Religion

St. Michael's Catholic Church, incorporating the state's oldest Catholic church building, began as a small log meeting house near Cedar Hill in Robertson County. Four families (the Byrnes, Redmonds, Traughbers and Watsons) who settled near Turnersville between 1838 and 1840…

St. Patrick’s Catholic Church is one of Memphis’s most historic institutions. Tennessee’s Catholic Diocese in Nashville decided that another Catholic church should be established in Memphis because of the city’s population growth during and after the Civil War. The largest…

The Mother Church of the Diocese of Tennessee, St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Franklin is the state's oldest Episcopal church and serves its oldest Episcopal congregation. Built with handmade bricks eighteen to twenty-four inches thick, the forty-by-eighty-three-foot church was organized…

Almira S. Steele, teacher and missionary, founded the South's first African American orphanage in Chattanooga. Born of Puritan forebears in Chelsea, Massachusetts, (neighboring Boston) on July 23, 1842, the daughter of Benjamin H. and Almira Sylvester Dewing, she was reared…

Barton W. Stone, minister and key figure in Tennessee and Kentucky frontier revivalism of the early 1800s, established a "Christian" movement that later became part of the Disciples of Christ. Born in Port Tobacco, Maryland, Stone grew up in southern…

Samuel A. Stritch, Roman Catholic prelate, was born in Nashville on August 17, 1887, the son of Irish immigrants. Having chosen to enter the priesthood, Stritch was ordained in Rome on May 21, 1910, at the age of nineteen. Returning…

African American businessman and religious leader Preston Taylor was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, on November 7, 1849, of slave parents. Taylor served as a drummer boy in the Union army during the siege of Richmond, Virginia. After the Civil War,…

Temple Adas Israel, a historic Jewish synagogue listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is located at the corner of Washington and College Streets in Brownsville. Built in 1881-82 and veneered in brick circa 1920, the Gothic Revival-style temple…

John Marks Templeton, financial executive, investor, and philanthropist, was born in Winchester on November 29, 1912, the son of Harvey and Vella Handly Templeton. He graduated from Yale University in 1934 and from Oxford University in 1936, where he studied…

In 1905 the Southern Baptist Convention authorized the establishment of a college for women to be located in Murfreesboro and to be known as Tennessee College for Women. The institution was founded on the principle of offering the very best…

Despite opposition from local whites and without northern missionary help, leaders in the Gay Street Colored Christian (Disciples of Christ) Church in Nashville established Tennessee Manual Labor University, the only freedmen's college in Tennessee founded by African Americans, in 1867.…

The institution now known as Tennessee Wesleyan College was established in 1857, when the Holston Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church South acquired the property of the Athens Female College, chartered in 1854 by the Order of Odd Fellows. The…

Recognized as the oldest door-to-door sales company in the United States, the Southwestern Company publishes Bibles and educational reference books that college students sell over summer vacation. The Reverend James R. Graves, a prominent Baptist minister, began publishing religious tracts…

In the early 1950s, a young immigrant named Sam Moore arrived in New York and launched his own business by selling Bibles door-to-door. His success in this endeavor provided Moore with the funds to establish the National Book Company, which…

Trevecca Nazarene University began in 1901. The Reverend J. O. McClurkan, a Cumberland Presbyterian minister, established the institution dedicated to training Christian workers for the United States and foreign countries as the Pentecostal Literary and Bible Training School for Christian…

Tusculum College is the oldest college in Tennessee, having been chartered on September 9, 1794, by the legislature of the Southwest Territory. It was founded as Greeneville College by the Reverend Hezekiah Balch and Reverend Charles Coffin and later merged…

Located in Jackson, Union University is a private institution of higher learning affiliated with the Tennessee Baptist Convention and traces its lineage through two earlier institutions. Jackson Male Academy opened in 1823 and was chartered by the state in 1825.…

The first Methodist publishing efforts began as the Methodist Book Concern in Philadelphia in 1789 with a loan of $600. Its publications were delivered by traveling preachers known as circuit riders. The Concern later relocated to New York City and…

James I. Vance, longtime pastor of Nashville's historic First Presbyterian Church, the largest Presbyterian Church in the South in 1914, was voted one of the nation's twenty-five leading pulpit ministers in 1925. A great-grandson of John Sevier, Vance was born…

James D. Vaughan, “the father of southern gospel music,” was born on December 14, 1864 in Giles County, Tennessee. Vaughan grew up in Middle Tennessee surrounded by the sounds of gospel music. As a teenager, he attended his first singing…