Entries

Adolpho A. Birch, a pioneering African American jurist, became the first black man to hold several judicial posts in Nashville and the first to assume the chief justice position of the Tennessee Supreme Court. Birch was born in Washington, D.C.,…

Black Bottom was notable as a Negro neighborhood in downtown Nashville until the 1950s. The area was nicknamed “Black Bottom” because of periodic river floods that left muddy residue on the streets. This area existed since 1832 as the Sixth…

During the first decade of the twentieth century, violence erupted in the tobacco belt of western Kentucky and northern Middle Tennessee as farmers tried to ease their economic distress. Collectively, these acts of violence became known as the Black Patch…

Gideon Blackburn, Presbyterian minister, college president, and missionary to the Cherokees, was born in Augusta County, Virginia, on August 27, 1772. As a young boy, Blackburn moved with his parents to what is now East Tennessee.  In 1787,  he became…

Ray Blanton, three-term congressman and one-term governor, was born in April 1930, in Hardin County and grew up on a farm close to the small town of Adamsville in McNairy County. His "dirt-poor" upbringing in the cotton fields of West…

The oldest and northernmost county in the Sequatchie Valley is Bledsoe County; it became Tennessee's thirty-third county by an act of the Tennessee legislature in November 1807. It was named for Anthony Bledsoe, a Revolutionary War patriot who migrated to…

This small state park contains 164 acres focused on the Bledsoe Creek embayment of Old Hickory Lake. Nearby the old Cumberland River port town of Cairo and close to such significant early settlement historic sites as Bledsoe's Lick, Cragfont, Wynnewood,…

Anthony Bledsoe, pioneer, surveyor, and early settler of the Cumberland region, was born in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, and became a product of the rolling frontier of his day. He was a justice of the peace for Augusta County in 1769,…

Isaac Bledsoe was born in Culpepper County, Virginia, but as a young man settled with his brother Anthony on the Holston River a few miles west of Bristol. After serving with British colonial troops in Lord Dunmore's War, he hunted…

Blount County is one of the oldest counties in Tennessee. Established in 1795 before statehood, it was named in honor of Territorial Governor William Blount. Prior to white settlement the area was home to the Cherokee Indians, who established their…

Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, Blount Mansion was constructed between 1792 and 1830, with the first period of construction occurring between 1792 and 1796. As the home and office of William Blount, the governor of the Southwest Territory, Blount Mansion…

Territorial Governor and U.S. Senator William Blount was born on Easter Sunday (March 26) 1749, the eldest child of Jacob and Barbara Gray Blount of Bertie County, North Carolina. As a lad, Blount received informal training in commerce at the…

Governor Willie Blount was born in Bertie County, North Carolina, to Jacob Blount and his second wife, Hannah (Salter) Baker Blount. He was half-brother to Tennessee's territorial governor William Blount. Willie (pronounced Wiley) Blount studied law at Princeton and Columbia…

Located on the Tennessee River between Meigs and Rhea Counties, Blythe Ferry dates to about 1809 and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Its original owner and operator was William Blythe, a mixed-ancestry Native American with both…

James Lafayette Bomar Jr., a lawyer from Bedford County, Tennessee, served his state as a congressman, senator, and lieutenant governor; he then extended his commitment to service to the global community through his involvement in Rotary International. Bomar was a…

Bon Aqua Springs Resort, once the largest health spa and summer retreat in Middle Tennessee, was known as the “Queen of the Southern Spas” during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the western Highland Rim, the Hickman County…

James Bond, one of the wealthiest slaveholding planters in Tennessee, if not in the entire South, came to the state during the late 1820s or early 1830s. Bond and two brothers moved from Bertie County, North Carolina, to the Forked…

Samuel Bond, cotton planter, physician, and Tennessee legislator, was born in Knox County on December 10, 1804. Bond's family moved to northern Alabama before locating in Shelby County in 1831. After a brief period of economic struggle, the family prospered,…

Derived from a 1974 phonograph album entitled Desitively Bonnaroo by the colorful and charismatic New Orleans performer Dr. John (Malcolm John Rebennack Jr.), the word Bonnaroo is Creole slang for “having a good time.” It also is short for “The…

Harlem Renaissance writer and Fisk University librarian Arnaud W. Bontemps was born in Louisiana in 1902 but grew up in Los Angeles after his family moved to California when he was three. In 1923 Bontemps graduated from Pacific Union College;…