmers.
The county societies disappeared during the Civil War and were not revived. The legislature's failure to renew subsidies to the organizations doubtlessly contributed to their demise. But the major factor was that other agencies usurped their role of providing information to farmers. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the organization of divisional farmers' institutes and conventions, the work of the state agricultural experiment station and extension service, and the greater availability of national farm publications rendered the county societies obsolete. Moreover, local governments and commercial groups took over the county fairs, and the divisional fairs were discontinued. In 1893 the state commissioner of agriculture suggested restoring subsidies for resurrecting the county societies, but legislative support was apparently lacking, as the recommendation went unanswered.
Donald L. Winters, Vanderbilt University
See Also: AGRICULTURE
AGRICULTURAL TENANCY
Agricultural tenancy is a broad, often loosely defined term used to describe a variety of land and labor arrangements in which individuals farm a plot of land that they do not own but have instead rented for a definite period of time. In Tennessee, as elsewhere across the United States, the institution has historically taken a variety of forms, with the major differences among them centering on the method of payment, allocation of risk, and degree of managerial autonomy. The most common forms of tenancy historically included fixed-rent tenancy, whereby the tenant pays the landlord a fixed amount of cash or a stipulated quantity of agricultural products (the latter agreement is often called "standing rent"). In this arrangement the tenant assumes all the burden of risk and makes most managerial decisions independently of the landlord. Another prevalent type has been share tenancy, a system in which the tenant pays rent in the form of a specified proportion (or share) of all agricultural output produced on the rented acreage. Under this system part of the burden of risk shifts to the landlord, who in turn frequently demands greater control of farm operations. Technically, agricultural tenancy also includes the system of sharecropping, a labor arrangement in which an individual family receives (rather than pays) a share of the crop produced on a plot of land in return for their labor on the same plot. Landlord and tenant again share risk in this system, but because the landlord commonly provides work stock, tools, and seed, he demands a greater degree of supervision and managerial control than under share tenancy.
Tenancy varied greatly over the last two centuries in its importance to the state's economy. Although government statistics prior to 1880 are not available, systematic study of landholding patterns in sample Tennessee counties indicates that by 1860 tenants constituted between one-sixth and one-fifth of farm operators across the state and were responsible for between five and 10 percent of all farm output. The prevalence of tenancy increased dramatically after the Civil War, due to the dramatic reorganization of the state's agriculture in the aftermath of emancipation. The state's tenancy rate was 34.5 percent as early as 1880 and topped 40 percent two decades later. It remained at this high level (peaking at 46.5 percent in 1930) until it began a precipitous drop after World War II as mechanization increasingly replaced tenant labor in the state's agricultural economy.
The precise economic effect of tenancy on Tennessee agriculture is difficult to establish. Its impact at any given point in time has probably been minimal. A study of agricultural production patterns in the late nineteenth century, for example, has shown that crop and livestock yields on Tennessee farms did not vary significantly according to the tenure of the farm operator, indicating that tenant farms were about as productive as owner-operated units. In the long run, however, the growth of tenancy may have had a detrimental impact on the state's agriculture, primarily due to the chronic restlessness of the tenant population. (A 1937 U.S. Department of Agriculture study found that at least one-third of all tenants changed farms annually.) Because of their indefinite tenure on the land, tenants tended to focus on maximizing their short-term income and had less incentive than owner-operators to engage in soil conservation measures and other land improvements that enhance long-term productivity. The efforts of landlords to require long-term improvements from their tenants and to monitor the extent of compliance may have mitigated the adverse effects to some (unknown) degree.
The exact social significance of agricultural tenancy is also somewhat problematic. Defenders of the institution assert that it has historically functioned as a rung on the "agricultural ladder," i.e., it has generally served tenants as a stepping stone to independent land ownership. Critics, on the other hand, view the very existence of tenancy as a sign of distress in the farm sector; according to this view, the institution has more commonly functioned to reify the permanent, dead-end status of a rural proletariat.
The most accurate assessment surely falls between these extremes. Undeniably, tenants always lived far closer to the margins of economic subsistence than owner-operators. On average, they worked much smaller plots than owners and received incomes only one-third to one-fourth as large. Even so, the extent of upward mobility from tenancy into independent land ownership has been impressive. A study of sample counties between 1850 and 1880 indicates that across Tennessee as a whole at least one-half of tenants were likely to acquire farms of their own in any given decade. Similarly, a study by the Department of Commerce in 1920 (when approximately 41 percent of all Tennessee farms were operated by tenants) found that one-half of all farm owners in the east south-central United States (including Tennessee) had previously been tenants. Although the evidence is not as complete as one would desire, it does appear that the extent of movement up the "agricultural ladder" was significant. For the majority of farm tenants in Tennessee's past, hard work and perseverance evidently bore fruit, eventually, in independent farm ownership.
Robert Tracy McKenzie, University of Washington
Suggested Reading(s): Robert Tracy McKenzie, One South or Many? Plantation Belt and Upcountry in Civil War-Era Tennessee (1994).
See Also: AGRICULTURE; SHARECROPPING
AGRICULTURAL WHEEL
The Agricultural Wheel in Tennessee traced its origins to a February 1882 meeting of seven disgruntled farmers in Prairie County, Arkansas. Concerned over continuing depressed farm prices and mounting agricultural debt, the founding farmers named their organization the Agricultural Wheel to reflect their belief that agriculture represented the "wheel" that moved the world's industrial economy--without agriculture, all other economic endeavors failed. From its humble origins, the Agricultural Wheel spread across Arkansas and into surrounding states including Tennessee. By 1887 the National Agricultural Wheel claimed five hundred thousand members.
The Wheel made its first appearance in Tennessee in February 1884, when J. R. Miles organized a local wheel in Weakley County. One year later Miles became the first and only president of the Tennessee State Wheel. By the time the National Wheel merged with the National Farmers' Alliance in 1889, Tennessee had sixteen hundred local wheels scattered across the state.
The Agricultural Wheel championed a radical agrarian reform program that advocated currency expansion through the free coinage of silver; an end to national banks; regulation of railroads, telegraph, and telephone, or failing regulation, nationalization of these services; restriction of the sale of public lands to American citizens; the imposition of an income tax; and the popular election of United States senators. Wheelers recognized the need for change in state and national laws and encouraged farmers to become educated in the political economy and vote their interests. The Wheel denounced partisan politics and promised to support candidates of either party who agreed to vote the farmers' interests. In Tennessee the Wheel was most often associated with the Democratic Party; in the 1889 meeting of the Tennessee General Assembly, over forty members claimed membership in the Wheel or Alliance.
Wheel ideology also included prescriptions for individual action and local cooperative efforts. Wheel members were urged to reduce farm expenses through self-sufficiency and good management. The state newspaper of the Wheel and Alliance, the Weekly Toiler, encouraged farmers to read the latest agricultural journals and attend local meetings to learn the techniques of scientific farming. Nevertheless, Wheel leaders recognized that good management counted for little unless farm expenses fell and farm prices rose. The Wheel established a cooperative system in 1888 for purchasing farm equipment and selling farm products. Financed entirely through the one-dollar assessments of individual members, the state agency met immediate resistance from Tennessee merchants.
In 1888 and 1889 the Wheel and Alliance joined in the national boycott of jute bagging, which was used for wrapping cotton bales, to protest the precipitous rise in prices imposed by the jute trust. In Clarksville the Wheel established a tobacco warehouse to store, grade, and sell tobacco for members. Peanut farmers on the Highland Rim worked to establish a cooperative system within the state and to join their efforts with those of Virginia farmers. Locally, county wheels built mills, warehouses, and cooperative stores. With a lack of strong financial backing and in the face of considerable economic resistance, however, most of these efforts were of short duration.
The Agricultural Wheel's effort to reform the agricultural economy officially ended in 1889 when it merged with the Farmers' Alliance to become the Farmers' and Laborers' Union. The Tennessee Wheel was the first state organization to ratify the new institution's constitution.
Connie L. Lester, Mississippi State University
See Also: COLORED AGRICULTURAL WHEEL; COLORED FARMERS' ALLIANCE; FARMERS' ALLIANCE; JOHN H. MCDOWELL
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AGRICULTURE
More than any other form of human activity, agriculture has influenced the development of Tennessee and shaped the lives of its people. It was the driving force behind the state's settlement, a vital factor in its economic growth, a major contributor to its wealthholding, the principal source of household income throughout much of its history, and a key element in the formation and perpetuation of its cultural heritage. It has affected, directly and indirectly, the relationships of Tennesseans with each other and with people outside the state, and in significant ways, it has defined their place in national and international affairs. The influence of agriculture on Tennessee's past has been diverse and sometimes ambiguous. It has embraced change and sustained tradition, embodied success and occasioned failure, stimulated advancement and resisted progress. Agriculture, in short, has played a central role in the history of Tennessee.
The vast majority of immigrants who participated in the settlement of Tennessee in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries shared a set of aspirations. They sought to create new and productive lives for themselves, their immediate families, and their heirs by exploiting the virgin territory's rich farming potential. This objective, more than any other factor, sustained the state's dynamic population growth in the early years and accounted for its rapid transition from frontier to mature settlement. Settlers first occupied the broad eastern valleys of the Tennessee and Holston River systems and the fertile central basin encircling the Cumberland River. By the time Tennessee entered the Union in 1796, these regions already supported substantial agricultural production. Settlement soon spread to the Cumberland Plateau and the Eastern Highland Rim situated between the eastern valleys and the central basin. Although sterile soil and barren terrain slowed and restricted the growth of agriculture in this area, farming eventually became the core source of livelihood for its residents. After the removal in 1818 of the last Chickasaw claims in the state, farmers moved across the Western Highland Rim to the western valley of the Tennessee River, the western plateau, and the bottomlands along the Mississippi River, where they established extensive farming activities soon after their arrival. Within little more than a half-century, settlers transformed Tennessee from an undeveloped wilderness into a collection of flourishing agricultural regions.
As settlers spread across the state, their initial tasks were to establish a farmstead and to provide for household subsistence. After securing access to land through purchasing, renting, or squatting on private or public property, they constructed an unadorned, small dwelling, cleared and broke ground for a field or two, and put in food crops. Families survived on goods transported from their previous locations, wild fruits and game, and fast-maturing garden vegetables until the first crop came in. Virtually every household planted corn as its main source of nourishment. An ideal pioneer crop, corn did well on new fields, required relatively little care during the growing season, produced high nutritional yields per acre, and provided the primary ingredient for many edibles. The few frontier households with fields suitable for broadcast crops also planted wheat or other small grains in the first few years. Some settlers brought along animals, and others acquired them from neighbors or livestock traders after arriving at their destinations. In either case, they soon supplemented their grain and vegetable diets with meat and dairy products. Swine cared for themselves, surviving on forest mast during most of the year, and their meat could be readily preserved through curing and smoking. For these reasons, pork was the preferred meat among farm families. Over the first few years, members of the household prepared additional land for cultivation, increased production of farm goods, expanded and improved their original dwelling, constructed auxiliary buildings, and made numerous other improvements to the farmstead. This routine recurred over and over in the late eighteenth century and well into the next, until eventually all of the regions of the state had been settled and brought into agricultural production.
Tennessee's early rural families valued self-sufficiency and strove to supply from their own production as much of the household consumption as possible. But they also understood that realizing their aspirations of a better life required involvement in commercial agriculture. Almost from the beginning, they looked for opportunities to sell or barter produce from the farm. At first, these exchanges involved trading small amounts of surplus goods on the local market for cash or items they could not provide for themselves. Commercial opportunities broadened as settlement moved beyond the frontier stage, and farmers responded to the demand in more remote markets. Although they continued to meet much of their household needs, they began to emphasize the production of marketable goods for sale in distant urban centers in the United States and Europe. Cotton and tobacco became Tennessee's principal cash crops. The state also sold sizable quantities of wheat and swine and smaller amounts of corn, beef cattle, and wool. By the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Tennessee supported a diversified agriculture based on a wide range of subsistence and commercial products.
The antebellum period saw other developments as well. As farmers concentrated on commercial goods and adapted their production schemes to particular soil, climate, and terrain conditions, regions of specialization emerged. The southwestern and south-central sectors of the state became areas of cotton cultivation, and the northwestern and north-central sectors became areas of tobacco cultivation. The central basin and the eastern valleys specialized in wheat, and the central basin and western plateau specialized in swine. Commercialization persuaded some farmers to pursue enhanced profits through expanded land and slave holdings. Because this strategy proved particularly effective in cotton production, plantation agriculture occurred more commonly in southwest Tennessee than elsewhere. Still, large-scale operations appeared throughout the state and produced a variety of commercial products. Small farms remained numerically dominant, but large plantations produced the bulk of Tennessee's marketable commodities. Involvement in the market also encouraged farmers to improve their efficiency by employing new technology and better managerial techniques. They purchased animal-drawn equipment and blooded livestock, used improved varieties of seeds and fertilizers, and practiced soil conservation. They experimented with ways to extract the greatest amount of labor at the lowest cost from their slaves and hired workers. They became more sensitive to market conditions in their business decisions. Just as the size and focus of agricultural enterprises varied widely, so the commitment to innovation ranged from the sophisticated planter's adoption of the latest technology and commercial techniques to the uninformed farmer's use of primitive hand tools in a basically subsistence regimen.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the state's agricultural economy was well established and exercised wide-reaching influence. Tennessee ranked among the top ten states in the production of cotton, tobacco, corn, wheat, swine, and sheep, and sixth in total livestock value. It produced ample amounts of several small grains other than wheat, several fibers other than cotton, and a variety of fruits and vegetables. Food production exceeded the needs of Tennessee residents; the surplus fed people elsewhere in the United States and in Europe. Domestic and foreign manufacturers depended on the state's cotton, tobacco, and wool for their raw materials. A diverse group of intermediaries emerged to service the financial and commercial needs of farmers, and their business activities depended heavily on agricultural conditions. Rural Tennesseans, of course, benefited from the state's antebellum farming development, but so too did many people in different places and from different circumstances.
The Civil War devastated Tennessee's agricultural economy. Military combat and occupation wrought extensive damage and destruction to primary dwellings, outbuildings, wells, fences, crops, and livestock. Wartime neglect also took its toll in the form of overgrown fields, dilapidated buildings, and deteriorating tools and machinery. The commercial infrastructure--financial, marketing, and transportation services--that farmers depended upon to participate in the market collapsed. Emancipation freed over a quarter of a million slaves, the cost of which was borne by the state's slaveholders. Crude congressional estimates placed the property loss to Tennessee farmers at almost 200 million dollars, 2.5 times the annual value of farm production on the eve of the Civil War.
Once the war was over, Tennesseans began the arduous task of rebuilding their agricultural system, preserving many features of the past. Farmers retained a strong commercial orientation, cotton and tobacco remained the major cash crops, and regional specialization continued. But the postwar years witnessed a significant reorganization of Tennessee agriculture. Many former plantations, their slave labor force eliminated with emancipation, were subdivided into smaller units, with a resulting rise in the number and decline in the average size of farms. An increase in land owners--largely white operators and a smaller portion of the former slaves who also became owners--accompanied these changes. Tenancy rates rose sharply as many whites displaced by the war and many blacks freed by the war found refuge in sharecropping and other forms of farm rental on subdivided plantations. Other members of those same groups, former slaves in particular, became workers on the large-scale operations that survived after the war. Wartime destruction of livestock and postwar shifts in land distribution and tenure markedly dropped foodstuffs production, and correspondingly, the degree of self-sufficiency among farm households declined. At the same time, cotton production more than doubled and tobacco production increased by almost 15 percent between 1860 and 1900. Under the slow and irregular pace of postwar reorganization, farmers continued to specialize in a number of commodities for sale on domestic and foreign markets, but the scale and the nature of their operations had changed profoundly.
By contrast, relatively little change occurred in the early decades of the twentieth century. Improved markets immediately after the turn of the century and strong demand during World War I, to be sure, brought temporary expansion of cotton, tobacco, and wheat production. But worldwide surpluses soon after the war drove down prices to below pre-war levels and caused modest declines in cotton and tobacco acreage in the 1920s. Because they lacked the necessary financial resources, few Tennessee farmers adopted the technology--tractors, trucks, hybrid seeds, and commercial fertilizers--that had become available in the 1920s and was revolutionizing agriculture elsewhere in the country. They continued instead to use the less efficient animal-drawn machinery, hand tools, and cultivation techniques from the nineteenth century. The Great Depression of the 1930s exacerbated conditions. With the precipitous drop in already depressed prices, the federal government fashioned schemes to reduce commodity surpluses through limitations on acreage and quotas on marketing. Farmers participated by cutting back even further on cotton and tobacco cultivation in return for government subsidies. Furthermore, federal programs had the unintended effect of reducing tenancy. Many landlords chose to idle land they had previously rented out, often forcing their tenants to leave agriculture altogether. The depression persuaded farmers to place renewed emphasis on subsistence production, resulting in a modest return to household self-sufficiency. From 1900 to 1940, Tennessee agriculture experienced short-lived and illusory prosperity followed by stagnation and economic hardship.
World War II ushered in a new period of transformation and advancement. War-induced demand ended the depression, reinvigorated commercial activities, and brought a return of agricultural prosperity. It stimulated production of the state's traditional market commodities as well as soybeans, a crop farmers had grown earlier primarily as forage and green manure. The decline in acreage devoted to cotton and tobacco, a trend begun in the 1920s and temporarily interrupted by the war, resumed in the late 1940s. Driving the postwar trend in both commodities were worldwide oversupplies, a softening of consumer demand (due, in the case of cotton, to preference for alternative fabrics and, in the case of tobacco, to health concerns), rising labor costs, and the continuation of federal programs to limit production. In the 1980s improvements in technology and more favorable market conditions reversed the trend in cotton. Production of the fiber, which had dropped by more than 50 percent from 1949 to 1982, exceeded immediate postwar levels by almost 30 percent in the early 1990s. While remaining an essential part of the farm economy, tobacco continued to decline in relative importance. A lucrative new crop was soybeans. Shortages of industrial and edible oils during the war and the development of a wide array of new soybean-based products after the war fueled an enormous increase in both domestic and foreign demand. Tennessee farmers responded by increasing their output by a factor of almost one thousand between 1949 and 1992, making soybeans the state's most valuable crop. They also devoted more of their resources to livestock, especially beef and dairy cattle and swine. Because the state was well endowed with grasslands and animals required less labor than field crops, livestock provided an attractive alternative to cotton and tobacco when domestic demand for meat and dairy goods soared in the prosperous postwar years. Farmers continued to cultivate a variety of commercial grains, principally wheat and corn; with improvements in the packaging, transportation, and distribution of perishables, some moved into large-scale production of fruits and vegetables.
The postwar transformation involved more, however, than modification in production choices. Tennessee farmers participated in a nationwide agricultural revolution that generated far-reaching change throughout the country. The driving force behind the revolution was the adoption of highly sophisticated new technology. The internal combustion engine tractor was arguably the most crucial innovation. Tractors had begun to appear on Tennessee farms even before World War II; after the war their adoption accelerated markedly. In time, they completely displaced mules and horses to drive the machinery for most field tasks. Although the initial investment was greater, tractors cost less to maintain, delivered more power, and were more dependable than draft animals. Most importantly, tractors substantially reduced the need for farm hands, a critical factor in the period of rising labor costs following World War II. The internal combustion engine also became the prime mover in self-propelled machinery designed for specialized functions such as cotton and soybean harvesting.
In addition to mechanical innovations, farmers also took full advantage of biological and chemical developments. They adopted new strains of cotton, tobacco, corn, wheat, grain, sorghum, and vegetables which offered higher yields, superior quality, and better adaptability to weather and soil conditions. They used synthesized fertilizers which delivered a greater range and larger amounts of nutrients to the soil. They applied herbicides, insecticides, and defoliants, largely eliminating problems from troublesome weeds and insects and enhancing possibilities for double-cropping. Just as new machines improved the productivity of labor, so these innovations improved the productivity of land. Livestock raising as well as crop cultivation benefited from the sweeping changes taking place. Crossbreeding created new bloodlines of cattle, swine, and poultry superior in quality and productivity and better adapted to natural conditions in Tennessee. Artificial insemination permitted breeders more effectively to select and transmit to succeeding generations desired animal traits. Farmers across the state recognized the benefits of these developments, and many were quick to capitalize on them.
These innovations also generated significant changes in management. To make a profit, heavy investments in labor-saving machinery and livestock, coupled with increased operating costs from herbicides, insecticides, and fuel, necessitated a larger scale of operation. Since the end of World War II, consequently, the number of farms has declined by two thirds and the average size has doubled. Those same conditions proved to be poorly compatible with farm tenancy, and the portion of renters has dropped from a third to less than 7 percent over the same period. The entry of corporate enterprise into farm management was yet another aspect of the postwar transformation. Business firms sometimes provided supplies and services to farmers in return for contracted production of marketable commodities; they sometimes purchased land and equipment and went into production on their own. In Tennessee, agribusiness, as these corporate arrangements have been labeled, became most common in poultry and specialized fruits and vegetables.
Despite an enduring commercial orientation, farming has from the beginning of settlement in the eighteenth century to the present played a broader cultural role in Tennessee. Rural residents have viewed farming as a way of life and as a social organization for perpetuating worthwhile values. Although they never precisely defined the substance of that life or of those values, they emphasized the desirability of household independence, family cohesion, community sharing and cooperation, and working the land. They sought to pass on these cultural objectives and goals to future generations. Since World War II the adoption of scientific agriculture, the expanding size of operations, and increasing commercialization have gradually undermined that cultural function. Farming as a business has largely displaced farming as a way of life.
Tennessee never regained the national agricultural importance it held on the eve of the Civil War. At that time, no other state ranked as high in so many different products. Still, Tennessee farmers have continued to supply the country with a variety of high quality farm goods, to contribute significantly to its foreign exports, and to add substantially to its annual value of agricultural output. They have sustained their own incomes--albeit sometimes at less than satisfactory levels--and enhanced those of many others in Tennessee and elsewhere. And they have managed these accomplishments even though the economic and cultural role of agriculture has steadily eroded.
Donald L. Winters, Vanderbilt University
Suggested Reading(s): Harriette Simpson Arnow, Flowering of the Cumberland (1963); Blanche Henry Clark, The Tennessee Yeomen, 1840-1860 (1942); Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865-1980 (1984); Mary Hoffschwelle, Rebuilding the Rural Southern Community: Reformers, Schools, and Homes in Tennessee, 1900-1930 (1998); Robert Tracy McKenzie, One South or Many? Plantation Belt and Upcountry in Civil War-Era Tennessee (1994); Melissa Walker, All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919-1941 (2000); Donald L. Winters, Tennessee Farming, Tennessee Farmers: Antebellum Agriculture in the Upper South (1994).
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AIRPORTS
The first scheduled airline operations in Tennessee began on December 1, 1925, when a route between Atlanta and Evansville included a stop in Chattanooga. For the next ten years, however, air traffic and airports grew slowly in Tennessee. In 1932, during the Great Depression, the state had twenty-three airports and landing fields, but these consisted at best of a hangar or two, a tiny terminal, and often, sod runways. The federal government, through the New Deal agencies of the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), provided the funding and labor to bring Tennessee's airports into the modern age of aviation. Across the state, the CWA began seventeen projects which the WPA later brought to completion. By 1939, new airports were already operating at Cookeville, Jackson, Jellico, Lebanon, and Milan. The WPA also funded five major airports at Memphis, Chattanooga, Nashville, Knoxville, and McKellar Field (now Tri-City Airport), which stood in a rural location between Kingsport, Johnson City, and Bristol. The WPA state administrator was World War I veteran Colonel Harry S. Berry, who was keenly interested in updating and expanding Tennessee's air transportation system.
Airports have multiplied across the state since the depression. At the time of its bicentennial, Tennessee had eighty-nine public airports, with funding, construction, and maintenance provided by the Tennessee Department of Transportation, which is advised, in turn, by the Tennessee Aeronautics Commission. Almost every county seat is within easy access of an airport. Yet the five major airports of the New Deal era remain the busiest and largest terminals for freight and passenger traffic, with the Memphis and Nashville airports being the most important.
Aviation took center stage in Memphis's transportation history in 1927. Encouraged by the Memphis Aero Club, which had been established in 1925, Watkins Overton made the construction of a Memphis airport a major issue in his mayoral campaign of 1927. After his election Overton quickly appointed five municipal airport planning commissioners who selected an airport site on the two-hundred-acre Ward Farm located about 7.5 miles southeast of downtown Memphis. On June 15, 1929, the Memphis Municipal Airport opened for business. Though its rudimentary operation consisted of a sod field runway and three small hangars, more than two hundred planes and pilots flew in to celebrate its opening. That fall the stock market crash dampened the demand for passenger services. In 1930, for example, only fifteen passengers were arriving and departing Memphis on a daily basis. But air mail and air freight kept the airport open; the major carriers were American Airways and Chicago & South. The first improvements came in 1934, when three asphalt diagonal runways were constructed. In 1937-38, the New Deal chipped in with needed improvements as the WPA built a new terminal and generally modernized the airport facilities and infrastructure.
With the many military-related activities in Memphis during World War II, the U.S. Army assumed administration of the municipal airport. As soon as the military relinquished its control at war's end, local officials moved quickly to respond to increased demands for passenger travel, especially on the technologically advanced Douglas DC-3 airplane. In 1947 the terminal was enlarged, and the city implemented a master plan to improve the runways for larger, faster planes. By 1949 at least six major carriers were landing planes in Memphis.
The 1950s witnessed steady growth in the amount of freight and passenger traffic handled by the Memphis airport, and the facility reached the benchmark of one million passengers in 1959. Four years later, on June 7, 1963, the city dedicated a new terminal which--for its $5.5 million cost--provided twenty-two airplane gates for seven competing airlines. Architect Roy Harrover's contemporary New Formalism-style design for the facility received national recognition by the American Institute of Architects.
Memphis air travel achieved international status in 1969 when the terminal became a point of origin and entry for international passenger and freight traffic. At that time officials created the Memphis-Shelby County Airport Authority to administer the quickly expanding facility. Within ten years the airport's terminal capacity doubled, and the authority constructed a new runway for wide-bodied jets, an International Flights terminal, and a new control tower.
A major impetus for the airport expansion came from Federal Express, which began in Memphis in 1973. As the freight service corporation boomed over the next twenty years, Memphis became one of the nation's busiest cargo airports. Federal Express has steadily reinvested in its Memphis facilities, including building a $36 million Aircraft Maintenance Facility that opened in 1995. Four years later, United Parcel Service opened an advanced package sorting facility which processes more than 250,000 items daily. Passenger service has grown as well in the past generation. In 1985 Republic Airlines designated Memphis as a regional hub, a designation the airport retained when Republic merged with the much larger Northwest Airlines the following year. The airport's future development was outlined in a new master plan produced in 1986 which called for a new International Flights terminal (opened in 1995) and a third parallel runway (completed in late 1996). The planned World Runway, 11,100 feet in length, opened in late 2000.
The first airfield in Nashville was Hampton Field, which operated until 1921, when it was replaced by Blackwood Field in the Hermitage community, which operated from 1921 to 1928. McConnell Field was open from 1928 to 1939, but much of Nashville's air traffic shifted to the Sky Harbour Airport, an isolated rural location in neighboring Rutherford County along the newly completed Dixie Highway. Both American and Eastern airlines landed planes at Sky Harbour. This airport served the city from 1929 until the 1937 opening of the modern Berry Field airport (named in honor of Col. Berry), also adjacent to the Dixie Highway, in southern Davidson County.
Berry Field was one of the region's first major WPA airport projects. This 340-acre field had a three-story terminal, a control tower, and paved runway. During World War II the army enlarged the field to over fifteen hundred acres as it served as home base for the Fourth Ferrying Command, a key clearing station for military aircraft. Once civilian control was restored in 1946, Nashville began aggressively to expand its services. By 1958 plans for a new terminal were underway, and two years later passenger jet service arrived in the city.
In 1961 officials opened a new 145,900-square-foot terminal with a modern control tower that boasted state-of-the-art electronics. In 1963 the existing runway was extended by eight hundred feet, and construction began on a second runway. Metropolitan government officials created the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority in 1970, and it continues to operate the airport today. Under the authority's administration, Berry Field experienced a second major expansion in 1977, when the terminal was renovated and enlarged; the airport now totaled 3,300 acres with three modern runways.
From 1984-87 the authority constructed a new terminal in reaction to regional growth and the news that American Airlines had designated Nashville as a traffic hub for its system. By 1986 Nashville offered 144 daily flights to thirty-seven cities, a level of traffic which severely taxed the older terminal. But on September 14, 1987, the Nashville Metropolitan Airport Terminal opened for business, alleviating the overcrowded situation. Designed by Robert Lamb Hart in association with Gresham, Smith and Partners, the terminal has forty-six gates and three concourses that radiate from an architecturally distinctive three-story atrium. In the mid-1990s American Airlines officially closed its Nashville hub, but other companies such as Southwest Airlines took over many of the American gates.
The growth of the airports at Nashville and Memphis is associated with general industry patterns that reflect the impact of airline deregulation in the late 1970s. Larger metropolitan airports have prospered, often to the detriment of nearby municipal airports. That is certainly the case in Tennessee. Knoxville and Chattanooga maintain modern facilities but face tough competition for flights from the much larger airports at Nashville and Atlanta. The McGhee-Tyson Airport, operated by the Metropolitan Knoxville Airport Authority, has fared best. It contains more than two thousand acres with parallel nine-thousand-foot runways. Seven major passenger carriers, with 120 arrivals and departures daily, operate at the airport. Due to the construction of a $9.3 million Air Cargo Complex in 1991, freight traffic has expanded significantly in recent years. The Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport at Lovell Field began as a New Deal project in the 1930s. The first major expansion of the terminal came twenty years later, when a new modern terminal was built in 1964. In 1985 authority over the airport passed to the Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport Authority. It began construction of a new terminal in 1992 and completed a $20.5 million expansion and improvement of its facilities by the mid-1990s. Four major passenger carriers and commuter lines operated twenty-seven daily departures from the Chattanooga airport in 2000.
Carroll Van West, Middle Tennessee State University
See Also: FEDEX; WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION
ALADDIN INDUSTRIES
When Aladdin Industries located its corporate headquarters in Nashville in 1949, it also introduced a progressive industrial design to Nashville's emerging corporate landscape. The company built a modern International-style headquarters designed by the firm of Spencer Warwick Associates on South Nashville land between existing railroad tracks and the Dixie Highway.
Aladdin Industries Incorporated dates to 1919. The company made and sold insulated receptacles and kerosene lamps. In the late 1930s Aladdin began to develop its first vacuum bottles. By 1949, at the time of the move to Nashville, Aladdin had merged with the Mantle Lamp Company of America, which had previously sold mantle lamps under the brand name "Aladdin." The new company kept the name, and in the following year, 1950, Aladdin expanded into the new market of school lunch box kits.
Production at the Nashville factory was initially devoted to the manufacture of vacuum bottles and lunch box kits. The first name character for the school lunch boxes was television and movie cowboy star Hopalong Cassidy. The new product was a huge success, and over the decades Aladdin has produced hundreds of new school lunch box designs. A second important expansion came in 1965, when Aladdin acquired the Universal Stanley Division of the J. B. Williams Company, which made the Stanley thermos bottle. Stanley bottles are still produced at the Nashville factory.
The corporation's third major product, Temp-Rite meal delivery systems, dates to 1968. These are insulated, compartmentalized trays that maintain food at a desired temperature and are in high demand from institutional clients such as hospitals. This product's success led to a creation of a separate division, Aladdin Synergetics, which by 1972 had established offices in England, France, and Germany.
Carroll Van West, Middle Tennessee State University
See Also: DIXIE HIGHWAY ASSOCIATION; INDUSTRY; NASHVILLE
ALCOA, INC. (ALUMINUM COMPANY OF AMERICA)
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. The company officially changed its name to ALCOA, Inc., in January 1999.
In 1909 ALCOA began purchasing riparian rights along the Little Tennessee River in a search for cheap power. Building a network of dams, ALCOA chose North Maryville as a plant site in 1913. It reincorporated the community as the town of Alcoa in 1914, purchased 750 acres of land, and built a smelting plant. Thus, Alcoa joined other planned industrial communities in Tennessee.
In 1919 ALCOA purchased the Knoxville Power Company, which held the rights to the power potential of dams on the Little Tennessee River. After World War I ALCOA expanded its facilities with a rolling mill, a sheet mill, and plans for a 7,500-acre city. These plans included workers' housing and schools, which, like the facilities of most company towns in Tennessee, were racially segregated.
City government was tied directly to company management, with Victor Hultquist, ALCOA's construction superintendent, serving as city manager until the 1950s. Alcoa recruited no other outside investment, nor were others interested in coming to a one-company town. The lack of economic diversification bound the fortunes of Alcoa's citizens to those of the company.
During the depression, ALCOA kept production at 1920s levels, cutting workers' hours to thirty per week to maintain employment. The company also reduced rents in company housing. Nevertheless, a wave of violent strikes erupted in Alcoa in the late 1930s in response to collective bargaining legislation. Hultquist hired a police force to suppress the strikers, and Governor Gordon Browning sent in the National Guard in July 1937. The strike ended quickly, and workers returned to the factory.
World War II brought prosperity to ALCOA, and the Tennessee operations expanded accordingly. The North Plant, constructed in 1940-41, covered sixty-five acres and employed twelve thousand workers, making it one of the largest plants in the world. In the postwar years, the company initially prospered due to strong demand for aluminum and related products. ALCOA's national image, however, suffered in the late 1940s and 1950s as a result of the hard-line stance taken toward labor unions. In addition, ALCOA no longer dominated the aluminum market, and the Tennessee Valley Authority challenged ALCOA's hydroelectric power business.
In response, the company released its paternalistic grip on the town of Alcoa. The company continued and expanded its practice of donating land for parks, schools, churches, and municipal buildings. The company also provided funds for the development of an airport in Blount County and continued to sell property in the public's interest, including additional land to the City of Knoxville for airport expansions. In order to improve company-town relations, ALCOA also provided Alcoa residents with recreational facilities, a retirement club, and tuition support at local universities.
By the 1950s the company had dispensed with company housing, selling houses to renters and Alcoa workers. ALCOA also transferred its electric and water utilities to the city in 1955 and 1960 respectively, thereby placing ALCOA's former power monopoly under the control of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Over the last thirty years the evolving world market for aluminum, the demands of labor, modern transportation, and the environmental movement have worked together to reshape the policies and products of the corporation. In 1997 ALCOA was Blount County's largest manufacturing employer with 2,050 workers.
Tara Mitchell Mielnik, Tennessee Historical Commission
See Also: BLOUNT COUNTY; INDUSTRY; LABOR; WORLD WAR II
WILLIAM THOMAS ALDERSON
1926-1996
Historian and editor William T. Alderson was born and raised in Schenectady, New York. After service in the navy during World War II, he graduated from Colgate University in 1947. He then entered the graduate program in history at Vanderbilt University, where he earned his master's degree and completed the Ph.D. in 1952. His dissertation was a study of the Freedmen's Bureau in Virginia.
Entering a tight job market, Alderson vainly sought a full-time teaching position on the college level. As an alternative, he accepted a senior archivist's position at the Tennessee State Library and Archives. His abilities as a historian and strong people skills resulted in his rapid advancement and appointment to key positions. In 1956 he was named editor of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly, and the following year he assumed the duties of executive secretary of the Tennessee Historical Society. In 1959 he was named assistant state librarian and archivist and then assumed the state's senior position two years later.
In 1964 Alderson began to rise in national prominence in the field of public history. The American Association for State and Local History (AASLH), headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, asked him to serve as its director. Alderson agreed to accept the job under one condition: AASLH would have to move its headquarters to Nashville. The AASLH board accepted Alderson's condition and moved the organization south. During the next fourteen years Alderson elevated AASLH to the nation's most important professional organization for historical societies and museums. During his tenure AASLH conducted scores of educational programs, issued hundreds of publications, set high standards for museums of all sizes, and saw its membership numbers increase severalfold.
In 1978 Alderson left Nashville to return to academe as the director of the museum studies program at the University of Delaware. Four years later he was appointed to the directorship of the Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum in Rochester, New York, a position he held until being named president of Old Salem in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1986.
Alderson officially retired from Old Salem in 1991, but he continued a decades-long commitment to professional involvement until the day he died. During his career he served as an officer in a number of organizations including the American Association of Museums, the American Records Management Association, and the Mid-Atlantic Museums Association. In 1992 he became director of the Seminar for Historical Administration in Williamsburg, the longest running continuing education program in the country for advanced museum professionals. Several months prior to conducting his fourth seminar, Alderson died in his sleep, leaving his wife of forty-four years, the former Sylvia C. Farrell, and two grown children.
Charles F. Bryan Jr., Virginia Historical Society
See Also: AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR STATE AND LOCAL HISTORY; TENNESSEE HISTORICAL SOCIETY; TENNESSEE STATE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES
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LAMAR ALEXANDER
1940-
Lamar Alexander, governor, university president, and U.S. secretary of education, was born on July 3, 1940, in Blount County. His parents were teachers in Maryville, and Alexander attended public schools there. Active in the Boy Scouts as a youngster, Alexander was awarded the rank of Eagle Scout, the highest scouting honor. In 1962 he completed his undergraduate degree, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Vanderbilt University. Three years later, in 1965, Alexander received his law degree at New York University. In addition, Alexander has received honorary doctorates from schools across the nation, including Christian Brothers University, Cumberland University, the University of the South, and Tusculum College in Tennessee.
Alexander began his law career as a clerk to Judge John M. Wisdom of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court in 1965; within two years his political career was underway, as he became a legislative assistant to Republican U.S. Senator Howard Baker in 1967. After Richard M. Nixon's election as president, Alexander was appointed an executive aide to Bryce Harlow, the White House congressional liaison.
In 1970 Alexander's successful management of the gubernatorial campaign of Winfield Dunn, the first Republican governor in fifty years, propelled him to the forefront of the Tennessee Republican Party. That year he also was one of the founding partners of the Dearborn and Ewing law firm in Nashville. Alexander's first attempt to win the governor's chair failed in 1974, as Democrats statewide, including gubernatorial nominee Ray Blanton, swept to power in the wake of the Watergate scandal. But four years later Alexander waged a determined campaign highlighted by a walk across Tennessee--a journey of 1,022 miles--during which he wore a red-checked flannel shirt. His quest for the governor's office was successful, and the red-checked shirt became his trademark.
At the request of the U.S. attorney, Alexander was sworn in as governor three days early, on January 17, 1979, in reaction to the possibility that Governor Ray Blanton would grant clemency to prisoners who, according to state and federal officials, had paid bribes for the expressed purpose of gaining executive pardons. Despite this controversial beginning, Alexander enjoyed several achievements during his two terms in office from 1979 to 1987. It was a time of economic growth and expansion of incomes in Tennessee. Thousands of new jobs were created in the automobile industry with the opening of the Nissan factory in Smyrna, and more were promised with the announcement of the Saturn plant at Spring Hill. He introduced a master teachers program and a Better Schools program to improve public education. For higher education, Alexander introduced a system of Centers of Excellence and Chairs of Excellence to enhance research and public service at the public universities. Alexander also supported the creation of a Tennessee Parkway system to improve highway transportation and enhance the state's expanding tourism industry. His Tennessee Homecoming '86 program was extremely popular, as 812 communities across Tennessee launched special projects and publications about state and local heritage. Spurred by federal court decisions mandating change, Alexander also addressed the state's antiquated corrections system and began a massive prison construction program.
The first Tennessee governor to serve consecutive four-year terms of office, Alexander also served as chair of the National Governors' Association and chair of the Southern Regional Education Board and was chosen "Conservationist of the Year" by the Tennessee Conservation League during his tenure. The success of Alexander's two terms solidified the Republican Party's role in state politics. As historian Dewey Grantham observed, "[T]he election of Lamar Alexander as governor in 1978 and his reelection four years later demonstrated that, with able and attractive candidates, Tennessee Republicans could win the top state offices as well as presidential contests." (1)
After returning to private life in 1987, Alexander continued to pursue his goal of improving education in America. He was chair of the Leadership Institute at Belmont University in 1987-88 and then, from 1988 to 1991, he served as president of the University of Tennessee. There he established the institution's first full-year scholarship program and developed a new five-year comprehensive plan for the university system.
In 1991 President George Bush appointed Alexander U.S. secretary of education. As secretary Alexander initiated and supported administration policy to set voluntary National Education Standards, to prohibit race-based scholarships at colleges and universities, and to implement America 2000, a program to achieve national educational goals as established by President Bush and the nation's governors.
After Bush's defeat in 1992, Alexander returned to Tennessee and was a counsel at the law firm of Baker, Donelson, Bearman and Caldwell from 1993 to 1995. He remained active in national Republican Party activities as chair of the Republican Exchange Satellite Network from 1993 to 1995 and as a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute from 1994 to 1995. On February 28, 1995, he launched a national campaign for the Republican presidential nomination but withdrew in the spring of 1996 after faring poorly in the early primaries.
Alexander has written several books including Steps Along the Way (1986), and he and his wife Leslee "Honey" Alexander have four children, Andrew, Leslee, Kathryn, and William. An attorney, writer, and Republican Party leader, Alexander presently lives in Nashville.
Carroll Van West, Middle Tennessee State University
(1) Dewey Grantham, "Tennessee and Twentieth-Century American Politics," Tennessee Historical Quarterly 54 (1995): 222.
See Also: HOWARD H. BAKER JR.; BELMONT UNIVERSITY; L. RAY BLANTON; BLOUNT COUNTY; WINFIELD DUNN; HOMECOMING TENNESSEE '86; NISSAN; SATURN; TENNESSEE IN FILM; UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE
DAVID ALLISON
d. 1798
David Allison, backcountry lawyer, political operative, and land speculator, was an agent for the Blount brothers, especially William Blount, Tennessee's first territorial governor. Allison's date of birth and exact birthplace (he was apparently from North Carolina) are unknown, but he accompanied Andrew Jackson to the Cumberland settlements in 1788, and both men handled minor lawsuits along the way.
In 1790 Blount appointed Allison clerk of the Superior Court of Law and later designated him as militia paymaster. Allison served Blount in a semiofficial and semiprivate capacity as business agent, frequently traveling to Philadelphia on public and personal financial business. In 1796 Allison hand-carried the famous "Blount Journal," the official record of Governor Blount's executive acts, to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson.
By 1795 Allison had moved to Philadelphia, the nation's financial capital, where he brokered speculative land deals and merchandise trading ventures into Tennessee. In August 1795 one of these involved Andrew Jackson, who was selling land for himself, John Overton, and others. Upon his return to Nashville, Jackson was financially embarrassed when the notes he had given to Allison were suddenly presented for payment. Jackson struggled for years to settle the matter. In 1798 the debt factored in Jackson's resignation from the United States Senate and acceptance of the salaried post of judge on the Superior Court of Law and Equity.
Overtaken by creditors, Allison was thrown into debtor's prison in Philadelphia and died there on September 28, 1798.
Lewis L. Laska, Tennessee State University
See Also: WILLIAM BLOUNT; ANDREW JACKSON; JOHN OVERTON; SOUTHWEST TERRITORY
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR STATE AND LOCAL HISTORY (AASLH)
AASLH is a not-for-profit professional organization of individuals and institutions working to preserve and promote history. Its roots stem from the early Conference of State and Local Historical Societies formed at the 1904 annual meeting of the American Historical Association in an effort to serve the needs of state and local historical societies. The AHA disbanded the conference in 1940, and from it the AASLH was created. Its purpose as stated in its first constitution was "the promotion of effort and activity in the fields of state, provincial, and local history in the United States and Canada."
From its headquarters in Nashville, AASLH provides its more than five thousand individual and institutional members with a variety of programs and services. Among these are the quarterly magazine History News; the monthly newsletter Dispatch; a video library lending service; regional and national seminars and workshops; an annual meeting; and a national Awards Program.
AASLH is a cosponsor of the Seminar for Historical Administration held each year at Colonial Williamsburg. The goal of the seminar is to develop and strengthen leadership within historical organizations and the museum community. AASLH also cosponsors National History Day, a national program for school children designed to enrich their understanding of history and its impact on their lives.
Through its diverse programs and services, AASLH works to ensure the highest-quality expressions of state and local history, whether provided through publications, exhibitions, or public programs.
Susan Goodsell, Benton Harbor, Michigan
See Also: WILLIAM T. ALDERSON
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AMERICAN MUSEUM OF SCIENCE AND ENERGY
The American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge was initially established in 1949 as the American Museum of Atomic Energy. Its opening on March 19, 1949, coincided with the opening of the security gates to the once top-secret city of Oak Ridge. The museum quickly became a key institution to orient visitors and newcomers to the scientific and technological achievements associated with the Manhattan Project and atomic energy research at Oak Ridge. In 1959, with congressional approval and support, the museum developed a special program entitled "This Atomic World" and took it on a national tour of American school systems, conducting presentations at many community events and state fairs as well. Program highlights during the next decade included an exhibit and program in 1969 on recently acquired moon rocks, then being studied by scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
In February 1975, again with federal support, especially through the efforts of Congressman Joe L. Evins, the museum moved from its original facility on Jefferson Circle in Oak Ridge to a new two-story, four-wing museum building at 300 South Tulane. The museum has remained and prospered at this location ever since. In 1978 the museum was renamed The American Museum of Science and Energy in an effort to better reflect the mission and energy policies of the recently established U.S. Department of Energy. Four years later, in 1982, the museum received 180,000 visitors during the six-month duration of the Knoxville World's Fair.
The American Museum of Science and Energy, an educational institution funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, maintains active and broad educational programs to help place into context the past, present, and future of the varied research activities at Oak Ridge. Current permanent exhibits include "The Oak Ridge Story," "Age of the Automobile," "Exploration Station," "Energy: The American Experience," "World of the Atom," "Earth's Energy Resources," and "Y-12 and National Defense," which connects the Manhattan Project to later national defense programs of the 1960s and 1970s.
Prepared from material supplied by Lissa Clark, American Museum of Science and Energy.
See Also: JOSEPH L. EVINS; OAK RIDGE
AMES PLANTATION
The 18,567-acre Ames Plantation, owned and operated by Trustees of the Hobart Ames Foundation under provisions of the will of Julia C. Ames, is located in Fayette and Hardeman Counties. Serving as an agricultural experiment station within the University of Tennessee system, the Ames Plantation is the location of intensive research efforts focusing on agriculture and natural resource management. Each February the Ames Plantation serves as the site of the National Championship Field Trials for all-age bird dogs. First held in 1896, this field trial has been conducted annually at the Ames Plantation since 1915.
The Ames Plantation property contains over two hundred nineteenth-century historic sites. The manor house, an antebellum mansion constructed in 1847 as part of Cedar Grove Plantation, is the architectural centerpiece of the property. In 1901 Hobart Ames purchased the plantation, one of the region's largest, and turned it into his own private rural retreat. The manor house furnishings are early twentieth-century and appear much as they did when the Ames family departed in 1950.
In addition, the Ames Plantation is home to a replica mid-nineteenth-century family farmstead typical of those that dotted the antebellum landscape. The "Farmstead" consists of restored and furnished log buildings and is utilized as a cultural resource education facility. Other historic sites of interest include the earliest marked burial site in Fayette County, dated January 7, 1827, and a restored one-room schoolhouse from 1900.
Jamie Evans, Grand Junction
See Also: FAYETTE COUNTY; HARDEMAN COUNTY; HUNTING DOGS; NATIONAL FIELD TRIAL
ANDERSON COUNTY
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 German immigrants in 1800. In December 1801 Anderson County was created from parts of Knox and Grainger Counties. The county was named after Joseph Anderson, a prominent U.S. senator and former territorial judge in Knoxville. The first seat of government in Anderson County was Burrville, named after Vice-President Aaron Burr. After Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in their famous duel and became implicated in a land speculation scheme, the Tennessee General Assembly changed the name of the Anderson County seat to Clinton in honor of either Vice-President George Clinton or his nephew DeWitt Clinton.
Agriculture was the key occupation in the county's early history, but a number of small businesses supplemented subsistence farming. Land speculation, especially in coal mining areas, began in the 1830s and continued throughout the nineteenth century. Once the county was linked to regional railroad networks during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, coal mining became its leading industry.
Education also played an important role in Anderson County. Union Academy, established in Clinton in 1806, began admitting female students along with males in 1817. By the 1840s Clinton Seminary and Clinton Grove Academy had opened and affiliated with the Baptist and Methodist churches, respectively. New education laws in the post-Civil War era prompted County Education Superintendent Charles D. McGuffey to campaign for funding for schools in Anderson County. By 1892 Anderson County was operating fifty-eight public schools, five for black students.
No major Civil War battles were fought in Anderson County, but, as in many other East Tennessee counties, local loyalties were divided between Union and Confederate sympathizers. Violence settled too many arguments; "bushwhacking" was common. When Confederates established a conscription center at Clinton, Union sympathizers used "Eli's Cabin" as a safe house to escape to Kentucky and join the Union army.
In the late Victorian era, several locations along the railroad lines experienced new investments in tourism and coal mining. In the 1890s Oliver Springs, at the corner of Roane, Morgan, and Anderson Counties, became a popular tourist spot. Accessible by rail, the town, with its large resort hotel and mineral springs, attracted guests from all over the United States and Europe. In July 1891 the coal mines at Briceville became the site of a violent strike prompted by the increasing use of convict labor to replace more expensive free labor. In the resulting "Coal Creek War" miners attacked the prisoners' stockade, released the convicts, and demanded the end of the convict-leasing system in Tennessee. Months of negotiations between the miners, Governor John Buchanan, and the Tennessee General Assembly failed to resolve the issue. The convict-lease system came to an end in 1895 when the leases expired. At the same time the general assembly enacted prison reforms and established Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Morgan County.
In the 1930s and 1940s the federal government made its presence known and propelled Anderson County and the state to national prominence. In 1933 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority into law and changed the Tennessee landscape, especially that of Anderson County. TVA launched its first major construction project with the building of Norris Dam, the planned community of Norris, and public parks at Norris and Big Ridge. The dam provided jobs, flood control, and electricity to Anderson County.
World War II led to new federal initiatives. Anderson County's location and resources and its proximity to Tennessee Eastman in Kingsport attracted federal planners searching for a site for the development of the atomic bomb. The resulting city of Oak Ridge became the fifth largest city in Tennessee within two years. The "Atomic Capital of the World" brought national and international attention to the state in 1945, when the first atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima.
Anderson County again garnered national attention in the wake of federally mandated school desegregation in the 1950s. When Clinton High School opened its doors to black students in 1956, a riot ensued, and Governor Frank Clement called out the National Guard to restore order in Clinton. White students boycotted classes, and in 1958 the high school building was bombed. Clinton High School students attended classes in Oak Ridge while their school was rebuilt. The events in Anderson County received national television coverage when Edward R. Murrow and CBS television analyzed the desegregation trouble in Clinton.
From its establishment in 1801 to recent historical events, Anderson County has influenced the role of the state in the nation, and the role of the nation in the world. Its 2000 population was 71,330.
Tara Mitchell Mielnik, Tennessee Historical Commission
See Also: AMERICAN MUSEUM OF SCIENCE AND ENERGY; ROBERT CAIN JR.; CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT; CLINTON DESEGREGATION CRISIS; CONVICT LEASE WARS; LABOR; MINING; NORRIS; NORRIS DAM; NORRIS FREEWAY; OAK RIDGE; TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY; WORLD WAR II
WILLIAM ROBERT ANDERSON
1921-
William R. Anderson, U.S. Navy captain and congressman, is best known as the commander of the submarine USS Nautilus during the first underwater crossing of the North Pole in 1958. Anderson was born on June 17, 1921, in the Sycamore Landing community of Humphreys County into a family distinguished by prominent farmers and political leaders. In 1942 he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. He received the Bronze Star and other combat awards for eleven submarine patrols in the Pacific Ocean during World War II.
After the war Anderson became a protégé of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the "father" of the navy's nuclear submarine program. In 1957 he received the command of the USS Nautilus, the world's first atomic-powered submarine. Few people knew Anderson's route the following summer when his ship left Pearl Harbor on a six-thousand-mile voyage to Great Britain. On August 3, 1958, the Nautilus crossed under the geographic North Pole, climaxing the first undersea voyage in history from the Pacific to the Atlantic by way of the ice-blocked Arctic region. Passing four hundred feet beneath the polar ice cap, the ship's crew conducted important scientific measurements and mapped the ocean floor in a previously unknown part of the world.
Commander Anderson and his crew received a hero's welcome and a ticker tape parade on their return to New York City. Their successful polar crossing, in the view of many Americans, helped to offset the Soviet Union's Sputnik achievement of the previous year. At a special White House ceremony President Dwight D. Eisenhower presented Anderson with the Legion of Merit.
In 1962 Anderson retired from the navy after twenty years of service and embarked on a campaign for governor of Tennessee. Surprisingly, for a political novice with no financing, he ran a respectable second to Governor Frank Clement and garnered more than twice the number of votes of the Republican challenger. Anderson's congressional career began in 1964 when he was elected representative from Tennessee's Sixth District, which included his home county of Humphreys. He did well in this conservative rural district, serving four consecutive terms despite being tagged as a liberal for his criticism of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his staunch opposition to American involvement in Vietnam.
Anderson retired from public life after his defeat in the 1972 election. He now lives in Florida with his second wife, Patricia Walters, and their two children. Captain Anderson is one in a long lineage of Tennesseans who have won fame for their military exploits and gone on to distinguished careers as elected officials.
Wayne C. Moore, Tennessee State Library and Archives
Suggested Reading(s): William R. Anderson, Nautilus 90 North (1959).
ANDREWS V. STATE
1871
The case of Andrews v. State is the single most important case regarding the right to bear arms under the Tennessee State Constitution. Article I, Section 26 of the constitution provides "That the citizens of this State have a right to keep and bear arms for their common defense; but the legislature shall have power, by law, to regulate the wearing of arms with a view to prevent crime."
In Andrews the defendants were charged with possession of a revolver in violation of law. They challenged the law under both the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and under the right to bear arms provision of the Tennessee Constitution. Since constitutional doctrine at the time held that the federal Bill of Rights did not apply to the states, the Tennessee Supreme Court dismissed this count. But on the Tennessee Constitutional issue, the statute was struck down in part.
The Attorney General of Tennessee argued before the Court that the right to keep and bear arms was a mere "political right" that existed for the benefit of the state and hence could be regulated at pleasure by the state. The Court did not agree. "Bearing arms for the common defense," it said, "may well be held to be a political right, or for the protection and maintenance of such rights, intended to be guaranteed; but the right to keep them, with all that is implied fairly as an incident to this right, is a private individual right, guaranteed to the citizen, not the soldier." (1) The court concluded that citizens have the right to keep military-type weapons and to engage in the necessary practice, repair, and transportation of such weapons without any specific connection to state activities such as the militia. Those parts of the statute that applied to military-type weapons were struck down, though the provisions relating to stilettos, derringers, and such (weapons regarded as having no usefulness except to criminals) were sustained.
Andrews remains the law today. Citizens have the right to keep and bear arms, subject to legislative regulation only for the purpose of preventing crime--there is no general legislative power to regulate arms for other purposes. Andrews, along with an earlier case of Aymette v. State, sheds light on the proper interpretation of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Aymette says that the Tennessee provision was adopted "in the same view" as was the Second Amendment, and the only U.S. Supreme Court case of this century addressing the Second Amendment relied heavily on Aymette. Should the U.S. Supreme Court address Second Amendment issues again, it seems likely it will rely heavily on Tennessee case law.
Glenn H. Reynolds, University of Tennessee School of Law
(1) Andrews v. State, 50 Tenn. at 156, 3 Heisk. at 182.
Suggested Reading: Glenn H. Reynolds, "The Right to Keep and Bear Arms Under the Tennessee Constitution: A Case Study in Civic Republican Thought," Tennessee Law Review 61 (1994), 647.
See Also: LAW; TENNESSEE SUPREME COURT
APPALACHIAN DECORATIVE ARTS
The early decorative arts of Appalachia were the hand-pieced quilts, handwoven coverlets, split oak egg baskets, and other "necessary" crafts once common to every remote household. In the Appalachian mountains of East Tennessee, art was often the result of need. The nonindustrialized Appalachian people were self-reliant, making do with materials at hand, crafting the cabins they lived in and all the furnishings, growing the flax and raising the sheep for the carding, spinning, and weaving of cloth for their clothing, and making any needed household implements, farming tools, toys, and bedding from the materials at hand.
The color that came into the Appalachian household came from natural material and natural dyestuffs, from walnut hulls and indigo, from inventive hands and minds adding "art" to everyday living. Intricate weaving patterns and dyes added life to the traditional coverlets, and surely many households contained "showoff" quilts made for marryings and buryings.
Just as the mail order catalog and better transportation began to give the mountaineers access to consumer products and a different, less self-sufficient way of life, a regional movement to preserve and market the traditional crafts got underway. Settlement schools and missionary workers saw the crafts as a means of generating cash income for a cash-poor people, and the "revival" of Appalachia's handicrafts began. The Pi Beta Phi School in Gatlinburg was a leader in the hand weaving arena, both in teaching and production, and the Arrowcraft Shop provided the early market. In Kentucky, Berea College's "Fireside Industries," and in North Carolina, Frances Goodrich's Allanstand Cottage Crafts, the John C. Campbell Folk School, Penland School, and Clementine Douglas's Spinning Wheel Shop provided similar outlets.
In 1929 these efforts merged to create the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild, the major organization devoted to Appalachian crafts, which held its first official meeting in Knoxville in 1930. In 1935 the Tennessee Valley Authority created Southern Highlanders, Inc., a crafts marketing program to work in conjunction with the Guild to operate retail stores in Norris, Tennessee, the Rockefeller Center in New York City, and in Washington, D.C. The TVA's program also included craft training such as O. J. Mattill's woodworking classes, which gave many Gatlinburg area woodworkers a start in the crafts business.
During the mid-1940s the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored Marian Heard's survey of Appalachian crafts, which led to the first Craftsman's Fair of the Southern Highlands, held in 1948 on the grounds of the Pi Beta Phi School in Gatlinburg.
The Southern Highlanders and the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild merged in 1950, extending the Guild's territory westward to Nashville. Phenomenal growth in crafts marketing and education across the region dramatically altered the craft objects which were once the "necessary" creations of mountain people. During the past fifty years, many artists and craftspeople from other regions have moved into Appalachia, bringing new skills and new artistic directions. As a result, the traditional self- or family-taught craftsperson is now part of a distinct minority.
Preservation efforts such as the Museum of Appalachia in Norris, the Guild's recognition of "Heritage Members," and state folklife efforts, are helping to preserve and perpetuate tradition, but the face of Appalachia's decorative arts is changing rapidly. Today's working craftspeople are more likely to be college-trained professionals whose work is derived from traditional mountain sources. But increasingly, the crafts are not intended to function in traditional ways and have become purely decorative. For example, quilts are now decorator showpieces seldom used on beds, and while the mountain coverlet (or "kiver") is no longer a significant part of Appalachian craft production, it is perhaps the most studied of the earlier art forms.
Organizations such as the Tennessee Association of Craft Artists (TACA) promote craft as art, though many members' work is very traditional; the Foothills Craft Guild in Oak Ridge has also been active for many years. Strong Appalachian craft organizations have maintained the effort begun during the 1930s, and today's craft professional benefits from the work done over the past half-century.
The marketplace introduced changes in production. Better looms for weaving tighter, straighter seams were introduced early in this century; quilts are now assembled from all-new materials and are often machine quilted and lighter in weight than earlier quilts, which were intended for warmth. Powered saws, sanders, planers, and carving tools have allowed woodworkers to expand and experiment. Electric potter wheels, ram presses, jiggers, and casting molds have influenced pottery design and production. Baskets are often free-form, woven from commercial strapping and dyed bright colors and seldom used for gathering eggs or carrying vegetables to the market. In almost every medium, technology has influenced the finished product.
Appalachian crafts have largely managed to avoid the popular "country" look pushed by magazines, though as always there are craft makers whose designs and production are market-driven. Nevertheless, contemporary Appalachian decorative arts have responded to general market influences and now differ little from those of most of the United States.
The crafts culture, however, remains as a direct descendant of the mountain heritage, and today's crafts work is, essentially, the modern equivalent of the work of a century or two centuries ago. Contemporary Appalachian craftspeople work for different reasons than those of their ancestors, but the common thread linking past and present is quality, material, and skill.
Garry Barker, Morehead, Kentucky
Suggested Reading(s): Allen H. Eaton, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands (1937).
See Also: ARROWMONT SCHOOL; CHARLES F. DECKER SR.; MUSEUM OF APPALACHIA; PI BETA PHI SCHOOL; QUILTMAKING; TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY
Click on images to enlarge
APPALACHIAN EXPOSITION OF 1910
The Appalachian Exposition of 1910 was held in Knoxville from September 12 to October 12, 1910. Although large expositions were commonplace at the turn of the century, and county, regional, and state agricultural fairs predated this Knoxville convention, the Appalachian Exposition of 1910 was the first one held in the southern Appalachian region. The intention of the fair was to demonstrate progress in southern industry and commerce. Moreover, it promoted the conservation of the region's natural resources, advocating their responsible exploitation for utilitarian (serving the public good) rather than aesthetic or ecological purposes. The fair's broad message applied the popular idea of a "New South" to southern Appalachia: the social and economic modernization of the South was to imitate and surpass northern prosperity. Through the promotion of government intervention and long-term investments in the service of conservation, the exposition's founders beckoned the more conservative businessmen of Knoxville to contribute to the creation of a grand industrial city.
Director general and secretary of the Knoxville Commercial Club William M. Goodman first envisioned the Appalachian Exposition in 1900. Not until 1908, however, when a massive publicity campaign rallied public support behind the event and Chilhowee Park was chosen as its site, did the club fully embrace the idea. In 1909 the Appalachian Exposition Company was established with local businessman William J. Oliver as president. Oliver and other company officers were responsible for the event's planning and management.
Exposition exhibits at the fairgrounds were housed in separate buildings. The eighty-thousand-square-foot Main Building held a myriad of displays promoting hardwood products and agricultural machinery and included various state and county exhibits. Exhibits in the Women's Building included contests for the best household products, such as needlework or canning items, and urged the adoption of "domestic science," the application of efficient time-saving techniques to housework, cooking, and child care. The Black Department, held in a building erected by the local black community, was designated to present the progress of African Americans to visitors. By separating the Women's and African American departments from the rest of the fair, traditional boundaries were reinforced. But members of each group viewed their exhibits as significant boosts to their collective self-worth. Three cabins on the fairgrounds portrayed Appalachian highlanders as churlish and peculiar, but more importantly, also as a group with the potential to participate in regional progress. The midway of the exposition hosted attractions ranging from "Muhall's Wild West Show" to "The Infant Incubator." Aeroplanes at the fair were the first to be seen in East Tennessee. Former president Theodore Roosevelt visited the fair and praised the promise of the fair and of the region.
The success of the 1910 fair led to the 1911 Appalachian Exposition and the 1913 National Conservation Exposition. These fairs preached, with a few modifications, the same New South message. The fairs had beneficial short-term effects, such as profitability and publicity, but failed to achieve their ultimate goal, the transformation of Knoxville into a model New South city.
Robert D. Lukens, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
See Also: KNOXVILLE
APPALACHIAN REGIONAL COMMISSION
In the 1960s, much of the Appalachian region lagged behind the rest of the nation in income, educational attainment, access to health care, and efficient transportation. The Council of Appalachian Governors, an ad hoc group of nine governors of the Appalachian states of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia, lobbied for external assistance for the mountainous portions of their states. Meeting with John F. Kennedy, a presidential candidate in 1960, the governors convinced him of Appalachia's needs. Campaigning in West Virginia, Kennedy encountered living conditions that further convinced him of the need for government intervention to solve the region's problems.
In 1963 Kennedy created the President's Appalachian Regional Commission to assist in advancing legislation to bring federal dollars to Appalachia. Harlan Mathews, later a U.S. senator, was Tennessee's first representative with the planning commission. Tennessee Sixth District Congressman Joe L. Evins supported the legislation through his role as a member of the House Public Works Committee, which he chaired from 1966 to 1975. When the legislation, the Appalachian Redevelopment Act, was passed in 1965, creating the Appalachian Regional Commission as a federal agency, Mathews was Tennessee's first designated representative.
Today the Appalachian Regional Commission consists of the governors of the thirteen states designated as Appalachian (the original nine, plus New York, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Ohio), each governor's designated state representative, and a federal cochair appointed by the president who serves with one of the governors as states' cochair. The states provide 50 percent of the funding to match the federal government's 50 percent funding. Program administration is conducted through local development districts, groups of counties designated by the state government for economic development. The Appalachian Regional Commission initially provided funding for the Appalachian Development Highway System; construction of health facilities, vocational educational facilities, and sewage treatment plants; timber development; mining area restoration; water resource planning; and land stabilization and conservation control.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the Appalachian Regional Commission demonstrated improvements in the region's economic development and quality of life. In 1981, in response to the Reagan administration's efforts to eliminate the programs, the Appalachian governors prepared a resolution calling on the president to continue the commission; two of the states' cochairs, Governor Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Governor John Y. Brown Jr. of Kentucky, helped offset many commission budget cuts. The commission survived, though reduced in its ability to serve the needs of the region.
Attitudes toward the commission changed, first with the election of George Bush and continuing during the administration of Bill Clinton. A new strategic planning process, begun in 1994, reinvigorated the commission and culminated in the 1996 publication of Setting a Regional Agenda. The strategic plan called for developing a knowledgeable and skilled population, strengthening the region's physical infrastructure, building regional capacity in leadership and planning, creating a dynamic economic base, and fostering healthy people. The Appalachian Regional Commission continues to serve as a model of federal-state-local planning and partnership.
Jean Haskell Speer, East Tennessee State University
See Also: LAMAR ALEXANDER; JOSEPH L. EVINS
APPALACHIAN TRAIL
The Appalachian Trail is a continuous marked footpath extending 2,140 miles through fourteen states from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Katahdin, Maine. The route crosses eight national forests, eight units of the national park system, and sixty state parks and wildlife areas. The trail's 284 miles along Tennessee's eastern border are mostly within the Cherokee National Forest and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The trail reaches its highest point in Tennessee at 6,643 feet on Clingman's Dome in the Great Smokies.
Benton MacKaye of Massachusetts first proposed the trail in a 1921 issue of Journal of the American Institute of Architects. The Appalachian Trail Conference (ATC) was formed in 1925 and coordinated planning and building the trail, which was completed in 1937. The Civilian Conservation Corps in Tennessee was particularly active. Much of the early trail ran along rural roads and across private property; over the years public lands have been acquired for rerouting. The trail received big boosts in 1968, when Congress designated it a national scenic trail, and again in 1978, when Congress authorized funds for acquisition of a corridor for the entire trail.
The ATC coordinates trail maintenance by more than two dozen volunteer organizations and publishes detailed hiker guides. Each year, several hundred "thru hikers" hike the trail from Georgia to Maine, but many thousand more use the trail for day hikes or shorter backpacking trips. Primitive shelters are spaced at intervals along the trail.
Robert Brandt, Nashville
Materials produced by Appalachian Trail Conference, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.
See Also: CHEROKEE NATIONAL FOREST; CLINGMAN'S DOME; CONSERVATION; GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK
ARCHAIC PERIOD
8,000-1,000 B.C.
The Archaic in Tennessee is the longest defined prehistoric cultural period, spanning approximately seven thousand years. The beginning of the Archaic Period roughly coincides with the Pleistocene/Holocene glacial boundary at about ten thousand years ago. The period ends with the efflorescence of both ceramic technology and more intense horticulture, hallmarks of the succeeding Woodland Period. One of the original defining features of the Archaic Period, in fact, was the absence of pottery.
In general, small groups of highly mobile hunter-gatherers characterized Archaic settlement patterns. Aggregation locales, where larger groups of people congregated at certain times of the year, were not uncommon, especially as the Archaic Period progressed. Archaic people subsisted on acorns and other plant foods in addition to hunting game animals, primarily white-tailed deer, as well as some smaller animals. Archaic hunters did not have bow and arrow technology but instead used spears. Unlike their Paleo-Indian precursors, they were aided in this endeavor by the atlatl, or spearthrower, which allowed them to hurl their projectiles with greater velocity. Spear points were, on average, much larger than those used in the later Woodland Period. The lifeways of Archaic people, however, were not uniform and homogenous for the entire seven-thousand-year period. Archaeologists have historically divided the Archaic Period into three phases--the Early, Middle, and Late Archaic Periods--to delineate significant cultural changes. Some researchers also define a Terminal Archaic phase, which marks the Archaic/Woodland Period cultural transition.
The Early Archaic Period (8,000-6,000 B.C.) was one of great transition. The end of the Pleistocene brought environmental changes in both flora and fauna. Megafauna, such as the mammoth and mastodon, that dominated the Pleistocene epoch became extinct. The early Holocene was cool and moist but warmer than the previous epoch, one factor that may explain the megafauna extinctions. In addition, oak and hickory forests replaced grasslands and savannahs all over the Southeast. These changes do not appear to have adversely affected prehistoric peoples. Rather, they adapted well to them.
In Tennessee two major cultural variants of the Early Archaic are represented by projectile point/knife (PPKs) types--the earlier Kirk and later Bifurcate traditions. Two forms of Kirk PPKs are recognized. One is a generally large corner-notched point, while the other is a straight-stemmed and often serrated edge form. The corner-notched form chronologically precedes the latter. Kirk people subsisted largely by hunting deer and turkey but also relied on acorn and hickory nuts. There is evidence for seasonal base camps at the Icehouse Bottom and Rose Island sites on the Little Tennessee River. The Bifurcate Tradition differed from the Kirk primarily in the shape of their PPKs. Bifurcate points were notched both on the sides and bases. Subsistence was very similar to that of the Kirk people.
At the end of the Early Archaic Period, the region became very warm and much drier. This climatic change, termed the Altithermal, marks the beginning of the middle Archaic Period at about 5500 B.C. The number of recorded Middle Archaic sites is lower than that recorded for the Early Archaic, suggesting that perhaps this climatic change precipitated migrations to and from certain biotic provinces. Subsistence appears to have remained largely the same, although with the addition of a new pattern: Middle Archaic people intensively harvested fresh water marine resources, especially shellfish. The archaeological record shows vast accumulations known as shell middens; these can be several feet thick at Middle Archaic base camps like the Eva and Hayes sites. In Tennessee two regional variants are distinguished, again primarily by PPK types. Eva points are basally notched and this variant characterizes the western Tennessee River Valley, while the Morrow Mountain variant is typical of the eastern valley. Morrow Mountain points are very similar to Eva points but commonly have rounded bases. Ground stone atlatl weights (or bannerstones) used to hone balance and velocity, made their appearance in the Middle Archaic. Increasing evidence also exists of intentional burial of the dead during this time.
The Late Archaic Period begins at the apex of the Altithermal about 3000 B.C. Conditions approximating those of the present day were reached by 2000 B.C. In evolutionary terms, many changes rapidly occurred during this last phase of the Archaic Period. Population size increased significantly. The number of larger aggregation sites far exceeded that in the Middle Archaic. Ceramic technology began during the late Archaic. Late Archaic pottery from Tennessee is thick and crude and often fiber-tempered. The beginnings of plant domestication and horticulture also first appear during this time. Intensive deep cave exploration and utilization occurred as well. Late Archaic people produced the earliest cave art. Projectile point forms become more variable during the Late Archaic. Early on, both the eastern and western valleys are characterized by large, asymmetrical, straight-stemmed types. In the western valley, however, this type is called Ledbetter and is made of chert or flint. Eastern valley points are termed Appalachian-stemmed and are made largely of quartzite. Later point forms became more varied. Deep corner-notched forms are found in the western valley, small straight-stemmed types in the eastern valley, and shallow side-notched forms in the Cumberland Plateau region.
Thus, the Archaic Period, including its constituent phases and traditions, is essentially defined by its great age, lack of pottery until late in the period, and projectile point forms. Small, mobile groups of hunter-gatherers, exploiting a wide variety of terrestrial and marine resources, dominated the landscape. Larger groups of people aggregated at certain times of the year at seasonal base camps in the major river valleys in order to form alliances and find mates. Archaic hunter-gatherers explored and exploited a vast and diverse array of ecological niches across Tennessee.
Jay D. Franklin, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Suggested Reading(s): J. A. Bense, Archaeology of the Southeastern United States (1994); Jefferson Chapman, Tellico Archaeology: 12,000 Years of Native American History (1987); J. T. Dowd, The Anderson Site: Middle Archaic Adaptation in Tennessee's Central Basin (1989); T. M. N. Lewis and M. K. Lewis, Eva: An Archaic Site (1961).
See Also: EVA SITE; PREHISTORIC CAVE ART
VERNACULAR DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE
The majority of Tennessee residences were neither designed nor built by architects or master craftsmen. Nor were they designed with one particular architectural style in mind. They do, however, fall under the rubric of "vernacular architecture." This term is used broadly to describe housing forms that include true or folk vernacular houses, houses that imitate academic styles, and houses produced by industrialization and cultural standardization. For example, the elaborate or "high style" designs of the early Victorian era required skilled artisans to complete ornamentation in brick or stone. As a result, only the wealthy could afford to hire architects, builders, and craftsmen to complete these houses. However, the emerging middle class could rely on designs shown in the popular press, magazines, or plan books. Instead of handcrafted elements, their houses were constructed using stamped metal or cast plaster molds. By the early twentieth century, the standardization of lumber size, the availability of catalogues of standard millwork, and the publication of house plan books made the vernacular interpretations of conventional academic styles easier.
In addition to the use of design elements that mimicked academic styles, vernacular house styles adapted to such regional variations as the local landscape, available building materials, and the skills of local craftsmen or builders. This type of domestic architecture also includes houses found in locally produced plan books, pre-cut houses from mail-order catalogues, and houses built for planned communities and company towns. Vernacular houses may also be houses constructed as speculative buildings in streetcar suburbs and suburban areas of the major cities.
The description of vernacular types generally focuses on the exterior form of the house, although the original form may have undergone change, particularly on the rear elevation. The number of stories, the style of roof, and roof orientation are primary features used to define the forms. Exterior materials and construction methods are sometimes used to help define a vernacular form.
Two important floor plans dominate Tennessee vernacular architecture: the hall and parlor plan and the central hall plan. One of the earliest floor plans for Tennessee houses is the hall and parlor plan and its variant, the three-room plan, sometimes called the Penn plan. Generally found on most extant eighteenth-century houses and early nineteenth-century houses, the hall and parlor plan consists of two rooms. One room served as the more formal and public parlor, while the second room was used as the living and sleeping space for the family. In the Penn variation, one room was partitioned into two smaller rooms. This floor plan may also have included a corner chimney, an indication that the house was constructed around the turn of the eighteenth century in Tennessee. Existing hall and parlor plans may be difficult to recognize because additions to the building sometimes disguised the original floor plan. As its name suggests, the central hall plan is composed of a center hall flanked by at least one room on each side. The hall, unlike today's halls, was a wide space that could function as a reception area or, more likely, living space for the family. At least one of the side rooms served as a formal, public parlor, with the other rooms reserved for family use.
Tennessee vernacular buildings are typically defined by four basic traits: materials used, construction techniques, shape of building, and design elements. Stone houses were generally constructed in East and Middle Tennessee in the period 1780 to 1820, with some construction as late as 1850. Settlers from Pennsylvania and Virginia often built or owned these homes. The houses are customarily two stories in height, with a central passage or hall and parlor plan. They feature side gable roofs, some with gable returns, and facades with multi-light, double-hung windows and three or five bays arranged symmetrically. Typically the houses have Federal- or Greek Revival-style embellishments, which are seen in entrances with sidelights and/or transoms. Interior doors and fireplaces may also show elements of Federal or Greek Revival designs.
Houses constructed of hewn logs held together by corner notching and mud or wood chinking were built primarily in East and Middle Tennessee in the 1780s and 1790s, though some log houses were common as late as 1900. Log houses are not always recognizable when exterior logs have been sheathed in weatherboard and interior walls have been covered with plaster or wood. The width of a building's walls can indicate that it is a log structure. Log houses are divided into four sub-types based on their exterior form: single pen, dog trot, saddlebag, and double pen. Single pens were one- or two-story rectangular or square buildings, featuring gable roofs, stone pier foundations, and stone chimneys. The dog trot house was usually one story with two single pens of the same size separated by an open hall or breezeway, which may have been enclosed at a later date. Many were built on stone pier foundations and have gable roofs and stone chimneys. Saddlebag construction consisted of two adjacent single pens with a central stone chimney, stone pier foundations, and gable roofs. The double pen was a one- or two-story residence consisting of two adjacent single pens with two exterior stone chimneys and was constructed with stone pier foundations and gable roofs.
The braced frame house, also called the post and beam or heavy timber frame, was one or two stories in height, rectangular in plan with a gable roof, and featured wall posts and beams supported with diagonal braces that were often hand hewn. Spaces between the posts and beam were filled with nogging such as brick. Frequently covered by weatherboard, these houses were built before 1860, and several examples can be found in Knoxville and Knox County.
Many styles of houses are classified by form and design features that were popularized during specific eras. An early example is the Cumberland House, the name of which originated in Middle Tennessee. This one- or two-story house, erected with logs or braced framing, is characterized by two single-leaf entrances on the facade leading into two separate rooms. Rectangular in plan, the house has a side gable roof and weatherboard siding and either a center chimney or two gable end chimneys.
One- and two-story I-Houses date from the early nineteenth century, but continued to be built until the 1900s. They are primarily frame, with gable roofs and stone or brick foundations. The three- or five-bay facades are symmetrical in design, and often there are two gable end chimneys. The interior plan of the I-House is likely to be central hall, although early I-Houses may have a hall and parlor plan. Many I-Houses contain Greek Revival, Italianate, sawn or milled wood trim or Colonial Revival embellishments which can be contemporary to the house or later additions.
In Middle and West Tennessee, Piano Box Houses were erected from the mid-nineteenth century into the early part of the twentieth century. The name for these one-story houses derives from their similarity to square, or box-shaped, pianos. The houses feature rectangular plans with integral porches and various embellishments.
The Gable House includes at least three different forms: Center Gable, Gable Front, and Gabled Ell House. The Center Gable House was built between 1850 and 1890. As the name implies, the distinguishing feature is a center gable that extends from the wall on the facade, sometimes called a dormer wall. This gable is generally smaller or narrower than the primary roof gable. The roof is a side gable roof but may be a cross gable roof if the facade center gable extends to the roof ridge. The facades may also have paired gables or tripled gables. Because of the gables, these houses are considered to reflect a Gothic Revival influence. Gable Front Houses were constructed in cities and planned communities circa 1870 to 1930. Generally two-story with a weatherboarded frame, they occasionally feature one- or two-story porches. The Gabled Ell House, found in both urban and rural Tennessee, consists of a gable front section with a side gable section attached at right angles to produce an L-plan or T-plan. The Gabled Ell House is sometimes called an Upright and Wing House or a Gable Front and Wing House because of its shape.
Shotgun Houses were built in urban and rural areas and as worker housing or tenant housing circa 1860-1930. They have narrow rectangular plans with gable front or hip roofs. Shotgun Houses are one to four rooms deep, occasionally with a side hall or no interior hall.
Queen Anne Influence Houses, circa 1880-1920, are weatherboarded frame but can be brick or stone veneer. The one- to two-and-one-half-story houses are characterized by complex rooflines and massing. They feature a variety of stylistic ornamentation, and later versions display strong elements of the Colonial Revival style.
The Pyramid Roof House was built circa 1900-1930 as worker housing in both rural and urban areas. It is generally one story in height and is characterized by a steeply pitched hip or pyramidal roof. The frame house is usually weatherboarded and built on a square plan with four rooms.
Bungalow Influence Houses, circa 1895-1935, are most often weatherboard frame or brick veneer, although stone, stucco, and shingles are also used. The houses are rectangular or irregular in plan with interior floor plans that are often open and informal. Although most are one or one and one-half stories in height, there is a variation called Airplane Bungalow that has a one-room second-story addition. Roofs are hip or gable and are characterized by a low pitch and overhanging eaves. Bungalow Influence Houses may have varied stylistic elements, including Craftsman or Colonial Revival. Memphis has a large number of bungalows with different characteristics and variations of the basic form.
The Four Square House, circa 1900-1940, is two stories with a square or near square plan. The frame house can be sheathed in weatherboard or brick veneer; sometimes stone or rock-faced concrete blocks are used as a surface treatment. They have a hip or pyramidal roof and at least one central dormer on the facade. The facade porch is one story with a gable roof or half-hip roof and generally covers the facade or three-quarters of it. The interior plan has four rooms and a side stair on each floor. The Four Square House was a popular plan book or mail order house.
Between 1915 and 1940 many communities expanded into suburbs. New houses were often built as revivals of earlier styles in the new neighborhoods. The common feature of these Period Revival Influence Houses is not the form as much as the fact that all are modern vernacular adaptations of academic styles. They evoke the feeling of the earlier styles, but their use of materials and floor plans differs. These house forms include the Cape Cod Revival House, the Tudor Revival House, the English Cottage House, and the Colonial Revival House.
The Minimal Traditional House is an early to mid-twentieth-century (1930-50) house. As the name suggests, it has minimal characteristics of other styles, such as Tudor Revival and Colonial Revival. It has a rectangular plan and a roof that is generally side gable. The house is frame and can be covered with wood siding, brick, or stone veneer. Usually one or one and one-half stories, the details or embellishments appear flat and are often only around the porch or entry. The gable roof has little or no overhang. Chimneys are wide and are sometimes found on the facade. Considered the forerunner of the Ranch House, a very popular suburban and rural house type from the 1950s to the 1970s, this house can be found throughout the state.
Claudette Stager, Tennessee Historical Commission
Suggested Reading(s): The Vernacular Architecture Forum publishes a Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture series that contains articles on vernacular design; Herbert Gottfried and Jan Jennings, American Vernacular Design (1985) and American Vernacular Interior Design (1993); John A. Jakle et al., Common Houses in America's Small Towns (1989); James C. Massey and Shirley Maxwell, House Styles in America (1996); Virginia McAlester and Lee McAlester, A Field Guide to American Houses (1984).
JOHN ARMFIELD
1797-1871
John Armfield, slave trader and businessman, descended from North Carolina Quakers who were Loyalists during the American Revolution. While still a boy, Armfield ran away from home, vowing not to return until he had acquired more wealth than his father, Nathan Armfield. In the 1830s, Armfield fulfilled his vow as the partner of slave trader Isaac Franklin.
With headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, Franklin and Armfield conducted gangs of chained and shackled slaves down the Natchez Trace and sold them in the slave pen on the edge of that Mississippi town. The arduous journey took seven or eight weeks, but wealthy cotton planters paid Franklin and Armfield well for their traffic in African flesh. Armfield's biographer, Isabel Howell, estimated that the pair averaged sales of twelve hundred slaves per year for every year from 1828 to 1835.
In 1831 Armfield courted and married Franklin's niece, Martha Franklin. A rich man when he retired in 1845, Armfield soon acquired social acceptance and began investing in Tennessee real estate. About 1850 he visited Beersheba Springs, a resort on Broad Mountain in Grundy County. Taken by the beauty of the springs and the possibility for development, Armfield purchased several hundred acres in 1854 and began renovations on the hotel. With its neo-classical facade, two-story galleries, and white columns, the hotel opened in May 1856 and inaugurated the glorious era of Beersheba--and Armfield's success as host and entrepreneur. Armfield also erected a saw mill, a brick kiln, a grist mill, and a tannery, remnants of which survive. An Episcopal supporter of the proposed University of the South, Armfield built cottages at Beersheba for Bishops James H. Otey and Leonidas Polk in 1859. Both houses still stand, along with the hotel and twelve other structures.
Armfield died childless in 1871, his fortune diminished by the Civil War. He is buried in the little private cemetery on Armfield Avenue across the road from his Beersheba home on the bluff.
Herschel Gower, Dallas, Texas
See Also: BEERSHEBA SPRINGS; ISAAC FRANKLIN; GRUNDY COUNTY; JAMES H. OTEY; LEONIDAS POLK; SLAVERY
ARMY OF TENNESSEE
The Army of Tennessee, known by various names in the course of its existence, was the Confederacy's principal army on the western front. From the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River, this force fought most of the major battles that took place in the region.
The army traced it origins to the early spring and summer of 1861, when Tennessee Governor Isham G. Harris spearheaded the effort to raise the Provisional Army of Tennessee. The army, one of the largest and best organized of the Southern forces, transferred to Confederate service in July 1861. Placed under the command of General Albert Sidney Johnston, it became the core of the Southern army in the Western Theater. In the opening days of the war, the army defended the northern frontier of the Confederacy along the Tennessee-Kentucky border before retreating following the Federal capture of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers in February 1862.
The army concentrated at Corinth, Mississippi. General P. G. T. Beauregard, second in command, styled the forty-four-thousand-man force the "Army of the Mississippi." On April 6-7, 1862, this army engaged Union General Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Tennessee in the battle of Shiloh, the first large-scale battle of the war. An apparent Confederate victory on the first day turned into defeat on the second. The army limped back to Corinth, having suffered more than ten thousand casualties, including the death of Johnston.
Although Beauregard succeeded to command of the army, his conflicts with President Jefferson Davis soon led to his replacement by General Braxton Bragg. For the next year and a half, Bragg led the army through some of the hardest marching and toughest fighting of the war. In November 1862, soon after the culmination of Bragg's first campaign at the battle of Perryville and the subsequent retreat into Tennessee, the army officially became known as the Army of Tennessee, the designation it carried for the rest of the war.
In the last days of December 1862, the thirty-eight-thousand-man Army of Tennessee took up a position thirty miles southeast of Nashville along the banks of the west fork of the Stones River near the small town of Murfreesboro. The Confederate forces faced a forty-four-thousand-man Union army under the command of General William S. Rosecrans. Both armies straddled the Nashville Turnpike and the railroad leading into that city.
Early on December 31, 1862, the Army of Tennessee struck the enemy's right flank and drove the Federals back to the turnpike and railroad. But the initial success could not be sustained. After three days of fighting, Bragg withdrew and the Federals claimed victory, although both sides suffered an almost equal number of casualties.
The Army of Tennessee held the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad near Tullahoma for the next several months. In the summer of 1863 Rosecrans adroitly maneuvered Bragg's forces from their defensive position, sending them into retreat to North Georgia, just south of Chattanooga. Reinforcements from General James Longstreet's Virginia corps bolstered the Army of Tennessee. On September 19-20, the army attacked Rosecrans along the banks of Chickamauga Creek, fighting one of the fiercest engagements of the war. Confederate casualties numbered more than eighteen thousand, while the Union forces lost more than sixteen thousand men. Despite its losses, the battle became one of the Army of Tennessee's greatest tactical triumphs. The Southern forces drove the Union army back to Chattanooga; only the skillful action of General George H. Thomas prevented the retreat from becoming a rout.
But Bragg failed to follow up his advantage. Criticism of the general, which had been mounting since the retreat from Kentucky and the battle of Stones River, reached new heights. Jefferson Davis visited the army and raised expectations that he would relieve Bragg of his command. Davis, however, decided to retain the general. Then, in late November 1863, Grant, who had replaced Rosecrans as Union commander, decisively defeated Bragg in the battles for Chattanooga, forcing him to withdraw to North Georgia and making the costly triumph at Chickamauga strategically worthless. Davis relieved Bragg of his command and named General Joseph E. Johnston to head the Army of Tennessee.
Johnston strengthened the army's morale and numbers, but faced an enormous task in the spring of 1864. General William T. Sherman, with superior numbers, launched his campaign to capture Atlanta. Gradually, Johnston fell back before Sherman's advance, presumably seeking an opening to strike the Union forces at an unguarded moment. Johnston found only one opportunity, and even then, General John Bell Hood, who had been expected to lead the attack, held back, fearing a Federal attack on his flank if he moved forward. The Confederates continued to retreat under pressure of Sherman's enveloping maneuvers.
A disenchanted Davis removed Johnston from command and gave command of the Army of Tennessee to Hood, who had been sending Davis criticisms of Johnston for continually retreating. Hood's engagements around Atlanta cost the army a terrible price in the numbers of dead and wounded, all to no avail. On September 2, 1864, Sherman captured Atlanta.
Hood then moved the Army of Tennessee northward, hoping to draw Sherman away from Georgia. Instead, Sherman headed for Savannah, leaving General Thomas to cope with Hood's forces in Tennessee. Crossing the Tennessee River and moving into Middle Tennessee, Hood led the Army of Tennessee into an ill-advised frontal assault at Franklin on November 30, 1864. This battle resulted in seven thousand casualties, including the deaths of six Confederate generals.
Nevertheless, Hood decided to move on to Nashville, where the army was decisively defeated on December 15-16, 1864. The remnants of the Army of Tennessee managed to reach safety on the Tennessee River, but Hood lost his command, and Johnston returned to lead the weakened, hard-luck army into the Carolinas, where they fought once more at Bentonville, before surrendering at Durham, North Carolina, in late April 1865. The Army of Tennessee gained a reputation as a tough, hard-marching, hard-fighting unit. Usually outnumbered and led by inept commanders, the Army of Tennessee nevertheless achieved an impressive record as a fighting force.
James L. McDonough, Auburn University
Suggested Reading(s): Thomas L. Connelly, Army of the Heartland: the Army of Tennessee, 1861-1862 (1967) and Autumn of Glory: the Army of Tennessee, 1862-1865 (1971); Earl J. Hess, Banners to the Breeze: The Kentucky Campaign, Corinth, and Stones River (2000); Stanley F. Horn, The Army of Tennessee (1941); Steven E. Woodworth, Six Armies in Tennessee (1998).
See Also: BATTLE OF FRANKLIN; BATTLE OF NASHVILLE; BATTLE OF SHILOH; BATTLE OF STONES RIVER; BATTLES OF CHICKAMAUGA AND CHATTANOOGA; BRAXTON BRAGG; BENJAMIN F. CHEATHAM; CIVIL WAR; PATRICK R. CLEBURNE; FORT DONELSON; FORT HENRY; ISHAM G. HARRIS; JOHN BELL HOOD; ALBERT S. JOHNSTON; JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON; LEONIDAS POLK; TULLAHOMA CAMPAIGN
SAMUEL MAYES ARNELL
1833-1903
Reconstruction legislator and congressman Samuel M. Arnell was born at Zion Settlement in Maury County on May 3, 1833. After attending Amherst College, Arnell returned to Tennessee, studied law, and practiced in Columbia.
Although a slaveholder, Arnell sided with the Union during the Civil War and traversed Middle Tennessee urging Tennesseans to maintain their allegiance to the United States. His relentless, vocal opposition to the Confederacy earned him many enemies, forcing him to flee to Nashville for safety. A Whig before the war, Arnell subsequently became a Radical Republican and represented Lewis, Maury, and Williamson Counties in the Tennessee General Assembly of 1865-66. Arnell wrote and introduced two franchise bills to prevent ex-Confederates from voting in state and national elections; they were signed into law in June 1865 and May 1866.
In the fall of 1865, after a disputed election in Tennessee's Sixth Congressional District between Arnell and Dorsey B. Thomas, Governor William G. Brownlow awarded the election certificate to Arnell. He remained in Congress until 1871, having chaired the Committee on Expenditures in the Department of State and served on the Committee on Education and Labor. The Arnell family continued to live in Washington, D.C., for a few years before returning to Columbia. From 1879 to 1885, Arnell served as the Columbia postmaster before becoming Superintendent of Public Schools. At the expiration of his term in 1888, Arnell and his family returned to Washington, D.C., until 1894, when his declining health forced them to move to Johnson City. He died there on July 20, 1903.
Kathleen R. Zebley, University of North Carolina at Pembroke
Suggested Reading(s): Kathleen R. Zebley, "Unconditional Unionist: Samuel Mayes Arnell and Reconstruction in Tennessee," Tennessee Historical Quarterly 53 (1994): 246-59.
See Also: WILLIAM G. BROWNLOW; MAURY COUNTY; RECONSTRUCTION
EDDY ARNOLD
1918-
The most successful commercial artist in country music for the years immediately after World War II was Eddy Arnold. Arnold's success in country music sales centered on two eras: the period from 1945 to 1953, when he dominated country sales and even outsold most pop music artists in the live radio era; and from 1964 to 1970, when country music embraced the "Nashville Sound" and became the music of the middle class.
Richard Edward Arnold was born May 15, 1918, on a farm in Henderson in Chester County. He first appeared on radio in Jackson before moving to Memphis and St. Louis with fiddle player Speedy McNatt. In 1940 Arnold joined Pee Wee King and the Golden West Cowboys in Nashville. From the end of 1941 to the end of 1942, the Golden West Cowboys appeared on the Camel Caravan to entertain U.S. military troops throughout the country.
At the beginning of 1943 Arnold went solo and appeared on the Grand Ole Opry. He obtained a recording contract with Victor Records and in December 1944 became the first artist with a major label to record in Nashville. His first hit was "That's How Much I Love You" in 1946. It was followed by a number of other top selling hits including "Bouquet of Roses," "I'll Hold You In My Heart," and "Don't Rob Another Man's Castle." Beginning in November 1947, he hosted a Mutual network radio show. In September 1948 Arnold left the Opry. That same year he began a daily network noon show which opened with his signature song "Cattle Call" and dominated country music like no other artist has before or since, having the top chart record for fifty of the fifty-two weeks of 1948.
Arnold's next reign as a top-selling country act occurred in the mid-1960s with songs like "Make The World Go Away" and "What's He Doing In My World." During this period, he recorded with lush string sections and contributed to the middle-of-the-road sound that brought country music to American middle-class listeners.
Throughout his career, Eddy Arnold appeared on network shows, first on radio, then television. His popularity expanded the boundaries of country music, and he served as a bright, articulate spokesman for the industry. Arnold was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1966, the same year he headlined a show at Carnegie Hall. He was the first Country Music Association "Entertainer of the Year" in 1967. In addition to his success as a country music artist, Eddy Arnold has been a successful businessman and community leader, active in developing and promoting Brentwood, a suburb of Nashville.
Don Cusic, Belmont University
See Also: CHESTER COUNTY; COUNTRY MUSIC HALL OF FAME; GRAND OLE OPRY; MUSIC
ARNOLD ENGINEERING DEVELOPMENT CENTER (AEDC)
Located on thirty-nine thousand wooded acres in Coffee and Franklin Counties, AEDC is the world's most diverse complex of aerospace ground simulation test facilities and one of the most unusual U.S. Air Force installations. Approximately three thousand civilian scientists and support personnel work with a military staff of several hundred, operating over fifty aerodynamic and propulsion wind tunnels, rocket and turbine engine test cells, space chambers, arc heaters, and ballistic ranges to simulate flight conditions from sea level to outer space and from subsonic speeds to over Mach 20. Virtually every modern aircraft's design, engine and weapons system, missile, space vehicle, and probe have been tested in the center's three major test complexes. World War II-vintage equipment from the Bavarian Motor Works in Munich forms the original core of the Engine Test Facility (ETF), which also includes the world's three largest rocket test cells. The von Karman Gas Dynamics Facility (VKF) honors famed scientist Dr. Theodore von Karman. The Propulsion Wind Tunnel complex (PWT) is an International Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark.
In 1951 President Harry S. Truman vowed that the U.S. would become the international leader of aeronautical development when he dedicated AEDC to the memory of the Army Air Force's visionary commander, General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold. Alarmed by the rapid advances of German aeronautical technology during World War II, Arnold enlisted von Karman to lead the Scientific Advisory Group (SAG) in assessing the situation in Europe in relation to national security. SAG's report, "Toward New Horizons," became AEDC's blueprint and included Dr. Frank Wattendorf's recommendation to provide leading civilian and military scientists with German equipment at a state-of-the-art testing and evaluation center.
Officials selected U.S. Army Camp Forrest (1940-46) near Tullahoma as the site of the new facility. The site provided ample power and water resources, while its remoteness protected civilians from testing hazards and provided security. Surrounding communities quickly adopted space race slogans and symbols. Tullahoma became the "Wind Tunnel City," and AEDC and the University of Tennessee combined to create the UT Space Institute in the mid-1960s. Motlow State Community College incorporated a rocket launch on its 1969 official seal.
Arnold Research Organization (ARO) designed and operated Arnold Center until 1980. The expression "going out to ARO" continues in the local lexicon, though the company no longer exists.
As the area's largest employer, AEDC heavily influences south-central Tennessee, both economically and culturally. An annual budget exceeding $360 million attracts related industries, subcontractors, and employees from across the nation and around the world. The culturally diverse work force merging into the local scene lends a cosmopolitan flavor to surrounding communities.
With the end of the Cold War, security pressures diminished. AEDC held its first open house in 1986. AEDC's mission continues to broaden, including commercial testing, the consolidation and transfer of navy jet engine testing, and the creation of service and support alliances with neighboring institutions and municipalities. The base has expanded its testing into new fields such as DECADE, which is a nuclear weapons effects facility. A report issued in 1995 titled New World Vistas set goals and objectives for AEDC into the twenty-first century. The U.S. Air Force Materiel Command manages AEDC, with a navy captain as vice-commander. Sverdrup Technology, Inc., operates all test facilities, and ACS provides center support.
Darlene M. Merryman, Motlow State Community College
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ARROWMONT SCHOOL OF ARTS AND CRAFTS
Arrowmont, a visual arts complex in Gatlinburg in Sevier County, grew out of the manual arts curriculum of the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School. The Pi Phi teachers taught handicraft skills to the community while seeking to revive traditional crafts among these mountain people. With an active weaving, furniture, and basketry program, the women's fraternity marketed the crafts to its national membership to supplement and stimulate the local economy. In 1926 the Pi Phis started the "Arrow Craft" Shop (later Arrowcraft) to market the products to a growing tourism industry. Although materials, instructions, and ideas came from outside of Appalachia, local residents interpreted the crafted items in their own way and returned the finished products to the shop for sale. In 1940, in reaction to the opening of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the fraternity built a new Arrowcraft building to house the work of over ninety artisans. In the mid-1940s, Pi Phi chose to enhance its offerings by establishing a summer program.
The fraternity approached the Department of Crafts and Interior Design of the College of Home Economics at the University of Tennessee about using the Gatlinburg premises during the summer to expand the influence of both entities in the crafts field. In 1945 this cooperative effort produced its first summer craft workshop. Under the leadership of Marian G. Heard, the summer workshop blossomed. While the Arrowcraft Shop continued to market crafts from local artisans, the summer workshops attracted students and instructors from around the world. The quality instruction and the pastoral surroundings created an atmosphere in which artists and craft workers could concentrate on developing their skills. The university also offered college credit through the Pi Beta Phi workshops.
The availability of locally made craft items attracted tourists, while an available market brought more crafts workers to town. In 1948 the Southern Highlands Handicraft Guild sponsored its first Craftsman's Fair at the Pi Beta Phi School, exhibiting local craft work and helping to establish Gatlinburg as a thriving craft center. At the 1964 Pi Beta Phi Convention, the fraternity decided to establish an arts and crafts school as a part of its centennial celebration.
The rapid modernization of the area around Gatlinburg changed the fraternity's mission from a three-way focus on academics, health care, and manual instruction to a single emphasis on the arts and craft work. In 1965 the fraternity closed its medical clinic. The same year Sevier County assumed control of the school facilities, leaving only the arts and crafts curriculum. The fraternity focused its energy on building a reputable arts and crafts school. In 1969 they changed the name of the school, and within a year the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts had been formally established and ensconced in its new thirty-eight-thousand-square-foot facility. It contains galleries, workshops, and libraries, while dormitories house students, instructors, and artists-in-residence. Marian Heard retired as director in 1977. Two years later, Sandra J. Blain, a University of Tennessee professor and nationally known potter, became director.
In 1994 the Southern Highlands Handicraft Guild assumed operation of the Arrowcraft Shop to market products from all over the southern Appalachian region, leaving Arrowmont to focus on instruction rather than marketing. Emphasizing art as a part of everyday experience and expression, the school offers seminars, conferences, community classes, and an Elderhostel program featuring internationally known instructors. Although hand-woven products have not been in high demand in recent years, Arrowmont continues to lead in the arts and crafts field through its diverse program and eclectic outlook.
Kevin D. Collins, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
See Also: APPALACHIAN DECORATIVE ARTS; ART; PI BETA PHI SCHOOL; SETTLEMENT SCHOOLS; SEVIER COUNTY
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ART
Tennessee, which until recently was rural, egalitarian, and lacking in concentrated wealth, never has been a center of art patronage or production. The first generation of pioneers lacked both time and money for art, and there is hardly any documentation of art created in Tennessee before 1800. Once the land was cleared and the Indians vanquished, though, there emerged a demand in this family-centered society for portraits. The needs of the second generation of settlers were largely met by itinerant painters who were essentially craftsmen peddling a trade. There simply was not enough work in any one place to enable an artist to settle, and economic survival often required versatility. For example, in 1825 Robert Titus advertised in a Knoxville newspaper as both a portrait painter and watchmaker.
The first resident professional artist was probably Ralph E. W. Earl, who took up residence in Nashville when he acquired a patron. Earl came to Nashville in 1817 to paint a portrait of Andrew Jackson, married into Old Hickory's family, and lived with him at the Hermitage. He painted portraits in Nashville until 1829, when he moved to Washington to live with Jackson in the White House. The following year Washington Bogart Cooper opened a studio in Nashville. He produced thirty to thirty-five portraits annually for half a century and more than earned his sobriquet, "the man of a thousand portraits."
With the proceeds of his early work, Cooper funded European study for his brother William, who returned to Tennessee and settled in Memphis. Like other artists of the era, William Cooper worked in Tennessee and the surrounding states. John Wood Dodge, Tennessee's premier portrait miniaturist, followed a similar pattern. From 1840 to 1861 he maintained a studio in Nashville but frequently traveled to Kentucky towns, resorts, and such Mississippi River cities as Memphis, St. Louis, Natchez, and New Orleans.
On June 1, 1840, the Nashville Whig informed readers that "if a portrait is wanted, Mr. Cooper is the artist . . . but if a miniature is preferred for mother, wife, or 'ladylove' call upon Mr. Dodge." So prolific was the work of these two that a century later, when collectors brought pictures to Nashville's Hooberry Bookstore for identification, the proprietor almost always told them that the oils were by Cooper and the miniatures by Dodge. Actually, though, by the 1840s, the size and prosperity of Nashville and Memphis had attracted many portraitists and miniature painters, but most of them stayed only briefly. An exception was George Dury, a German painter, who arrived in Nashville in 1850. He became Washington Cooper's chief rival by flaunting his prior work for European royals.
By the 1850s even Clarksville was prosperous enough to support two resident portraitists, Robert Loftin Newman and William Shackelford. Newman sought out commissions for full-length portraits because of the greater compositional challenge. No doubt, an additional incentive was the fact that the price of portraits was proportional to the size. Following an emerging trend of including landscapes in portraits, Samuel Shaver executed portraits of various sizes with estate views in the background.
William Harrison Scarborough worked in Kingston, Rogersville, and Knoxville in 1833 before moving to South Carolina two years later. Shaver may have painted earlier, but from 1845 until after the Civil War, Scarborough was the leading artist in East Tennessee.
The first Tennessee paintings with a large element of landscape were the overmantel caprices at the Carter Mansion in Elizabethton, circa 1790. The next earliest Tennessee landscapes were topographical views, essentially portraits of places, such as A Full View of Deadrick's Hill, Jonesboro, now at the Tennessee State Museum. This painting was commissioned in 1810 by a storeowner whose shop is pictured at the center of the work. In 1832 John H. B. Latrobe completed the earliest painting of Memphis. The painting was done in watercolors, the favored medium of travelers like Latrobe. Another traveler, Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, drew pencil sketches of the Mississippi and Cumberland Rivers in 1828 and 1832. Among the earliest Tennessee views, these drawings were completed for scientific--not artistic--purposes, and the originals, in Le Havre, France, have never been shown in Tennessee.
The War of 1812 fueled a sense of national patriotism that combined with the first impulses of the Romantic Movement and transformed this topographical transcription into landscape art. The chosen subject was the American landscape. The favored format was the panorama. The greatest Tennessee practitioner of panoramic landscapes was James Cameron. A Scot who settled at Chattanooga, Cameron possessed that inestimable thing that previously only Earl had commanded--a single, wealthy patron. Although Cameron did pure landscapes, he is best known for works that combine group portraiture with a panoramic view. The most famous is that of his patron, Colonel Whiteside and Family (Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga), a charming picture, but one whose parts do not quite come together into a coherent whole. The diminutive size he gave the African Americans in the picture has provided a fertile field for analysis.
Most of Cameron's landscapes show nature succumbing to settlement. Another landscape artist of the 1850s, possibly James Wagner (of whom nothing is known), painted two exquisite views of Nashville emphasizing the newly completed capitol building (Tennessee State Museum, Nashville; First Tennessee Bank, Memphis). Generally, Tennessee artists shunned scenes of wild nature such as that depicted in New York artist Alexander Wyant's Tennessee (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Their clients preferred to show off the state's man-made improvements and their dominion over nature, possibly to tout Tennessee as an investment opportunity to eastern capitalists.
Before the Civil War, art was taught only in schools for girls as a fashionable accomplishment, not as training for professional artists. Men who sought to become professional artists apprenticed with a master. Newspapers were uniformly complimentary to artists and welcomed every new artist to town, but no critical art literature developed in Tennessee. Nor were there galleries for exhibitions; artists generally exhibited their work at their studios or in shops.
A unique artistic event in antebellum Tennessee was the staging of the 1858 benefit exhibition of 350 paintings at the State Capitol to enable the Tennessee Historical Society to purchase Washington Cooper's series of portraits of Tennessee governors. A remarkable feature of the series is that it was painted on speculation with no assurance of purchase.
Although the Methodist Episcopal Church commissioned portraits of its bishops, and the Grand Masonic Lodge in Nashville paid Cooper to paint portraits of its Grand Masters, antebellum public commissions were exceedingly rare. One exception was the 1859 commission granted by the Tennessee General Assembly to Dury to execute a posthumous likeness of former U.S. Senator and Attorney General Felix Grundy.
The Civil War virtually ended the Tennessee art market, and artists struggled throughout the war. Dodge was driven out of the state because of his wife's abolitionist views. Cameron left at the end of the war to escape the devastation. Union soldiers, or "special artists" sent to report on the war for Harper's Weekly or Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, produced most of the surviving datable art from the Civil War era.
The East Tennessee Art Association, a pro-Confederate organization formed in October 1862, commissioned Shaver to depict various Confederate generals, but apparently the project miscarried. Shaver was a staunch Confederate supporter, but other artists proved more flexible in their allegiances. Early in the war, Dury exhibited a portrait of Jefferson Davis, but later accepted commissions from the Reconstruction legislature for paintings of Governor William G. "Parson" Brownlow and Union General George C. Thomas.
The Civil War marked an end to the nation's innocence. Artists no longer sought inspiration in America's uniqueness. Rather, artists were once again drawn to Europe, and Tennesseans were no exception. After the war, the itinerant faded away except in remote areas, the expected standard of art rose, and European training became a distinct advantage.
The postwar era produced an increased demand for portraits by institutions such as colleges, banks, and foundations, as well as individual capitalists and professionals. Refined homes were expected to have pictures on the walls, although in Tennessee, more often than not, these were prints rather than paintings. For the first time, Tennessee developed a market for still lifes, "negro studies," allegories like those completed by Carl Gutherz upon his return to Memphis from Paris in 1873, and landscape and genre painting in the Barbizon style.
The popularity of genre painting in France beckoned some Tennessee artists such as Willie Betty Newman of Rutherford County, who specialized in peasant scenes from Brittany and won honorable mention at the Paris Exposition of 1900 for En Penitence. Tennessee genre painting, however, was largely done by outsiders such as Elizabeth Nourse and John Stokes. whose Smoky Mountain Wedding (Tennessee State Museum, Nashville) of 1872 combined the two picaresque elements northerners expected in a southern painting--blacks (with watermelons) and hillbillies.
Another style that blossomed was historical genre painting. Gilbert Gaul came to Tennessee in 1881 and eight years later won a bronze medal at the 1889 Paris Exposition for Charging the Battery (Birmingham Museum of Art), a Civil War picture. He was the first important Tennessee artist who did not paint portraits. After Lloyd Branson returned from Europe to Knoxville in 1878, portraits constituted his mainstay until his death in 1925, but the expanding market also enabled him to paint scenes from early Tennessee history including Rendezvous of the Overmountain Men at Sycamore Shoals, 1780 (Tennessee State Museum, Nashville). Influenced by the Barbizon school, Branson's Hauling Marble (Frank H. McClung Museum, Knoxville), which won a gold medal at the Appalachian Exposition in Knoxville in 1910, was a classic Continental exhibition piece, albeit with a local theme.
Another postwar development was the emergence of the professional woman artist in Tennessee. The prevailing cult of domesticity discouraged careers for women, but art was grudgingly accepted as a suitable pursuit for women because of their presumed greater sensitivity. In 1887 Adelia Lutz returned to Knoxville from European study and commenced a career painting portraits, landscapes, and flower studies (especially hollyhocks) until her death in 1931. After Willie Betty Newman returned from her studies in France, she won a number of commissions for official portraits, including those of Governors James Frazier and Ben Hooper. An important addition to the artistic community was Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer, a great-great-granddaughter of the Philadelphia painter Charles Willson Peale. She came to Nashville in 1907 to paint a portrait of Methodist Bishop Holland McTyeire, but she stayed until her death in 1937, painting portraits and landscapes, although still lifes were perhaps her best work. The state's most notable Impressionist was a woman--Knoxville's Catherine Wiley. Impressionism did not become fashionable in Tennessee until the turn of the century, an example of the retardataire, or cultural lag of the state. She painted a few landscapes and fewer portraits of family and friends. Most of her subjects were individual women in quiet interiors or a few women outdoors. Among her best works are Woman in Blue at a Desk, perhaps also known as The Letter (Tennessee State Museum, Nashville), Sunlit Afternoon (Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina), and Willow Pond (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
The end of the century also witnessed the tentative beginnings of an art establishment. Clarksville's Robert Loftin Newman and Nashville's George Dury failed in 1872 to find support for an Academy of Art in Nashville. However, in 1885 the Watkins Institute opened with a successful program of coeducational art instruction. The Nashville Art Association was founded in 1878, the Knoxville Art Circle a few years later. Both sponsored annual exhibitions.
The increasing popularity and availability of photography produced a devaluation of transcription in art. After the Civil War the artist was expected to reveal himself in his work, interpretation gained importance, and artists stressed subject matter less than form. The cult of the artist as a genius migrated from Europe and replaced the earlier idea of the painter as craftsman. However, Tennessee artists worked in a somewhat different climate, offering little room for Bohemianism or eccentricity. Wiley's nervous breakdown, far from being compared to Van Gogh's, was hushed up for decades. Nor was art a vital part of everyday life. One artist ruefully conceded that in Nashville, "Art was a rather nice thing done by someone's maiden aunt or a courtly and slightly hungry old gentleman, and it was appreciated in a rather detached way by the gentle ladies of the women's clubs." (1)
Impressionism had not come to Tennessee until it was thoroughly respectable, even passé, in Europe, but once here it lingered into the 1930s. By then, most artists wanted to move on. Nashville's Ella Hergesheimer was quoted in the Nashville Banner on February 26, 1938, praising the Post-impressionists for having "done something wonderful for us. They have given us design which in a great measure was lost by the impressionists, but which the great masters of the past always had."
However, the successors of the Post-impressionists were not well received in Tennessee art circles. Mrs. Louis C. Audigier of Knoxville's Nicholson Art League reported from Rome, "I have seen the Cubists and the Futurists, and I think it reprehensible for any government to permit the exhibition of such works--as to allow a madman the freedom of the streets." (2) Nonetheless, that these influences reached Tennessee a generation later is evidenced in the work of such artists as Nashville's Charles Cagle, Clarence Stagg, Avery Handly, and Philip Perkins, Memphis's Burton Callicott, and Chattanooga's George Cress. But until the 1960s not much Tennessee art went beyond semi-abstraction because of the state's cultural conservatism.
Indeed, during the 1930s the New Deal encouraged a resurgence of realism in the form of Regionalism. The federal government commissioned local artists to paint murals in some thirty Tennessee post offices, including Farm and Factory by Horace Day in Clinton; Manpower and the Resources of Nature by William Zorach in Greeneville; and Farmer Family by Wendell Jones in Johnson City. Other public buildings also received murals such as those by Dean Cornwell in the Davidson County Court House and the John Sevier State Office Building in Nashville and Burton Callicott's murals for the Memphis Museum of Natural History. These works exhibit a didactic content largely absent from earlier Tennessee art.
Another regionalist, who worked in a semi-pointillist style very different from that of the muralists, was Carroll Cloar, one of the best-known Tennessee artists of the twentieth century. His paintings include The Appleknocker (private collection) and Historic Encounter Between E. H. Crump and W. C. Handy on Beale Street (First Tennessee Bank, Memphis). Cloar observed that his family album was a source for his work, although as many of his paintings relate to his Arkansas boyhood as to his Memphis adulthood.
African American artists did not come into their own until the mid-twentieth century. Before then black artists had almost no opportunities for study, exhibition, and patronage. After emancipation, African Americans themselves relied on photographs and painted photographs for their portraits and prints for other artistic needs. Blacks were the subjects of what were called Negro studies, but these were artworks by whites for a white clientele. Perhaps the first important African American artist in Tennessee and the first to concentrate on black subject matter was Aaron Douglass. He had made his reputation as a painter of the Harlem Renaissance with geometric and stylized forms drawn from African art. He was on the faculty of Fisk University from 1936 until his death in 1969. At Fisk Douglass painted murals in the university library (now administration building), those at the north end depicting the black man in Africa, those at the south end the black man in America. Another major work of his Tennessee period is Building More Stately Mansions (Fisk University, Nashville). Under his influence the Fisk University Galleries became the first in Tennessee to emphasize African and African American art.
Out of Knoxville came two African American brothers, Beauford and Joseph Delaney, who made their marks as modern painters. Beauford Delaney worked with Lloyd Branson in Knoxville and studied in Boston before settling in Greenwich Village, where he associated with the Harlem Artists Guild. He was among the painters shown at The Negro in Contemporary Art exhibit at the Baltimore Museum in 1944. He left the states in 1953, spending the remaining twenty-six years of his life in Paris. His brother Joseph also studied in New York City, attending the Art Student League, where he worked with the famous Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. He returned to Tennessee at the age of eighty-two when he became the artist-in-residence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1986.
The art infrastructure of Tennessee expanded phenomenally in the twentieth century. The Nicholson Art League of Knoxville was founded in 1906. The Brooks Museum in Memphis was founded in 1913. The Memphis Art Association began in 1914, and the Memphis Academy of Arts commenced in 1936. The Arrowmont School for Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg was formed in 1945. Chattanooga's Hunter Museum of Art dates to 1951, and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's art gallery was founded a year later. Nashville's Fine Arts Center at Cheekwood opened in 1957 as an outgrowth of the earlier (1924) Nashville Museum. The Dulin Gallery (now Knoxville Museum of Art) was founded in 1962, the Carroll Reece Museum in Johnson City in 1965, and the University of Memphis Art Museum in 1969. Since 1971, when the Tennessee State Museum (founded in 1937) came under the administration of the Tennessee Arts Commission (founded in 1967), it has sponsored periodic purchase competitions of Tennessee art, held retrospectives of such artists as Carroll Cloar, Arthur Orr, Paul Harmon, and Carl Sublett, and undertaken survey exhibitions of landscape painting and portraiture in the state. The other institutions also touted local talent and gave art a visibility it previously lacked. Art was taught in the public schools, and college art departments turned out artists in increasing numbers.
The contemporary art scene in Tennessee is incredibly varied. There are several art schools, many museums and commercial galleries, numerous exhibitions, frequent competitions, and far more artists than ever before. They work in almost every style and medium found elsewhere in the world. Nevertheless, no artist of the first rank has come from Tennessee, and perhaps the most renowned living Tennessee artist, Red Grooms, is best known for his installations based on life in Chicago and New York. A telling statistic is that Tennessee seems mired near the bottom in per capita state spending on the arts.
James C. Kelly, Virginia Historical Society
(1) Nashville Banner, 18 May 1930.
(2) Quoted in Frederick C. Moffatt, "Painting, Sculpture, and Photography," in Heart of the Valley: A History of Knoxville, Tennessee, ed. Lucile Deaderick (1976), 432.
Suggested Reading(s): William H. Gerdts, "Virginia," in The South and the Midwest: Art Across America: Regional Painting in America, 1710-1920 (1990); James C. Kelly, "Landscape and Genre Painting in Tennessee, 1810-1985," Tennessee Historical Quarterly 44 (1985): 7-152 and "Portrait Painting in Tennessee," Tennessee Historical Quarterly 46 (1987): 193-276; Frederick C. Moffatt, "Painting, Sculpture, and Photography," in Heart of the Valley: A History of Knoxville, Tennessee, ed. Lucile Deaderick (1976): 424-38; Jessie Poesch, The Art of the Old South, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and the Products of Craftsmen, 1560-1860 (1983).
FRANCIS ASBURY
1745-1816
Francis Asbury, bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America, was born near Birmingham, England, to Joseph and Elizabeth (Rogers) Asbury and apprenticed as a blacksmith. At an early age Asbury joined the Methodist movement under John Wesley's leadership and became a lay preacher. In 1771, when the fledgling Methodist movement in the American colonies called for leadership, Asbury offered himself. He was elected bishop in 1784, when the Methodists in America formed themselves into the Methodist Episcopal Church.
Recognized as the preeminent leader of the denomination, Asbury became known as the father of American Methodism and the principal guide and shaper of the movement. He insisted that Methodist preachers travel constantly, winning converts and organizing new congregations. Under Asbury's leadership, Methodists established churches in every state along the eastern seaboard from New England to Georgia, and circuit-riding preachers moved westward with the pioneers into the wilderness of Tennessee and Kentucky. Like his preachers, Asbury was no armchair administrator. He was constantly on the move, making the rounds of all sections of the church to superintend the work. He adopted the motto, "Live or die, I must ride," and traveled an average of six thousand miles annually for forty-five years.
Asbury first visited Tennessee in 1788, six years after the establishment of the Holston Conference at the headwaters of the Yakin and Holston Rivers. Between his first trip in 1788 and his last in 1815, Asbury visited the state seventeen times and recorded his observations in the daily journal he kept for forty-five years. Critical of the frontier fondness for whiskey and concerned about the moral effects of cheap land, Asbury seldom failed to praise the generosity of Tennessee people.
Asbury died in 1816 in northern Virginia while on his way to the meeting of the General Conference in Baltimore. He was buried in the Eutaw Church in Baltimore; in 1854 his body was moved to a prominent Methodist graveyard in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Baltimore.
Frank Gulley, Vanderbilt University
Suggested Reading(s): Elmer T. Clark et al., eds., The Journals and Letters of Francis Asbury (1958).
See Also: HOLSTON CONFERENCE; RELIGION
ASHWANDER ET AL. V. TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY (TVA)
1936
On February 17, 1936, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes delivered the principal opinion in this 8-1 ruling on the constitutionality of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) after dissenting stockholders in the Alabama Power Company challenged TVA's right to produce electric power at the World War I-era Wilson Dam in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, by filing suit against the directors of the company and the government-operated TVA.
TVA directors implemented the original vision of multiple use planning for navigation, flood control, reforestation, and regional economic development with a system of dams throughout the Tennessee River Valley; they started with electric power generation as a yardstick for inexpensive power to inhabitants of the seven-state area. TVA competition with private power companies to supply electricity, purchase transmission lines from private firms, and sell power to private companies and individuals quickly generated controversy. Dissenting Alabama Power stockholders sought to overturn a January 4, 1934, contract between the company and TVA that expanded power lines from Wilson Dam to seven surrounding counties with a population of 190,000 and ten thousand electrical customers. A district court ruled in favor of the stockholders, but the circuit court of appeals reversed the decision, setting the stage for a Supreme Court hearing on December 19-20, 1935.
The plaintiffs' lawyers presented a constitutionally based argument favored by many conservatives at that time, contending that TVA had no legal right to exist; therefore, Alabama Power had possessed no right to enter into the original contract. Attorneys for the stockholders based their constitutional argument against the legality of TVA on the commerce clause, the Tenth Amendment reservation of rights to the states, and the Ninth Amendment restrictions on federal powers not expressly granted under the Constitution. They also argued that the federal government had no authority to create a commercial business, engage in commercial business, allow TVA to regulate navigation, or even establish the TVA commercial electric program. TVA lawyers countered that commerce and war powers included in the National Defense Act of June 3, 1916, gave the federal government authority to generate, sell, and transmit power at the Wilson Dam, and that the Ninth and Tenth Amendments did not apply in this case. The court ruled in favor of TVA, holding that Congress had authority to construct dams and sell electricity, a by-product. Justice Louis Brandeis concurred, taking the position that the constitutional issue should not have been addressed in a case involving stockholder dispute. Justice James C. McReynolds, from Tennessee, dissented.
Significantly, while the Supreme Court's narrow interpretation applied only to the Wilson Dam, leaving open future decisions about the broader authority of TVA, it set a positive constitutional precedent in favor of this key New Deal program early in the presidential election campaign of 1936. The decision was later affirmed by Tennessee Power Company v. TVA in 1940.
Patrick D. Reagan, Tennessee Technological University
Suggested Reading(s): Erwin C. Hargrove and Paul K. Conkin, eds., TVA: Fifty Years of Grass-roots Bureaucracy (1983); Thomas K. McCraw, TVA and the Power Fight, 1933-1939 (1971).
See Also: LAW; TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY
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ASSOCIATION FOR THE PRESERVATION OF TENNESSEE ANTIQUITIES (APTA)
Thirty Nashville women founded the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities (APTA) in 1951 to "acquire, restore, and preserve Tennessee's historic buildings and landmarks." On November 8, 1951, approximately one hundred charter members attended the first official APTA meeting at the Noel Hotel in Nashville, where they heard an address by Dr. Robert H. White and elected Mrs. Allan Van Ness as the first president.
A chartered nonprofit Tennessee corporation, APTA "promotes and encourages active participation in the preservation of Tennessee's rich historic, cultural, architectural and archaeological heritage through restoration, education, advocacy, and statewide cooperation." A statewide board of directors governs the association, and chapter presidents serve ex officio on the board.
In 1982 APTA established an endowment fund to provide grants to chapters for restoration work and educational programs. An independent board of trustees administers the fund. An APTA Board of Trust must approve new chapters when real property is involved as well as the purchase or sale of real property.
Membership in APTA is open to anyone interested in preserving Tennessee's cultural heritage. Membership may be through a local chapter or directly with APTA headquarters in Nashville. APTA membership fees support historic preservation and entitle members to free admission at all APTA sites, a newsletter, APTA-sponsored tours, and an annual membership meeting at Belle Meade Plantation in Nashville. Membership through a local chapter brings additional benefits established by that chapter.
The APTA sites are: Belle Meade Plantation (1807), which serves as statewide APTA headquarters, administered by the Nashville Chapter; The Athenaeum Rectory (1835) in Columbia, Maury County Chapter; Buchanan Log House (1800-1810), Donelson-Hermitage Chapter; Ramsey House Plantation (1795-97), Knoxville Chapter; Glenmore Mansion (1868-69), Glenmore Chapter, Jefferson City; Crockett Tavern Museum (1796, authentic log cabin replica), Hamblen County Chapter, Morristown; Fort Blount (1796, proposed reconstruction), Fort Blount Chapter, Gainesboro; Rachel K. Burrow Museum (1905), Historic Post Office (1900) and Log Cabin, Arlington Chapter; The Pillars (1826-29) and Little Courthouse (1824), Hardeman County Chapter, Bolivar; Hannum-Wirt-Rhea House (1832), Somerville, Fayette County Chapter; and Woodruff-Fontaine House (1870) and Goyer-Lee House (1871), Memphis Chapter. Four other chapters in Bedford, Hawkins, Rutherford, and Sullivan Counties promote local heritage programs in their communities but do not currently maintain sites.
A board of directors with the responsibility for preserving, maintaining, and interpreting the site governs each APTA chapter. Volunteers and employed staff members mount seasonal exhibits and hold fund-raising events. Chapters provide numerous educational programs designed to reach people of all ages and cultural backgrounds to help them learn more about the way their ancestors lived.
Cherrie H. Hall, Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities
See Also: GLENMORE MANSION; RAMSEY HOUSE
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ATHENAEUM
The Athenaeum rectory is a historic Gothic Revival building in Columbia that was once part of a women's college and finishing school which operated between 1852 and 1903. The Reverend Franklin Gillete Smith, a Vermont native who came to Columbia to head the Columbia Female Institute, an Episcopal school, established the Athenaeum. Dismissed from the Institute by Bishop James Otey over alleged improprieties with a student, Smith organized his own school on an adjacent tract. Smith believed that female intelligence was equivalent to that of men, and his Athenaeum school offered courses such as physics, calculus, and marine biology previously taught only to male students. The school had a sixteen-thousand-volume library and a museum with six thousand specimens. The Tennessee General Assembly chartered it as a college in 1858.
The main school complex of twelve buildings stood until about 1915 on land now occupied by the Maury County Board of Education. Only the rectory and a small cottage used by Reverend Smith as a study survive. The castellated rectory is of eclectic Gothic design, featuring elements of Moorish, Italianate, Greek Revival, and other styles. It was constructed in 1835 by Maury County builder Nathan Vaught for Samuel Polk Walker, but he never lived there. In 1973 the Smith family deeded the rectory to the Maury County Chapter, Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities, which restored it as a house museum.
Richard Quin, National Park Service
See Also: MAURY COUNTY; NATHAN VAUGHT
BATTLE OF ATHENS
Officially, the "Battle of Athens" in McMinn County began and ended on August 1, 1946. Following a heated competition for local offices, veterans in the insurgent GI Non-Partisan League took up arms to prevent a local courthouse ring headed by state senator Paul Cantrell and linked to Memphis political boss Ed Crump from stealing the election. When Sheriff Pat Mansfield's deputies absconded to the jail with key ballot boxes, suspicious veterans took action. A small group of veterans broke into the local National Guard Armory, seized weapons and ammunition, and proceeded to the jail to demand the return of the ballot boxes. The Cantrell-Mansfield deputies refused, and the veterans, now numbering several hundred, opened fire. The ensuing battle lasted several hours and ended only after the dynamiting of the front of the jail. The surrender of the deputies did not end the riot, and the mob was still turning over police cars and burning them hours later. Within days the local election commission swore in the veteran candidates as duly elected. The McMinn County veterans had won the day in a hail of gunfire, dynamite, and esprit de corps.
The battle of Athens stands as the most violent manifestation of a regional phenomenon of the post-World War II era. Seasoned veterans of the European and Pacific theaters returned in 1945 and 1946 to southern communities riddled with vice, economic stagnation, and deteriorating schools. Undemocratic, corrupt, and mossback rings and machines kept an iron grip on local policy and power. Moreover, their commitment to the status quo threatened the economic opportunities touched off by the war. Across the South, veterans launched insurgent campaigns to oust local political machines they regarded as impediments to economic "progress."
In Athens, the Cantrell-Mansfield ring colluded with bootleg and gambling interests, shook down local citizens and tourists for fees, and regularly engaged in electoral chicanery. While communities such as Knoxville, Oak Ridge, and Chattanooga boomed, Athens languished, and veterans returned to a community beset with more problems than opportunities. When Cantrell and Mansfield employed their typical methods to nullify the veterans' votes and reform efforts, the ex-soldiers resorted with the skills and determination that had brought them victory overseas.
Although recalled fifty years later with a certain amount of local pride, the battle of Athens initially proved a source of embarrassment, and many residents abhorred the violent, extralegal actions of the veterans. The image of gun-wielding hillbilly ex-soldiers shooting it out with the Cantrell-Mansfield "thugs" that blazed across national and regional newspaper headlines enhanced East Tennessee's reputation for violence and lawlessness. The Good Government League, empowered by the veterans' victory, scored few successes in its efforts to eradicate the vice, corruption, and arbitrary rule of machine government. Nevertheless, the battle of Athens exemplified the southern veteran activism of the postwar period and defined the disruptive political impact of World War II.
Jennifer E. Brooks, Tusculum College
See Also: MCMINN COUNTY
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CHESTER BURTON "CHET" ATKINS
1924-2001
Chet Atkins, one of country music's greatest instrumentalists, producers, and promoters of the Nashville Sound, was born the son of a fiddler in Luttrell, Union County in 1924. He took up guitar at an early age but first performed on Knoxville's WNOX as a fiddler, a sideman for Johnnie Wright and Jack Anglin, and Kitty Wells. Atkins moved on to Cincinnati's WLW, Nashville's WSM, and Springfield, Missouri's KWTO, backing artists such as the Carter Sisters and Red Foley during the 1940s.
In 1950 Steve Sholes of RCA offered the guitarist his first contract. Atkins returned to Nashville and immediately became a prominent studio artist. His musical talents and friendship with Sholes led to his appointment as Sholes's Nashville assistant in 1952. When RCA built its own studio in 1957, Atkins managed it. Before long, Sholes turned over RCA's country operations to his protégé, and by 1968 Atkins was a vice-president at RCA.
Atkins supervised other producers, produced many of his own recordings, and signed such artists as Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Jerry Reed, and Charley Pride. As an instrumentalist and producer, Atkins broadened the country music sound to compete with the growing popularity of rock music. By shaping the Nashville Sound, he strengthened the city's position as a recording center and helped establish its fame as Music City.
Known by many as "Mr. Guitar," Atkins legitimized the role of the country guitar soloist throughout his career with dozens of albums showcasing his unique "galloping guitar" picking style. The Gretsch and Gibson guitar companies even brought out guitar models built to Atkins's specifications.
As of 1997 Atkins had received fourteen Grammy awards and in 1973 became a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, at that time the youngest individual to be so honored. He retired from RCA in 1981 but continued to perform and record until his death on June 29, 2001.
Anne-Leslie Owens, Middle Tennessee State University
See Also: MUSIC; NASHVILLE RECORDING INDUSTRY; UNION COUNTY
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ATTAKULLAKULLA
ca. 1700-1780
Attakullakulla was a powerful eighteenth-century Overhill Cherokee leader who played a critical and decisive role in shaping diplomatic, trade, and military relationships with the British Colonial governments of South Carolina and Virginia for over fifty years. He effectively led and acted as the primary spokesman for the Overhill Cherokees in the 1750s and 1760s, although apparently he never attained the official title of Uko, or foremost chief, within Cherokee society. He was probably born in the early 1700s, most likely along the French Broad River. In 1730 he was one of seven Cherokees who accompanied Sir Alexander Cumming to England. From about 1743 to 1748 Attakullakulla resided as captive among the Ottawas of eastern Canada, where he was afforded considerable freedom and became well regarded among the French.
He returned to the Overhill country about 1750 and quickly became second in authority to Connecorte, or Old Hop, the Uko at Chota, who was probably his uncle. By this time, whites knew Attakullakulla as Little Carpenter. Popular stories attributed his name to his ability to construct amicable relationships with whites, but it more likely referred to his small stature and to his woodworking skills. James Mooney suggested the derivation of Attakullakulla from the words for "wood" and for "something long leaning against another object."
In the 1750s Attakullakulla negotiated repeatedly with the Virginia and South Carolina Colonies as well as the French and British traders in the Ohio Valley to improve the abundance and availability of trade goods to the Cherokees. He also argued for increased colonial military presence in the Overhill villages, which led to the construction of the Virginia Fort and Fort Loudoun near the Overhill villages in 1756. In 1759 Chief Oconastota and twenty-eight of his followers were taken hostage at Fort Prince George as the result of misunderstandings concerning a joint military action with the British against the French. Although Attakullakulla secured Oconastota's release, some of the hostages were killed; the Cherokees retaliated with the siege of Fort Loudoun. Attakullakulla worked to prevent an escalation of violence. Placing himself at great personal risk, he managed to save John Stuart from massacre along with most of the Fort's garrison. Stuart was subsequently appointed superintendent of Indian affairs south of the Ohio.
Attakullakulla remained an active leader and negotiator for the Cherokees into the 1770s. When American Revolutionary forces under the command of William Christian occupied the Overhill villages in 1776, Attakullakulla arranged for their withdrawal and played a leading role in the 1777 peace negotiated at Long Island on the Holston. His influence diminished as Dragging Canoe, his son, and other young leaders continued Cherokee resistance to the Americans. Sometime between 1780 and 1785 Attakullakulla died.
Gerald F. Schroedl, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Suggested Reading(s): David Cockran, The Cherokee Frontier: Conflict and Survival, 1740-1762 (1962); James C. Kelly, "Notable Persons in Cherokee History: Attakullakulla," Journal of Cherokee Studies 3 (1): 2-34.
See Also: DRAGGING CANOE; FORT LOUDOUN; OCONASTOTA; OVERHILL CHEROKEES
STANLEY IRVING AUERBACH
1921-
A founder of the science of radiation ecology and staff leader at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Auerbach was born in Chicago in 1921. He studied at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University, earning his Ph.D. in zoology in 1949. He taught zoology, biology, and ecology at Northwestern and Roosevelt Universities until 1955, when he moved to Oak Ridge to become a health physicist and chief of radiation ecology.
Auerbach's specialty, radiation ecology or radioecology, investigated the transport of radionuclides and their concentrations in ecosystems, especially useful considerations for siting nuclear power plants and disposing of radioactive wastes. These studies encouraged the use of radioactive tracers to track the movement of animals, decomposition of forest litter, fish migrations, and other environmental relationships. Auerbach concentrated on analysis of radioactive waste cycling in terrestrial ecosystems and directed studies of the eastern deciduous forest biome during the 1970s. These pioneering studies led to his election as president of the American Society of Ecology (1971-72) and leadership of other professional organizations.
In 1972 Auerbach became Director of the Environmental Sciences Division at ORNL and managed its studies and expansion until he retired in 1986. In retirement, he has continued his ecosystem studies as consultant for many agencies, notably on the Environmental Advisory Board for construction of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway.
Leland R. Johnson, Clio Research Institute
Suggested Reading(s): J. Newell Stannard, Radioactivity and Health, A History (1988).
See Also: OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY
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AUSTIN PEAY STATE UNIVERSITY
Located in Clarksville, Austin Peay State University was founded on April 26, 1927, and named for Governor Austin Peay, a Clarksville resident.
The campus had been the location of educational institutions dating back to 1806. The first on the site was an academy that operated until 1848, when the Masonic Order established a college that continued until Stewart College was created in 1855. In 1875 the Presbyterian Church opened Southwestern Presbyterian College in Clarksville, where it remained until 1925. The Presbyterian Synod then moved the college to Memphis to be nearer its student population base in West Tennessee.
The loss of Southwestern represented a severe blow for the upper Middle Tennessee area, and efforts began immediately to replace it. With support from Peay and state commissioner of education Perry L. Harned, Montgomery Countians pushed to acquire a state normal school for the vacated Southwestern facilities on College Street.
On August 4, 1927, Southwestern Presbyterian deeded the thirty-acre campus to the state. After a hard political fight, the general assembly produced a bill that proposed the establishment of "a Normal School in Clarksville for the purpose of training white teachers for the rural public schools of the state." When Austin Peay died suddenly on October 2, 1927, it seemed appropriate to place his name on the newly established Normal School.
Austin Peay Normal School officially opened September 23, 1929 in a ceremony attended by Governor Henry Horton and World War I hero Alvin C. York. The new normal school offered a two-year curriculum designed to prepare graduates to pass the state certification requirements for teachers in elementary schools or receive a junior college diploma. Compared to contemporary standards, the curriculum required few course hours but upheld rigorous course requirements.
Harned, a vigorous advocate of teacher preparation and certification, selected Dr. Philander P. Claxton to serve as the school's second president after the sudden death of President John S. Ziegler. Claxton, a former U.S. commissioner of education under Woodrow Wilson and organizer of the University of Tennessee Summer School of the South, joined Harned in promoting the need to rehabilitate rural life through education. When Harned's tenure as education commissioner ended in 1933, Claxton continued his efforts to foster rural education. On February 25, 1939, Austin Peay Normal was elevated to the status of a three-year institution, with provisions to add a fourth year in 1941. The school received the designation of a college in February 1943.
President Claxton retired in 1946 and was succeeded by former Austin Peay history professor, administrator, and former state commissioner of education Halbert Harvill. In Harvill's first year of service, the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools accepted Austin Peay College for membership, thereby conferring national accreditation on its programs.
Between 1946 and 1962, Harvill led a major building program that included the expansion and modernization of the school's academic buildings, residence halls, and administration building. The college became a member of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education in 1951, a boost for the former normal school's teacher preparation program.
Within the campus community a number of significant changes occurred as Austin Peay College adjusted to contemporary events. Typical of the relatively peaceful integration of the state's school system, the first African American, the Reverend Wilbur Daniel, gained admission to Austin Peay in January 1956. He enrolled in the graduate school and received his M.A. degree in 1957. By 1958 black students entered the undergraduate population and at present compose approximately 16 percent of the enrollment. A benchmark for Austin Peay occurred in November 1966, when the State Board of Education approved the school for university status. This move, effective September 1, 1967, promoted more serious campus conversation concerning the traditional mission of an university--instruction, research, and community service. The long-simmering debate over the direction of the institution dating back to the 1920s which pitted teacher training against emphasis on the liberal arts and sciences was renewed with greater intensity.
In terms of faculty size, the three colleges of the university during the 1970s continually moved toward a predominantly liberal arts and sciences college, with the college of business and that of education receding to second and third place, respectively. Austin Peay provided courses at nearby Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where its role evolved from the establishment of "Eagle University" in 1972 to the present-day Fort Campbell Center, which offers both associate degrees and a bachelor's degree.
Austin Peay State University completely departed from its original mission as a "teacher college for rural white schools" when, on December 14, 1984, the State Board of Regents recommended that it be designated as a liberal arts institution. A transitional period in terms of funding requirements followed the designation as the university adjusted admissions standards to secure more academically capable students.
By 1996 Austin Peay State University had become a regional institution with its chief mission being liberal arts and science. Enrollment in the fall of 1999 totaled 7,440 students; the campus included two hundred acres. Today the university offers forty undergraduate majors in five academic colleges. The dreams of Perry Harned and Philander P. Claxton has borne fruit, and Austin Peay State University prepares to enter the twenty-first century "known for thoroughness in subject matter and for teaching independent thought to its students." (1)
Thomas H. Winn, Austin Peay State University
(1) Perry L. Harned, "Remarks at the Opening of Austin Peay Normal School," 23 September 1929.
See Also: CLARKSVILLE; PHILANDER P. CLAXTON; HIGHER EDUCATION; AUSTIN PEAY; RHODES COLLEGE
MARILOU AWIAKTA
1936-
Marilou Awiakta, Cherokee and Appalachian poet, storyteller, and essayist, was born in Knoxville in 1936 and reared in Oak Ridge. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Tennessee in 1958.
Awiakta's unique fusion of her Cherokee and Appalachian heritage with science has brought her international recognition. In 1985 the U.S. Information Agency chose her books Abiding Appalachia: Where Mountain and Atom Meet and Rising Fawn and the Fire Mystery for the global tour of their exhibit "Women in the Contemporary World."
Awiakta's third book, Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother's Wisdom (1993) applies Native American philosophy to contemporary issues. Quality Paperback Book Club chose it as a Fall 1994 selection. The audio tape of the book (Audio Literature) with music by Joy Harjo, was nominated for a 1996 Grammy Award. A quote from Selu is engraved in the River Wall of the Bicentennial Capitol Mall in Nashville, and "Motheroot," a poem from Selu, is lined in marble along one border of the new Fine Arts Walkway at the University of California, Riverside.
Awiakta received the Distinguished Tennessee Writer Award (1989) and the Outstanding Contribution to Appalachian Literature Award in 1991. She is profiled in the 1995 Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the U.S. and in Contemporary Authors, 1996. Three anthologies from the University of Tennessee Press contain Awiakta's works: Homewords; Homeworks; and The Poetics of Appalachian Space. She has been featured in the PBS film Telling Tales and in Appalshop's program for National Public Radio, "Tell It On the Mountain: Women Writers of Appalachia."
Formerly chair of the Literary Panel of the Tennessee Arts Commission, Awiakta serves on the boards of the Tennessee Writers' Alliance, the Tennessee Humanities Council, and the National Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers.
Alice Swanson, Tennessee Arts Commission
See Also: LITERATURE; TENNESSEE ARTS COMMISSION; TENNESSEE HUMANITIES COUNCIL
HERMAN BAGGENSTOSS
1904-1992
Herman Baggenstoss, conservationist, was a native of Grundy County, the son of Swiss settlers who founded the Dutch-Maid Bakery in Tracy City in 1903. An alumnus of the University of the South, Baggenstoss served as superintendent of the Civilian Conservation Corps Grundy Camp P-62 at Tracy City in the 1930s, taking part in the establishment of Grundy State Forest, Grundy Lakes, and the Fiery Gizzard Creek hiking trail.
One of the founders of the Tennessee Federation of Sportsmen in 1934, Baggenstoss became its executive secretary in 1936 and began the bulletin "Turkey Feathers, Boar Bristles and Fish Fins." Renamed Tennessee Wildlife magazine in 1937, the publication became The Tennessee Conservationist in 1939. In 1939 Baggenstoss was also instrumental in the creation of the Conservation Commission to advise the Tennessee Department of Conservation. In 1940 he resigned from the Federation and served in the Seabees during World War II.
In 1946 Baggenstoss was a founding member of the Tennessee Conservation League. Continuing his work in forestry, Baggenstoss and his wife Mary Elizabeth also purchased the Grundy County Herald, which they published for twenty years. Baggenstoss became nationally known for his environmental advocacy and served as president of the American Forest Association, Forest Farmers Association, "Keep Tennessee Green," and Tennessee Outdoor Writers Association. Baggenstoss was appointed to the first state Board of Reclamation, overseeing the renewal of strip mine sites. He also served on the first Tennessee Forestry Commission.
Baggenstoss is credited as the driving force for the establishment of the South Cumberland State Recreation Area, which includes Grundy Forest, Fiery Gizzard, Stone Door, and Savage Gulf in Grundy County and Natural Bridge and Buggy Top Cave in Franklin County. His work received many awards, including those from the National Conservation Resource Society, Soil Conservation Society of America, and U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, for his role in the establishment of the U.S. Forest Service research lab at Sewanee. His dedication continued through the weeks prior to his death in 1992, as he opposed chip mills on the Tennessee River.
Ann Toplovich, Tennessee Historical Society
See Also: CONSERVATION; GRUNDY COUNTY; GRUNDY LAKES PARK AND GRUNDY FOREST STATE NATURAL AREA; SOUTH CUMBERLAND STATE RECREATION AREA
DEFORD BAILEY
1899-1982
DeFord Bailey, a virtuoso harmonica player who won fame on the early Grand Ole Opry, has a more significant place in history as the first African American to win fame in the field of country music as well as blues. He is recognized today as one of the South's most gifted traditional musicians, as well as one of the Opry's key figures in the 1920s and 1930s. His harmonica playing had an immense impact on the performing styles of both white and black players.
Bailey was born in the community of Bellwood in Smith County on December 14, 1899. He grew up in the rural hill country there, surrounded by what he called "black hillbilly music." His grandfather was a local champion fiddler, and other members of the family played the guitar, banjo, harmonica, and other traditional instruments. His own interest in the harmonica dated from the time he was stricken with polio at age three; the disease stunted his growth and left him too frail to do much of the farm work. He spent his days mastering the instrument, imitating trains and natural sounds and developing a battery of complex trills, harmonics, lip puffs, and blended notes for his harmonica.
Moving to Nashville in 1918, Bailey worked as a domestic for wealthy white families on the city's West End, and in his spare time he haunted local theaters in order to hear the age's great blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. By 1925 he was working as an elevator operator at the National Life and Accident building when Dr. Humphrey Bate, himself a harmonica player and charter member of the Grand Ole Opry, got him an audition for the show. Bailey soon became an Opry regular; by 1928 he was appearing on the show more often than any other performer. He became best known for his novelty pieces such as "The Fox Chase" and "Pan American Blues" in which he did imitations on his harp. In 1927 he journeyed to New York to record eight tunes for the Brunswick Company, and the following year he participated in the very first recording session--conducted by RCA Victor--to be held in Nashville. In spite of his radio popularity, though, these records were not commercially successful--most of the Victor recordings were never released--and he did not try to record again for decades.
During the 1930s Bailey toured widely with Opry groups throughout the South. Often he was refused accommodations at hotels on the tours and had to seek lodging with local black families. Audiences on these tours were often surprised to see that Bailey was black--the Opry had not emphasized this on the radio shows--and publicity soon began to patronizingly refer to him as the Opry "mascot." The Opry fired him in 1941 for a variety of complex reasons including a feud between two music licensing organizations, changing musical tastes, and the increasing professionalization of the Opry. Hurt and angry, Bailey retired from performing and opened a shoeshine stand in downtown Nashville.
In the 1960s a group of young folk music enthusiasts including Dick Hulan, Archie Allen, and James Talley rediscovered Bailey; he began to appear at local coffeehouses and festivals, and in 1965 he gave a concert at Vanderbilt University. But he turned down national offers to record, to appear at the Newport Folk Festival, and even to take a role in major Hollywood films like, W. W. and the Dixie Dancekings, which was largely filmed in Nashville. In 1974 he began to work with a young housing authority agent named David Morton, who convinced Bailey to return to a series of special guest appearances on the Opry and to dictate his biography for later generations. DeFord Bailey died on July 2, 1982, and is buried in Nashville's Greenwood Cemetery. His son, DeFord Bailey Jr., has kept some of his father's harmonica music alive.
Charles K. Wolfe, Middle Tennessee State University
See Also: GRAND OLE OPRY; MUSIC