Institution

On January 1, 1918, 12 students from four states met with Nora Chambers in an upstairs room of the Church of God Publishing House in Cleveland, Tennessee. This first class meeting of the Church of God's Bible Training School (BTS)…

Memphis's Lemoyne Owen College opened its doors in 1871 as LeMoyne Normal and Commercial School, but it traces its ancestry to the schools for ex-slaves organized by members of the American Missionary Association (AMA) during and after the Civil War.…

Located on ninety-three acres along the Tennessee River in downtown Lenoir City, the Lenoir Car Works was once the largest and most important business in Loudon County. The earliest operation was the Bass Foundry and Machine Company, which produced iron…

The Lenoir Cotton Mill was one of a series of five mills built by the family of General William Lenoir along Town Creek in what is now Lenoir City. In 1810 Major William Ballard Lenoir, son of Revolutionary War General…

Although Tennessee libraries developed slowly from early statehood until the twentieth century, early Tennesseans placed a high value on their collections of books. Given the demands of frontier life and the relatively high cost of books, it is not surprising…

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…

The Lincoln League was a Republican Party organization founded by Robert R. Church Jr. on February 12, 1916, in Memphis and named for Republican President Abraham Lincoln. Church, whose father had been one of the first black millionaires in the…

In 1897 the Reverend Arthur A. Myers, his wife Ellen, and General O. O. Howard founded a mountain school that expanded to become an accredited four-year institution, Lincoln Memorial University. Supported by the American Missionary Association, the Reverend and Mrs.…

The roots of Lipscomb University date to October 5, 1891, when David Lipscomb and James A. Harding established the Nashville Bible School. Lipscomb and Harding believed there was a need for a school that would prepare students completely through high…

Before the Civil War, voluntary associations of women existed in Knoxville, Memphis, and Nashville, as well as in some rural areas. Most groups organized through local religious institutions to provide charitable services to the needy. With the establishment of these…

The Louisville and Nashville (L&N) Railroad achieved national recognition as one of the most profitable and influential railroads in the southern market from the second half of the nineteenth to well into the twentieth century. The foundation for the company's…

The Chattanooga-based Lyndhurst Foundation was organized in 1978 by Coca-Cola Bottling heir John T. (Jack) Lupton II and family following the death of his parents, Thomas Cartter Lupton and Margaret Rawlings Lupton. Named for the former Lupton family estate in…

The Emancipator, published in 1820 in Jonesborough, Tennessee, by Elihu Embree, was the first newspaper in the United States devoted entirely to the abolitionist cause. It was an outgrowth of Embree’s first newspaper, the Manumission Intelligencer, published the year before.…

The history of Marathon Motor Works provides a spectacular though short-lived example of new industry during one period of Nashville boosterism. Augustus H. Robinson, owner of the Maxwell House Hotel, masterminded the removal from Jackson of the automotive division of…

This Nashville-based architectural firm, founded by Thomas Marr in 1897, grew rapidly in the 1910s and 1920s as it specialized in the design of theaters, schools, hotels, and other commercial buildings. Marr began his career as a draftsman for Nashville…

Maryville College, a distinguished higher education institution in Blount County, was among the first colleges in the country to open its doors to African American and Native American, as well as white, males and admitted women students as early as…

Established in 1923, Mayfield Dairy Farms has evolved into one of the major southern milk and ice cream products companies. It began as an antebellum family farm in McMinn County that continued as a family-run business into the late twentieth…

Based in Cleveland, Tennessee, Maytag Cleveland Cooking Products began in 1916 as a family-owned and -operated company known as Dixie Foundry. Company founder S. B. Rymer Sr. was a native of Polk County, but his family later immigrated to what…

Chattanooga's McCallie School opened September 21, 1905, with eight teachers and 48 students on a family farm located on the western slope of Missionary Ridge donated by Presbyterian minister T. H. McCallie to his sons, James Park and Spencer J.…

As the creators and producers of Little Debbie Snack Cakes, O. D. and Ruth McKee transformed a small bakery into a terrific success that their two sons have turned into a business worth $770 million in annual sales. Before the…