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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.

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, 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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.…

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…