Transportation

At 2:00 a.m. on April 27, 1865, the magnificent side-wheeler riverboat Sultana was struggling against the surging current of the Mississippi River eight miles north of Memphis. The weather was rainy and chilly, and the boat was grossly overloaded. Suddenly…

The Tennessee Centennial Exposition, held in Nashville in 1897 to celebrate Tennessee's one-hundredth anniversary of statehood, was one of the largest and grandest of a series of industrial expositions that became hallmarks of the New South era. Modeled in particular…

The Tennessee Central Railroad was an important late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century competitor to the dominant Louisville and Nashville (L&N) and Southern Railway systems in Tennessee. Nashville capitalist and former Memphis and Charleston Railroad president Jere Baxter organized the line…

Regulation of railroads, common carriers, and public utilities in Tennessee has followed not only development in the technological and economic structures of those industries, but changes in general professional and public attitudes toward monopolies, competition and governmental regulation, particularly as…

The Tennessee River system covers 41,000 square miles, draining portions of sixty Tennessee counties and seven states. The Tennessee River is the largest tributary to the Ohio River and is its equal in water volume. From its mouth at Paducah,…

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is an independent public corporation founded by Congress in 1933 to control flooding, improve navigation, assist farmers, provide cheap electric power, and make "surveys of and general plans for [the Tennessee River] basin and adjoining…

Under construction from 1972 to 1985 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway is a 234-mile thoroughfare extending from the Tennessee River to the junction of the Black Warrior-Tombigbee River system near Demopolis, Alabama. It links commercial…

This Chattanooga-based trucking firm, in business since 1985, has grown to be the fifth largest publicly owned truckload carrier in the United States. U.S. Xpress is also the ninth largest private employer in Tennessee, with an estimated 7,300 employers. The…

First established as an arm of the Continental Army, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has both military and civil missions. Since the Revolutionary War, it has provided topographic reconnaissance and mapping, fortification design and construction, and related services for…

East Tennessee businessman and railroad president Campbell Wallace was a native of Sevier County and grew up in Maryville, where he attended Anderson Seminary. At age fourteen he moved to Knoxville, where he was employed by a prominent merchant, Charles…

The Walton Road played a major part in the settlement of the area between the Cumberland Plateau and the Cumberland River. Passing through what are today Roane, Cumberland, Smith, and Putnam Counties, it was not the first road through the…

P. V. H. Weems, internationally known air navigator, was born March 29, 1889, at Turbine, the son of Joseph Burch and May Elizabeth Rye Weems. He attended Walnut Grove Country School in Montgomery County and Branham and Hughes School in…

The Wilderness Road served as the principal route from the east coast colonies to the interior lands drained by the Ohio River. The configuration of the Wilderness Road may be described as a broad loop, open on the north. Its…

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was one of the most far-reaching and controversial programs initiated during the New Deal. Designed to put people to work, WPA received an initial Congressional appropriation of $5 billion. Between 1935 and its termination in…

Overlooking the sulfur springs at Bledsoe's Lick in the Castalian Springs community, the sprawling log inn Wynnewood was built in 1828 for travelers passing between Knoxville and Nashville. The builders, Alfred R. Wynne, Stephen Roberts, and William Cage, located it…