Margaret D. Binnicker

Names for this company have changed through the years, but the early factory site off Murfreesboro Pike in Nashville has not, and the importance of this plant cannot be overstated. Nashville's Mayor Thomas Cummings (elected 1938) induced Aviation Corporation of…

The Carolina, Clinchfield, and Ohio (CC&O) Railway, best known as the Clinchfield Railroad, provided the "Quick Service, Short Route between the Central West and Southeast," crossing the Appalachian Mountains and opening the communities along its 277-mile route to distant markets…

The traditional dances of clogging and buckdancing are popular forms of percussive dancing that originated in the southern Appalachian mountains. Though the eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish settlers brought with them the clog, a step dance characterized by a very erect…

The first woman to win a statewide election in Tennessee, Jane G. Eskind was raised and educated in Louisville, Kentucky. She attended Brandeis University, married Richard Eskind, completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Louisville, and settled in Nashville…

Randall M. Falk has advanced Jewish-Christian relations and understanding as an author, professor, and rabbi of The Temple, Congregation Ohabai Sholom in Nashville. Born in Little Rock and educated at the University of Cincinnati and the Hebrew Union College, Falk…

Situated on the public square in Clarksville in the Arlington Hotel, the First Woman's Bank began operations on October 6, 1919. As a financial institution created, directed, and staffed entirely by women, its opening produced something of a sensation, and…

Writer Nikki Giovanni expresses her version of the late twentieth-century African American experience through poetry and essays. Though her parents left Knoxville after her birth, Giovanni returned for summers with her grandparents and graduated from Knoxville's Austin High School before…

Harpeth Hall School opened in 1951 in Nashville on a twenty-six-acre campus that had previously been the Estes estate. While new in name and location, the school continued in spirit and manner the education of girls and young women that…

The Holston Presbytery founded King College in 1867 in Bristol and named the school for James King, an eighteenth-century settler in the region. Both the acreage and physical plant of the college have more than doubled in 130 years. The…

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…

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…

Frances W. Preston, a Nashville native who went to work for Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) at the age of twenty-one, serves now as that enterprise's worldwide president and CEO. While still a teenager Preston joined WSM as a receptionist, and…

The location of Scott County on the Cumberland Plateau abutting the Tennessee-Kentucky state line makes for beautiful landscape, poor soil for farming, and a small population. The region is blanketed with forests and parks, both in neighboring counties and Scott…

At the end of the nineteenth century no universally accepted standards or requirements for any level of education existed in the South. Defeated in the Civil War and their economies devastated, the southern states had little monies to expend on…

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,…

Under the leadership of E. J. Owens, Southern Potteries, Inc., began operations in Erwin in Unicoi County in 1916-17 using skilled labor brought from Ohio and local unskilled workers. Its product was known as Clinchfield ware, and the company's letterhead…

St. Andrew's-Sewanee School is the result of the 1981 merger of two older institutions, and it builds upon the heritage of three Episcopal schools founded on Monteagle Mountain in Franklin County. The junior department of the University of the South,…

Tracy Caulkins Stockwell ranks among Tennessee's most successful Olympians. She began swimming at age eight and, under the aegis of the Nashville Aquatic club, qualified for the Olympic Trials five years later. At fourteen, Caulkins won her first national title,…

Robert Latendresse began Tennessee Shell Company in Camden in 1954 to ship Tennessee mollusk shells to Japan. There the shells were cut, ground into round beads, and inserted by Japanese pearl farmers into mollusks in Japan's waters to be the…

Van Buren County encompasses 274 square miles straddling the Cumberland Plateau and the eastern Highland Rim. The western 30 percent of the county stands 960 feet above sea level; its limestone outcroppings have resulted in numerous caves. The best known,…

Suffragist Katherine Burch Warner was born in Chattanooga, raised in Nashville, and educated at Vassar. The well-traveled Kate learned about politics through her father, John C. Burch, editor and publisher of the Nashville American and secretary of the U.S. Senate.…

Nashville businessman and civic leader Percy Warner followed the lead of his father, James C. Warner, in capitalizing upon the New South exploitation of natural resources with his Warner Iron Corporation in the 1870s and 1880s. While working for the…

This family-owned baseball and softball equipment company was founded by George Sharp Lannom Jr. in Tullahoma in 1912 as Lannom Manufacturing Company. It began as a producer of leather horse collars and harnesses. Recognizing the decline of animal-powered farming, Lannom…

Harry and Mary Zimmerman founded in 1960 what became within a generation the nation's largest catalog showroom, Service Merchandise. Both grew up in Memphis, and, after graduating from Central High School, they married. Shortly after the birth of Raymond, their…