Commerce

Chattanooga business leader Jo Conn Guild was an outspoken critic of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). He was born in 1887 in Chattanooga, the son of a prominent engineer. He attended Baylor School, the University of Virginia, and Vanderbilt University,…

Hales Bar Dam has the distinction of being the first main-river, multipurpose dam built on the Tennessee River. In order to improve navigation on the Upper Tennessee and provide electricity to the city of Chattanooga, Jo Conn Guild Sr., a…

Managing director of the East Tennessee Land Company, Walter C. Harriman was born in New Hampshire, the second of the three children of Walter and Almire Harriman. During the Civil War, Colonel (later General) Walter Harriman led his Eleventh New…

With a letterpress lineage dating back to Gutenberg, Hatch Show Print began printing posters in 1879 when brothers Charles R. and Herbert H. Hatch opened their small business in Nashville. Their first poster, a six-by-nine-inch handbill advertising a lecture by…

HCA Healthcare, one of the nation's largest healthcare companies and private employers, is based in Nashville. The present company represents the merger of several hospital and healthcare companies, primarily the Hospital Corporation of American (HCA) and the Columbia Hospital Corporation.…

Horace G. Hill, grocery man, real estate entrepreneur, banker, and philanthropist, was born in Hickory Valley in White County in 1873. He opened the first H. G. Hill Grocery Store at age twenty-three and became a pioneer in such grocery…

The merchant prince of Memphis, Napoleon Hill was born in 1830, the second of eleven children of Duncan and Olivia L. Bills Hill. Hill's physician father died in 1844, leaving his widow an estate valued at more than forty thousand…

Early tourist resorts in Tennessee were almost invariably close to mineral springs in mountainous East Tennessee. Reflecting a widespread belief in the efficacy of the ancient practice of hydrotherapy, or the "water cure," visitors endured arduous journeys to highland spas…

Chattanooga businessman and philanthropist George Thomas Hunter was the nephew of pioneer Coca-Cola bottler Benjamin Franklin Thomas. A native of Maysville, Kentucky, Hunter joined his childless uncle and aunt in Chattanooga in 1904, becoming a surrogate son and business heir.…

J. R. “Pitt” Hyde III started the operation that became AutoZone in 1979 as part of Malone & Hyde, a company founded by his grandfather. In 2004, Hyde was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame—an achievement that the institution…

Bronson Ingram was Tennessee's only billionaire when he died of cancer at the age of sixty-three on June 15, 1995, in his Nashville home. His net worth was estimated at $1.3 billion. In 1994 Forbes national business magazine placed Ingram…

The first Nashville firm to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, J. C. Bradford and Company was founded in 1927 by James Cowdon Bradford Sr. Bradford was born in Nashville to Alexander and Leonora Bradford on November…

Entrepreneur and philanthropist Cal Johnson was born to Cupid and Harriet Johnson in Knoxville on October 14, 1844. The Johnson family, slaves of Colonel Pless McClung, lived on the site of the old Farragut Hotel Building at the corner of…

Appalachian entrepreneur and promoter of the model city of Kingsport, J. Fred Johnson was born on June 25, 1874, in Hillsville, Virginia, the son of J. Lee Johnson and Mary Pierce Early Johnson. A nineteenth-century American value system heavily imbued…

This Nashville barber, businessman, and politician became the first African American elected to the Tennessee General Assembly. Keeble was born circa 1832 in Rutherford County to slave parents, Sampson W. and Nancy Keeble. From the age of nineteen until 1863…

William Key, nineteenth-century veterinarian and horse trainer, was born a slave in Winchester and took the name of his owner, William Key, a Shelbyville planter and entrepreneur. As a child he demonstrated a remarkable talent for working with horses and…

Kingsport Press was a powerful Tennessee presence in the publishing world for fifty years. The press was initially established in 1922 by Blair and Company, the New York bankers who financed the Clinchfield Railway and the Kingsport town site, with…

The Knoxville International Energy Exposition was held from May through October 1982 on a 67-acre area a few blocks west of the city's central business district. The idea of a world's fair in Knoxville was first conceived by W. Stewart…

This Chattanooga-based hamburger chain was founded in 1932 by Rodolph B. Davenport Jr. and J. Glenn Sherrill. Loosely patterned after the successful midwestern White Castle hamburger chain which had begun in 1921 in Wichita, Kansas, Krystal capitalized on the economic…

Established by Andrew M. Burton, Guilford Dudley Sr., Helena Haralson, Dr. J. C. Franklin, and Pat M. Estes in Nashville in 1903, Life and Casualty Insurance Company initially offered industrial (health and accident) insurance to working-class blacks and later concentrated…