Objects

Duncan Cooper, journalist, publisher, and leading figure in Tennessee's Democratic Party in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was born in Maury County. Cooper served in the Confederate army during the Civil War and was captured at Fort Donelson.…

A prominent member of the U.S. House of Representatives for almost thirty years, Jere Cooper was born in Dyer County on July 20, 1893. Cooper attended local schools and graduated in 1914 from Cumberland University Law School. He was admitted…

Portrait painter Washington Cooper was born near Jonesborough on September 18, 1802, the third of nine children. The family moved frequently, and young Cooper lived near Carthage and Shelbyville. He briefly received some art instruction in Murfreesboro before settling in…

Located near Byrdstown, Pickett County, the Cordell Hull Birthplace and Museum State Park is a twenty-acre site acquired by the Tennessee Historical Commission in 1990 and placed under the State Division of Parks in 1997. It is the birthplace and…

Corn was the chief agricultural product almost from the beginning of human settlement in Tennessee. Referred to as "Indian corn" throughout the 1800s, the cereal was widely cultivated by the Cherokees and formed a basic element of their diet. Most…

Illustrator and mural painter Dean Cornwell executed several exceptional commissions on Capitol Hill in Nashville during the Great Depression. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 5, 1892. Cornwell began his professional career as a cartoonist for the Louisville…

Cotton was not an aboriginal crop in Tennessee, nor was it widely cultivated by the earliest settlers in mountainous East Tennessee. Gins for separating cotton seed from fiber were brought into Middle Tennessee during the 1780s, however, and soon appeared…

Without the cotton gin Tennessee never would have evolved into a major antebellum cotton market; the cotton fibers produced here were too short for hand ginning or roller ginning, which could be performed on the long-staple cotton found along the…

The Country Music Association (CMA) is one of Tennessee’s most important musical trade associations. The CMA is dedicated to guiding and enhancing country music’s development and demonstrating its viability to advertisers, consumers, and media throughout the world. During the late…

The Country Music Foundation (CMF) is a tax-exempt, not-for-profit organization dedicated to collecting and preserving artifacts and disseminating information about country music’s development as an art and a business. The State of Tennessee chartered the CMF in 1964. In 1967,…

One of the most-visited popular-arts museums in the United States, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum is now located in a $37 million facility of 135,000 square feet in downtown Nashville, next to the Sommet Center. The new…

Cove Lake State Park was developed in the late 1930s as a third joint recreational demonstration effort by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the National Park Service. It was centered along an arm of…

The Cox Mound, or Woodpecker, gorget style is a particularly beautiful and enduring symbol of Tennessee's prehistoric inhabitants. A gorget was a pendant, or personal adornment, worn around the neck as a badge of rank or insignia of status and…

Elizabeth Cox, poet, short story writer, essayist, and novelist, was born in 1942 in Chattanooga into a family of teachers and writers. She attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, the University of Chattanooga (now the University of Tennessee at…

Governor John Cox constitutionally inherited his position as Tennessee's chief executive when Governor James Frazier (1903-5) resigned the office to assume the U.S. Senate seat of the late William B. Bate. Before becoming governor, Cox was a consummate public official,…

Crab Orchard stone is a rare sandstone quarried from the Crab Orchard Mountain of the Cumberland Plateau. Predominately rose in color, this mottled stone is streaked in irregular patterns by different shades of brown. Its unique and beautiful color was…

Alfred Leland Crabb, author of popular historical novels published in the mid-twentieth century, was born in Warren County, Kentucky, and educated at Bethel College, Peabody College, University of Chicago, and Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in 1925 from Peabody.…

Cragfont is a beautiful Georgian-style mansion located on a craggy eminence above Bledsoe's Creek seven miles east of Gallatin. James and Susan Black Winchester had the house designed and built between 1798-1802. The masons built the two-story house of gray,…

In 1947, the most popular song in the United States was “Near You.” It was listed for a record-setting seventeen consecutive weeks as the nation’s number one song on Billboard magazine’s Honor Roll of Hits. It has been called the…

Thomas B. Craighead was a 1775 "New Light" graduate of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton). He became Nashville's first minister when James Robertson and other pioneering settlers invited him to the Cumberland region to establish a Presbyterian church…