My grandmother, Jessie Ely Wills, was a daughter of Ruth Whiteide Ely, of Shelbyville, Tennessee. When my grandfather, Ridley Wills proposed to her in 1898, she agreed to marry him if he would promise to take care of her sister, Mamie, whom Jessie suspected would not marry. He agreed to do so and Mamie lived with Ridley and Jesse at their homes on Patterson Street and Louise Avenue in Nashville until shortly after they moved to their new home, Far Hills, on Curtiswood Lane in 1931. Soon thereafter, Mamie chose to move to Shelbyville where she spent the remainder of her life living in the Dixie Hotel on the public square. The hotel’s proprietor was Dr. C. A. Breast who advertised the Dixie as being “on the Dixie Highway Scenic Route” and the “Florida Short Route.”
His claim was initially true because the U.S. Highway 41, which would go through Murfreesboro and Manchester to Chattanooga, but not Shelbyville, was not completed until the fall of 1925. After U.S. 41 opened, it gradually robbed Shelbyville of most of the north-south traffic. This was the second transportation blow Shelbyville had suffered.
In 1830, Bedford County had the highest population of any county in Tennessee (30,244). This would change. In 1845, the Tennessee General Assembly granted a charter to the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad Company to connect Nashville with Chattanooga by rail. The next summer and fall, N&C company officers employed John Edgar Thomas, an engineer, to survey the country between the two cities to determine the most inexpensive rail route. Having decided the site of the Franklin County tunnel should be at Cowan, Thomas then laid out a route through the gaps in the Rutherford, Bedford and Coffee County hills, passing through Murfreesboro, Wartrace and Tullahoma but not Shelbyville. Naturally, Shelbyville civic leaders protested, but had to be later satisfied with a branch line from Wartrace.
When the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad reached Chattanooga in 1854, this meant that Middle Tennessee shippers, such as General Willam G.Harding at Belle Meade, could send their produce, largely corn and other grains, all the way to Savannah on the Atlantic Ocean via the Western and Atlantic Railroad, which reached Chattanooga in 1850, and the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company which ran from Terminus (later renamed Atlanta) to the coast. By not being on the main line, Shelbyville suffered. By 1900, Bedford County had slipped from being the most populous county in the state to the 19th largest.
When the Dixie Highway was built through Shelbyville just before World War II, the economy was given a boost to last until after 1925 when U.S 41 was completed over Monteagle Mountain. This was a shorter route to Chattanooga than the Dixie Highway (U.S.41-A) through Murfreesboro and Shelbyville. Through the Depression, most of the north-south traffic through Shelbyville evaporated and the Dixie Hotel saw a decline in the number of tourists traveling to Florida who stopped there.
In December 1924, a mob of white men in Shelbyville burned down the Bedford County Court House in an effort to capture and hang a Black man accused of rape. The accused man escaped only to be captured and put in the local jail. In order to receive a fair trial, he was moved to Lewisburg, where a jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death, but Shelbyville still had to reckon with their actions ahead of the trial itself. One of his attorneys was Prentice Cooper, who later became the 39th governor of Tennessee.
In 1939, a Walking Horse Celebration was founded in Wartrace. The event drew 40,000 fans in its first year, when trainer Floyd Carouthers and his three-year-old Strolling Jim won the first World Walking Horse Championship. The celebration grew quickly, and, after several years, moved to the much larger Shelbyville where it continued to thrive. In time, Shelbyvllle became known as “The Walking Horse Capital of the World.” For 11 days, beginning in late August, at the celebration, held in an outdoor stadium eventually seating more than 30,000, World Champion winning horses were crowned, initially in three divisions, with the World Grand Champion Tennessee Walking Horse crowned on the Saturday night before Labor Day. Other notable winners have been Merry Go Boy (1947-1948), Garnier’s White Star, the first mare to win the coveted crown (1954), and more recently, I am Josie, in 2013, 2014, and 2015. The Optimist and Rotary Clubs maned booths on the grounds for the eleven days and teenagers at Shelbyville High School could always count on having steady jobs at the celebration grounds where, at its height, the Celebration drew an estimated 2,000 horses, housed in 60 stables, and 250,000 spectators, some of whom came multiple times, and who slept in crowded motels and hotels for miles around. They would bring $51 million in revenue to Shelbyville annually.
During World War II, Shelbyville and Bedford County actually benefited. Because Camp Forrest was in nearby Tullahoma, soldiers from Camp Forrest kept the Dixie Hotel full on weekends when some soldiers even slept on the hotel stairs. In 1943 and 1944, extensive army maneuvers were held across Middle Tennessee. Red army headquarters were often in Shelbyville. Bedford County farmers leased their farms to the military for the maneuvers in which tanks and other military vehicles tore down miles of wire and plank fences, damaged fields, destroyed bridges, utility poles and asphalt roads. After the war, the army made extensive repairs and set up a Claims Board office in Shelbyville to pay farmers for their damages.
Sadly, two blows would hammer Shelbyville. In the 1960s, Interstate 24 was completed from Nashville to Chattanooga. Just as U.S. Highway 41 did, the Interstate bypassed Shelbyville, choosing to go through Murfreesboro, less than a mile of Bedford County, Beechgrove and Manchester before climbing Monteagle Mountain and continuing down Battle Creek Valley in Marion County to Chattanooga. This meant that warehouses would spring up in business parks on I-24 near Manchester rather than in Shelbyville.
In recent years, the famed Tennessee Walking Horse Celebration has drawn controversy and criticism because of the widespread practice of soring horses at the event. This is an abusive practice designed to make horses step higher. This practice was ruled to be illegal in 1970 when a Federal law, the Horse Protection Law, was passed. For years, trainers denied spring and secretly did it anyway. In 2006, concerns escalated between horse trainers and APHIS inspectors when trainers refused to allow their horses to be tested. The inspectors struck back, disqualifying all but three horses in the Grand World Championship finals that year. Since then, spring has been much better controlled but not entirely eliminated. This took a toll on the Celebration, with unfavorable national publicity and smaller crowds. Every night is followed by a dawn and this has happened in Shelbyville. In 2023, the Walking Horse Justified, owned by Lisa Baum, of Shelbyville, won, for the third consecutive year, the World Grand Championship and the celebration drew an attendance of 130,000.
The city’s population between 2010 and 2020 grew by a healthy 16.4 percent to 23,333, more than one fourth of whom were new to the area — the census identified the largest growth in Hispanic or Somalian who worked in low-paying construction jobs, or at such places as Musgrave Pencil factory and Tyson Foods. The Nearest Green Distillery at 500 Gordon Lane in Shelbyville has been a great success and brings needed tax revenue to the city.
Shelbyville has produced more than its share of local and national leaders, including Gov. Prentice Cooper (1939-1945) and his sons, Jim Cooper, Democratic member of the House of Representatives for the 5th Civil District of Tennessee from 2003 to 2023 and recent Nashville mayor, John Cooper. Then too, there is Nashvillian Jerry Breast, a grandson of C. A. Breast, the 1930s owner of the Dixie Hotel. Jerry is a retired admiral in the U.S. Navy. Their ancestors, buried in Shelbyville’s Willow Grove Cemetery, would be proud of them. My ancestor, Thomas Cooper Whiteside, my great great grandfather, is also buried there. He was a Shelbyvlle bank president and member of the board of the NC&STL Railroad from its inception, as the N&C, to his death in 1885.