Commerce

Memphis's great soul music recording company was founded in 1960 by siblings Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton. Aspiring to break into the music business, Stewart, a bond salesman, convinced his schoolteacher sister to mortgage her home for $2,500. Their company,…

Anna Rorex Stokely established one of the nation's major canning companies. She was the daughter of James Addison and Rebecca Badgett Rorex, born in 1852 on a farm along the French Broad River in Cocke County. In 1872 she married…

Sun Records burst onto the post-World War II American scene suddenly, a force that few would forget. At the helm was Sam Phillips, an eccentric radio engineer willing to put black and white sharecroppers, truck-drivers, dishwashers, and factory workers in…

African American businessman and religious leader Preston Taylor was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, on November 7, 1849, of slave parents. Taylor served as a drummer boy in the Union army during the siege of Richmond, Virginia. After the Civil War,…

This Monroe County historic site was a key federal outpost on the southwest frontier constructed in 1794-95 at the confluence of the Tellico and Little Tennessee Rivers adjacent to the site of the earlier Fort Loudoun. For protection from aggressive…

In the early twentieth century, temperance was the key issue in Tennessee politics. The roots of the temperance movement date to Jacksonian America, when temperance reform appeared in conjunction with capitalistic economic efforts. For the next eight decades temperance leaders…

Oliver Perry Temple, author, East Tennessee economic promoter, and trustee of the University of Tennessee, was born on January 27, 1820, near Greeneville. An 1844 graduate of Washington College in Washington County, Temple studied law and gained admittance to the…

John Marks Templeton, financial executive, investor, and philanthropist, was born in Winchester on November 29, 1912, the son of Harvey and Vella Handly Templeton. He graduated from Yale University in 1934 and from Oxford University in 1936, where he studied…

The discovery of gold in California in 1848 inspired at least four or five thousand young Tennesseans to cross the country. Many of them, rejected for service in the Mexican War because of the overabundance of volunteers, saw this as…

The cable television industry in Tennessee, represented by several different networks, has increased the visibility of the state and positioned it as a culturally relevant and important part of the American media landscape. These networks have often focused on values…

The Tennessee Centennial Exposition, held in Nashville in 1897 to celebrate Tennessee's one-hundredth anniversary of statehood, was one of the largest and grandest of a series of industrial expositions that became hallmarks of the New South era. Modeled in particular…

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 Tennessee Electric Power Company (TEPCO) was the largest private-sector electrical power monopoly in Tennessee's early twentieth-century history. It was formed on May 27, 1922, when the Tennessee Power Company, Chattanooga Railway & Light, and the Chattanooga, and Tennessee River…

Recognized as the oldest door-to-door sales company in the United States, the Southwestern Company publishes Bibles and educational reference books that college students sell over summer vacation. The Reverend James R. Graves, a prominent Baptist minister, began publishing religious tracts…

In the early 1950s, a young immigrant named Sam Moore arrived in New York and launched his own business by selling Bibles door-to-door. His success in this endeavor provided Moore with the funds to establish the National Book Company, which…

Chattanooga businessman and industrialist Benjamin F. Thomas pioneered the development of the Coca-Cola bottling industry in America. A native of Maysville, Kentucky, Thomas began his business career as a bank clerk, stone quarry operator, and manager of a hosiery mill.…

This Memphis company was the first insurance agency in the United States to be owned and managed by women. In 1910 Mary Harry Treadwell and her sister, Georgia Harry, founded the company after the death of Treadwell's husband. At the…

One of the largest black-owned businesses in the state, Tri-State Bank was founded in 1946 by Dr. J. E. Walker (founder of Universal Life Insurance) and his son A. Maceo Walker. The original headquarters site at the corner of Beale…

Memphis-based Universal Life Insurance Company (ULICO), the second African American company in the United States to attain million-dollar-capital status (1947), has been described as one of the "ten top Negro owned and operated business enterprises in the world" and as…

Joseph E. Walker, noted physician, banker, businessman, civic and religious leader in Memphis, was born in the cotton fields near Tillman, Mississippi, in 1880 and rose to become one of the most successful African Americans of his time. Walker overcame…