Religion

Gilbert E. Patterson, Church of God in Christ (COGIC) minister and presiding bishop, media pioneer, and religious entrepreneur, was born in Humboldt, Tennessee, the son of COGIC Bishop W. A. and Mary Patterson. He grew up in Memphis and was…

Episcopal bishop and Confederate general Leonidas Polk was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, April 10, 1806. He briefly attended the University of North Carolina before entering the U.S. Military Academy. He graduated eighth in his class in 1827. He became…

William G. Pollard, nuclear physicist, Episcopal priest, and founder of Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU), was a native of New York state. Pollard moved to Tennessee with his family at age twelve. He received his B.A. from the University of…

More than seven thousand deep caves have been recorded throughout Tennessee. Concentrated in the limestone uplands of Middle and East Tennessee, these karsts extend from the Mammoth Cave area of central Kentucky through Tennessee into northern Alabama, and they represent…

Episcopal Bishop Charles T. Quintard was born at Stamford, Connecticut, the son of Isaac Quintard and Clarissa Hoyt. In 1847 he received his M.D. degree from University Medical College, New York University, and worked for a year at Bellevue Hospital.…

Religion is a word that almost defies any consensual definition. Most people reflect some of their own religious beliefs, or at least those of their own culture, in defining religion. Thus, those from the Semitic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) tend…

Tennessee’s roadside religion is widespread, varied, and includes much more than church architecture. It reflects a range of religious beliefs and experiences, as well as Tennessee’s cultural diversity. Religious roadside architecture encompasses everything from large-scale works of art commissioned by…

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…

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…

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…

Shape-note singing, a predominantly rural, Protestant, Anglo-American music tradition, involves singing from hymnals or "tunebooks" having shaped notes (aka "character notes," "buckwheat notes," or "patent notes") as opposed to the standard "round notes." Shape-note singing is rooted in the Singing…

Kelly Miller Smith was the influential pastor of Nashville's First Baptist Church, Capitol Hill, from 1951 until his death in 1984. He was also assistant dean of the Vanderbilt Divinity School from 1969 to 1984. As president of the Nashville…

Haywood County African American leader Hardin Smith was a slave and Baptist preacher who lived and taught the principle that freedom was acquired through education. He founded churches and schools for freed slaves, and his legacy includes a rich musical…

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…

Maury County's landmark St. John's Episcopal Church, constructed between 1839 and 1842, exemplifies rural simplification of the prevailing Gothic Revival architectural style used in Episcopal churches of the antebellum South. Five sons of the North Carolina planter William Polk, who…

This Nashville landmark is one of the first Catholic Church buildings constructed in Tennessee and served as the Catholic Cathedral for almost seventy years. The oldest extant church building in downtown Nashville, St. Mary's dates to 1844-47. Its architect was…

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…