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Ann Robertson Cockrill was the only woman among the early Cumberland settlers to receive a land grant in her own name. In 1784 the North Carolina legislature awarded this honor for her contribution to the "advance guard of civilization." Born…

Known in his day as a leading authority on agriculture and livestock, Mark R. Cockrill earned the sobriquet "Wool King of the World" from the awards he received for his Tennessee-bred sheep. His success in wool-culture and stock breeding gained…

Fred Coe, leading producer and director during the "golden age of television" of the 1950s, was born in Mississippi but raised in Nashville, and he called Tennessee home. Nurtured in the arts and theatre at Peabody Demonstration School, Coe began…

Of those who carried the Tennessee Democratic banner during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, few were as colorful, magnanimous, diligent, or fearsome as General Levin Coe. As a political warrior, Coe had few peers in either party. After…

The Tennessee General Assembly established Coffee County from parts of Bedford, Warren, and Franklin Counties in 1836. It named the new county in honor of General John Coffee, a close political ally of Andrew Jackson. The county has several important…

Stanley Cohen is the second Vanderbilt University Medical Center professor to win the Nobel Prize; he joined Vanderbilt in 1959 as a professor of biochemistry. The Nobel Prize committee recognized him for his work with Rita Levi-Montalcini in their discovery…

Waldo Cohn, prominent nuclear scientist, member of the Manhattan project, biochemist, and founder and first conductor of the Oak Ridge Symphony Orchestra, the state's oldest continuing symphony, came to Oak Ridge in 1943 with a biochemistry Ph.D. from the University…

Located in Fentress County east of the historic town of Allardt, the Colditz Cove State Natural Area is one of the state's most recently designated natural areas. The state acquired the area's approximately seventy acres from a donation of the…

Edmund "King" Cole, a leading late nineteenth-century railroad entrepreneur, financier, and philanthropist, was born in Giles County, a descendent of a prominent Virginia family. Cole's father died when he was three months old, leaving his mother with a large family…

When Vanderbilt University organized a varsity football team in 1886, it was probably the first Tennessee college to do so. Maryville College began playing intramural games in 1889 under coach, captain, and quarterback Kin Takahashi. In 1890, Vanderbilt and the…

Clarence Kelley Colley was a Nashville architect noted for his institutional designs, most in the Classical Revival style. Several of his buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including the North Branch Carnegie Library (1915), East Branch…

The Civil War touched almost every place in Tennessee, and towns like Collierville, located on the historic Memphis-Charleston railroad line in Shelby County, have their own Civil War stories to tell. Conflict came to the doorsteps of Collierville residents once…

Organized in the mid-1880s shortly after the establishment of the Agricultural Wheel in Tennessee, the Colored Agricultural Wheel supported the same demands for economic and political changes that white Wheelers advocated. Similarly, the Colored Wheel adopted secret passwords and rituals…

This grassroots agrarian cooperative movement was founded in 1886 by sixteen African American farmers in Houston County, Texas, and spread rapidly across the South. Similar to the white Farmers' Alliance, the Colored Alliance advocated a program of uplift that promoted…

In 1921 the Tennessee General Assembly enacted a law "to provide for those colored men who served as servants and cooks in the Confederate Army." Senator Edgar Jones Graham of Hickman County proposed the bill, which entitled former slaves to…

This post-World War II race riot occurred in the town of Columbia on the night of February 25-26, 1946. Like other outbreaks of violence in the South in the immediate postwar era, this incident involved military veterans who were unwilling…

Columbia’s most significant combat role occurred November 24 through 29, 1864, during Confederate General John Bell Hood’s campaign to capture Nashville. On a main route between the state capital and the Deep South, Columbia was important in the struggle for…

Arthur S. Colyar, attorney, political leader, newspaper editor, and industrialist, was born in Jonesborough, one of thirteen children of Alexander and Katherine Sevier Sherrill Colyar. Colyar received his education in the Washington County common schools, and in 1828 he moved…

Tennessee's early patterns of commercial exchange determined the location and growth of its urban centers. Commercial centers typically formed at some junction of land and water that required a break in the mode of transportation, usually from animal-powered overland wagons…