Architecture

St. Michael's Catholic Church, incorporating the state's oldest Catholic church building, began as a small log meeting house near Cedar Hill in Robertson County. Four families (the Byrnes, Redmonds, Traughbers and Watsons) who settled near Turnersville between 1838 and 1840…

The Mother Church of the Diocese of Tennessee, St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Franklin is the state's oldest Episcopal church and serves its oldest Episcopal congregation. Built with handmade bricks eighteen to twenty-four inches thick, the forty-by-eighty-three-foot church was organized…

Located in Overton County on the Cumberland Plateau, Standing Stone State Rustic Park was acquired from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through the Land-Use Area program of the 1930s. The program allowed submarginal property to be obtained from the federal…

The Stencil House, also known as the Johnson-Dillon House, is a log house featuring an elaborately stenciled interior. Built sometime after 1830, the house was originally located near Hardin Creek and Eagle Creek in rural northwestern Wayne County. To ensure…

Master architect and designer of the Tennessee State Capitol, William F. Strickland was born in 1788 in Navesink, New Jersey. When he was two years old, his parents, John and Elizabeth Strickland, moved the family to Philadelphia. In 1803 William…

The Swaggerty Blockhouse in Cocke County was built ca. 1787 by James Swaggerty on land acquired from the state of North Carolina in 1786 by Abraham Swaggerty. It is the only remaining log blockhouse on its original site in Tennessee.…

Temple Adas Israel, a historic Jewish synagogue listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is located at the corner of Washington and College Streets in Brownsville. Built in 1881-82 and veneered in brick circa 1920, the Gothic Revival-style temple…

Throughout the twentieth century, the Tennessee Farm Bureau Federation has made a significant contribution to the economy and way of life of rural Tennessee. The Tennessee Farm Bureau grew out of the County Councils of Agriculture, first established in Blount…

The cornerstone of the Tennessee State Capitol was laid on July 4, 1845. William Strickland designed the building and supervised construction until his death in April 1854. Two architects assisted in its completion. Strickland's son, Francis, served as architect for…

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is an independent public corporation founded by Congress in 1933 to control flooding, improve navigation, assist farmers, provide cheap electric power, and make "surveys of and general plans for [the Tennessee River] basin and adjoining…

The home of Andrew Jackson, now a public museum, is eleven miles east of Nashville. Andrew Jackson bought the Hermitage farm in 1804, and it was his home for the remainder of his life. The Jacksons had lived on two…

This Nashville landmark is the world's only exact-size replica of the original temple in Athens, Greece. For the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, Nashville drew upon its nickname "Athens of the South" and built the art building as a copy of the…

Travellers Rest was the Nashville home of Judge John and Mary Overton and their descendants for 150 years. In 1954 the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in Tennessee rescued the house from threatened demolition by the Louisville…

Tusculum College is the oldest college in Tennessee, having been chartered on September 9, 1794, by the legislature of the Southwest Territory. It was founded as Greeneville College by the Reverend Hezekiah Balch and Reverend Charles Coffin and later merged…

Called the "Master Builder of Maury County," Nathan Vaught is credited with the construction of many of the most imposing antebellum homes in southern Middle Tennessee. Vaught was born in Shenandoah County, Virginia, and his family moved to Rutherford County,…

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…

The log house is perhaps the most enduring architectural icon associated with Tennessee. Scholars continue to debate how the knowledge of log construction was diffused through the cultural patterns of the colonial South, but it is generally agreed that Scandinavian…

By 1853 Jesse Warren (1814-1885) and his partner Joseph Moore (1821-1871) had established a millwork machine shop on Nashville's High Street. Four years later, the nearly fifty employees of Warren & Moore were using the era's most modern steam powered…

Located near Cedar Hill, Robertson County, Wessyngton Plantation specialized in dark-fired tobacco from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Joseph Washington, a native of Virginia, established Wessyngton in 1796, the year of statehood, when he acquired property along…

Two of Tennessee's best known prehistoric sites, Pinson Mounds in Madison County and the Old Stone Fort in Coffee County, date to the Woodland Period (300 B.C. to A.D. 900). Anthropologist Charles Hudson concluded that the Woodland tradition represented "probably…