Features
Tennessee’s Coal Creek War Tested 13th Amendment
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The Anderson County town of Coal Creek was founded when the railroad first came in, around 1870.
Features
The original Nashville Predator and its mysterious missing tooth
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A half-century ago, a construction company unearthed the remains of a saber-toothed cat that had lived in present-day downtown Nashville 11,000 years ago.
Features
The ghost of murdered Clarence Pullis may have haunted his alleged killer Lem Motlow, but it didn’t stop Motlow from building a career in Tennessee spirits and politics
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One of the most powerful men in Tennessee was indicted for murder a more than a hundred years ago.
Features
Bill Carey: What Nashville Chooses to Remember about the KKK’s Presence
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There’s a hill south of downtown Nashville that is home to Carter-Lawrence Elementary School and several sports fields, one of which is Belmont University’s home baseball stadium. On a Friday a couple years ago, I took my dog to the top of it and saw joggers, people playing softball and students taking part in their annual field day. It was a wonderful place to be. However, more than 100 years ago, the Ku Klux Klan held its most widely viewed meeting ever in Middle Tennessee there. On the night of June 1, 1923, residents of Nashville were mesmerized by the sight of a huge cross lit by incandescent lights on the hill.
Features
First Blind Man to Use a Seeing-Eye Dog Was a Tennessean
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When you see a blind person with a seeing-eye dog, remember that this practice started with a young man from Nashville. In 1927, Morris Frank was a 20-year-old student at Vanderbilt University and unhappy about his dependency on others to get around. Frank’s father read him an article in the Saturday Evening Post by Dorothy Eustis, an American woman living in Switzerland. In the article, Eustis talked about how shepherds there were training dogs to help blind people. She speculated that this practice could be perfected to help blind people on a full-time basis.
Features
Cumberland Furnace
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Many Nashvllians know that ironmaster Montgomery Bell (1769-1855) had an iron forge at the Narrows of the Harpeth in Davidson County 30 miles west of Nashville. Many have launched a canoe there. Far fewer know much about Cumberland Furnace, which Bell purchased for $16,000 in 1804 from James Robertson when he moved to Tennessee from Lexington, Ky. The wilderness tract included beech, elm, walnut, chestnut, oak and pine trees needed to make the charcoal to fuel the forge. Bell systematically purchased additional land, much of it in nearby Montgomery County, where he received permission from the county court to erect a ferry across the Cumberland River 10 miles east of Cumberland Furnace.
Features
The Nashville-French Connection
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Ridley Wills II’s oldest grandchild married a man from Paris earlier this year, which inspired this special History Corner.
Features
A Brief History of Dickson, Tennessee
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Sneedville later became Dickson, named for a Nashville Congressman.
Features
A Brief History of Portland, Tennessee
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Portland is located 14 miles north of Gallatin on the Highland Rim in extreme northern Middle Tennessee.