Institution

Rhodes College in Memphis has been aptly characterized as "the garden in the city," a reference to the college's lush, richly wooded, and landscaped campus in the heart of the state's largest city. Princeton Review's 1995 college guide cited Rhodes…

One of four freedmen's colleges in Nashville, Roger Williams University began as elementary classes for African American Baptist preachers in 1864. Classes were held in the home of Daniel W. Phillips, a white minister and freedmen's missionary from Massachusetts. By…

Rudy's Farm, once home to the Rudy Sausage Company, was a family operation dating back to 1881. Daniel Rudy made and sold his own sausage in Nashville on a farm near the railroad on Lebanon Road. His son, Jacob Ludwig,…

The Rural African American Church Project seeks to identify and document historic African American churches located in rural areas throughout Tennessee. Administered by the Center for Historic Preservation at Middle Tennessee State University, the program began in 1997 as a…

On July 31, 1985, Governor Lamar Alexander announced that a new General Motors company--Saturn--would build a giant industrial complex in Spring Hill, a small town located thirty miles south of Nashville on U.S. Highway 31 in northern Maury County. Spring…

Scarritt College was moved from its original home in Kansas City, Missouri, to Nashville in 1923. Established as an institution to train women missionaries by the United Methodist Church, the school was dedicated in 1892 as the Scarritt Bible and…

Seeing Eye, Inc., a New Jersey-based corporation that enhances the independence and dignity of blind people through the training and use of "Seeing Eye" dogs, traces its roots to Nashville and the effort of Morris Frank, a Nashville native. In…

At the end of the nineteenth century no universally accepted standards or requirements for any level of education existed in the South. Defeated in the Civil War and their economies devastated, the southern states had little monies to expend on…

In 1852 Gillen, Webb, and Company established Sylvan Mills on the Duck River outside of Shelbyville as a woven cotton fabric mill. It produced fabric from raw cotton throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the early 1920s,…

This important African American business institution in Memphis was founded in 1906 by Robert R. Church Sr., who had become the wealthiest African American in Tennessee through real estate and other interests. The bank was located on Beale Street across…

After its founding as Graysville Academy in 1892, this educational institution evolved and expanded, changed its name twice, and moved in 1916 to what later became the town of Collegedale in Hamilton County. On its new one-thousand-acre campus the school,…

Southern Baptists in Tennessee represent a tradition born in Amsterdam and London in the early seventeenth century, transported to the American colonies in the 1630s, and carried south and west with frontier migrations. These Christians affirm the authority of Scripture,…

When a group of ministers met in Augusta, Georgia, in 1845 to establish the Southern Baptist Convention, they simultaneously created two separate boards to oversee the domestic and foreign missionary work of the convention. The Board of Domestic Missions, headquartered…

The short-lived Southern Citizen was a pro-slavery newspaper in the heart of antislavery East Tennessee; its editor, an Irish nationalist hero of 1848, worked in the midst of anti-immigrant Know Nothings. In October 1857 Knoxville mayor William Swan cofounded the…

Located in Memphis, the Southern College of Optometry has educated over six thousand optometrists in its sixty-nine years of existence. It is one of only seventeen schools of optometry in the United States and has contracts with several states to…

In 1884 two mechanics in Jackson established the Southern Engine and Boiler Works to build a line of small engines and boilers. In 1895 the mechanics sold their shop to local stockholders, who constructed a new complex on North Royal…

Under the leadership of E. J. Owens, Southern Potteries, Inc., began operations in Erwin in Unicoi County in 1916-17 using skilled labor brought from Ohio and local unskilled workers. Its product was known as Clinchfield ware, and the company's letterhead…

St. Andrew's-Sewanee School is the result of the 1981 merger of two older institutions, and it builds upon the heritage of three Episcopal schools founded on Monteagle Mountain in Franklin County. The junior department of the University of the South,…

The world's only institution devoted solely to the study and treatment of catastrophic childhood illnesses, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital was built on one man's promise. Then a struggling radio actor with seven dollars in his pocket, Danny Thomas offered…

The oldest private school in Memphis is St. Mary's Episcopal School. It has operated continuously since its founding in 1847, and during most of its existence the school has been exclusively for girls. During the Civil War, Headmistress Mary Foote…