Michael Toomey

Daniel Boone is perhaps the best known of the early "long hunters" who ventured across the Appalachian Mountains to hunt and explore in the area of present-day Tennessee and Kentucky. Born on November 2, 1734, in Oley, Berks County, Pennsylvania,…

John De Brahm, engineer and cartographer, was a native of Germany. A military engineer in the army of Charles VII, he resigned his commission in 1748 and three years later led a group of immigrants to America, settling in the…

The first explorations by Europeans in what is now Tennessee took place in 1540, when a Spanish expedition under the command of Hernando de Soto entered the region from the southeast. Soto had set out from Florida the year before…

Archibald Roane, second governor of Tennessee, was born in 1760 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He became a lawyer and served with distinction in the Continental Army during the Revolution. Roane arrived in Tennessee in 1788 in the aftermath of the…

A short-lived attempt to create a new state in the trans-Appalachian settlement of present-day East Tennessee, the State of Franklin arose from the general unsettled state of national, regional, and local politics at the end of the Revolutionary War. Under…

The Transylvania Purchase occurred on March 14, 1775, when Richard Henderson, a North Carolina land speculator, met with Cherokee representatives at Sycamore Shoals near the present site of Elizabethton. Henderson wanted to purchase a tract of land in what is…