Local Stories in Tennessee
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Music History·Davidson County
Acuff-Rose
Before 1942 a country songwriter in the South often sold a song outright for a flat fee and never saw another penny from it. Floyd Tillman let It Makes No Difference Now go for three hundred dollars in 1938. Acuff-Rose was incorporated in Nashville on 13 October 1942 to change that. Roy Acuff, then the Grand Ole Opry's biggest star, put up 25,000 dollars, and the performing rights organisation BMI added 2,500.
Music History·Davidson County
Club Baron
Doctor Jackson H. Brown built on Jefferson Street in 1951 for his pharmacy, and in 1955 spent seventy five thousand dollars turning the place into a skating rink, a dance hall and a club. The rink floor was the dance floor, and it was the only rink in the city open to Black skaters. The club drew the touring circuit that white Nashville venues would not book: Etta James, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Otis Redding, Muddy Waters and Jackie Wilson all played the room.
History
Dobbins Stand
Big Swan Creek runs off the western Highland Rim to the Duck River, and the valley it cuts was among the first parts of Lewis County settled. A stand stood somewhere along it: David Dobbins opened one on Swan Creek in 1808, and it is one of about ten known on the Tennessee length of the Natchez Trace. That is very nearly all anyone knows.
History
Dogwood Mudhole
A mile south of the parkway's Wayne County marker for it, the old Natchez Trace crossed a depression in a flat, dogwood-covered ridge, and after heavy rain that depression became almost impassable to wagons. It was called the Dogwood Mudhole. Meriwether Lewis camped there on his last journey in 1809 and some of his horses got away from him in the night, which is the best-attested thing that ever happened at the spot.
Music History·Sevier County
Dolly Parton Parkway
The stretch of US 411 running east out of Sevierville carries Dolly Parton's name, and she came home in October 1979 for the naming, playing a show at Sevier County High School on the evening of the sixth. She had graduated from that school in 1964, at eighteen. By her own account the graduating class was asked in turn what each of them meant to do next, and when she said she was going to Nashville to be a star, the room laughed.
Music History·Davidson County
Ernest Tubb Record Shop
Ernest Tubb was already an Opry star when he opened a record shop on Commerce Street on 3 May 1947 and, the same night, began broadcasting a live show from inside it. The Midnite Jamboree went out on WSM immediately after the Opry finished, which meant a listener in Ohio or Alabama who had stayed up for the Opry simply kept listening.
History
Garrison Creek
Garrison Creek is named for a United States Army post that stood beside it in 1801 and 1802, at the northern end of the work that turned a footpath into a road. The order of events is the opposite of what it looks like. The Post Office wanted the mail moved between Nashville and Natchez, the road was designated a post road in 1800, and it was the Postmaster who suggested putting army troops in western Tennessee to the job of cutting it.
Music History·Davidson County
Hank Williams' Last Opry
Hank Williams was fired from the Grand Ole Opry on 11 August 1952, at twenty eight, as the biggest star in country music. The Opry's manager, Jim Denny, had run out of patience after Williams failed to appear for a scheduled spot two days earlier. It was not the first missed show. Williams drank, and he took morphine for the constant back pain of a spinal condition he had been born with, and by that summer his first marriage had ended and he was often not fit to walk on stage.
Industry & Science·Davidson County
Hatch Show Print
Two brothers, Charles and Herbert Hatch, opened a print shop in Nashville in April 1879. Their father was a printer who had brought the family from Wisconsin four years earlier. The first job off the press was a handbill six inches by nine advertising a lecture by the preacher Henry Ward Beecher, and it already had the things a Hatch poster would always have: big wood type, a letterpress bite you can feel with a thumb, and a layout built to be read from across a street.
Entertainment·Sevier County
Klondike Katie
The older of the two steam locomotives that haul passengers around the theme park at Pigeon Forge was built by Baldwin in Philadelphia in February 1943 for the United States Army, and was shipped to Alaska to move supplies for the building of the Alcan Highway. Number 192 was sold after the war to the White Pass and Yukon Route, which worked it out of Skagway until dieselisation put it aside at the end of the 1950s.
History
McGlamery Stand
A stand on the old Natchez Trace in a corner of Wayne County kept a tavern and a blacksmith's shop for travellers from early in the nineteenth century, and the blacksmith was as much of the business as the beds were, because a road like this one broke wheels. The two markers at the site do not agree about who started it. The Park Service credits John McGlamery with establishing a stand nearby in 1849.
History
Metal Ford
The Buffalo River runs over a hard ledge of bedded chert at this crossing, and a firm bottom in a river was worth a great deal to anyone driving stock or a loaded wagon. Frontier travellers are said to have called a stone-surfaced road a metalled road, and the Park Service takes the ford's name from that. It was not an easy crossing in all weathers.
Music History·Davidson County
Music City U.S.A.
Fisk University was five years old and nearly bankrupt when its treasurer, George L. White, took nine students out of Nashville on 6 October 1871 to sing for money. Most of them had been born into slavery. They sang spirituals, which had never been performed as concert music for white audiences, and White named them the Jubilee Singers for the year of jubilee in Leviticus, the year in which the enslaved were to go free. Ella Sheppard accompanied them on piano.
Music History·Davidson County
Nashville Number System
Nashville session players write chord charts in numbers rather than letters, and the reason is the working day. In the late 1950s Neal Matthews Junior, who arranged the vocals for the Jordanaires, was singing on several sessions a day and could not memorise everything. He got there from shape note singing, the gospel quartet notation he had grown up with, and swapped the shapes for numbers: number one is whichever chord the key is built on, and every other chord is counted up from it.
Quirky
Sheboss Place
One of the stands on the old Natchez Trace stood somewhere in a corner of Hickman County, and it was known as Sheboss. The Park Service tells the story as legend, which is the right register for it. A widow named Cranfield kept the inn with a second husband, a Native man who spoke little English, and when travellers rode up and asked whether they could get a bed, a meal or corn for the horses, he would say nothing, point at his wife and answer "she boss".
Military·Sevier County
The Battle Of Boyds Creek
On 16 December 1780 John Sevier's militia met a Cherokee force on Boyds Creek, west of what is now Sevierville, and won the fight with a trick. The Cherokee had struck the settlements that autumn while Sevier's men were away at Kings Mountain, and he came back after them with something under three hundred mounted militia.
History
The Braided Road
The Natchez Trace was never a single road. It began as a set of paths along the ridgelines, linked and used by the Chickasaw, the Choctaw and the Natchez, and the braid widened as travellers went round whatever they could not get through. Wagons dodged mudholes by cutting fresh ruts into the woods. A stretch that sank too deep was abandoned outright and a replacement opened beside it.
History
The Broken Column
Meriwether Lewis, thirty-five years old and governor of Upper Louisiana, stopped for the night at Grinder's Stand on 10 October 1809, riding east with his expedition journals and a set of contested accounts to answer for. He was shot twice, in the head and in the body, and died at sunrise the next morning.
History
The Chickasaw Line
The ridge the parkway climbs in southern Williamson County divides the waters. Streams on the north side run to the Harpeth and then the Cumberland; streams on the south run to the Duck and then the Tennessee. It was also, for nineteen years, a national boundary. The Treaty of Hopewell in 1786 set the Chickasaw line at the ridge dividing the Cumberland waters from the Tennessee waters, and when Tennessee became a state in 1796 that line still held.
Music History·Davidson County
The Circle Of Ryman Oak
The Grand Ole Opry played the Ryman Auditorium for the last time in its thirty one year residency on 15 March 1974, and opened this house the following night. President Richard Nixon came, five months before he resigned, played piano and took a yo-yo lesson on air from Roy Acuff. The building seats around four thousand four hundred, nearly twice the Ryman, and it was built around a broadcast rather than a congregation, which is what the Ryman had been designed for in 1892.
History
The Collinwood Depot
Collinwood was built on purpose and all at once. Early in 1913 the Superior Lumber and Tie Company bought Wayne County timberland, and W. W. Collins, the man on the ground for the company, put up sawmills and set about making a town to go with them. The Collinwood Land Company bought ground from J. E. Wilburn for twelve thousand dollars, hired an engineer named Edward Lull to lay out streets, and advertised lots in June 1913. About three hundred people were living there within a year.
History
The Devil's Backbone
Travellers called the Natchez Trace the Devil's Backbone, and the name was a complaint. The road ran some four hundred and forty miles through the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations, past the reach of any state's law, with inns a day apart and every part of the journey harder than it looked on a map. Robbery, fever, snakebite, swollen rivers and simply losing the line all took a share of the people who set out on it. Tennessee has since moved the name onto a hill.
Music History·Davidson County
The Dixie Tabernacle
From June 1936 until July 1939 the Grand Ole Opry was broadcast from a revival tabernacle on Fatherland Street in East Nashville. It was a rough building: plank benches, a dirt floor, canvas that rolled down for walls, no dressing rooms and room for around three thousand five hundred people. The Opry had been moved there because it had outgrown everything else.
Architecture
The Double Arch Bridge
The bridge carrying the Natchez Trace Parkway over Tennessee Highway 96 west of Franklin spans 1,572 feet between its abutments, 1,648 including them, and stands about 155 feet above the floor of Birdsong Hollow. It was designed by the Figg Engineering Group, built by PCL Civil Constructors, and finished in the spring of 1994; the arches closed that March and traffic crossed by June. It was the first precast, segmentally constructed concrete arch bridge erected in the United States.
History
The Duck River Ferry
In 1802 John Gordon, a militia captain and since 1796 the postmaster of Nashville, arranged with the Chickasaw chief William Colbert to run a trading post and a ferry where the Natchez Trace crossed the Duck River. The treaties that opened the road reserved the ferries on it to the Chickasaw nation, so a partnership was how a white trader got in, and a written version of the bargain survives in the Tennessee state archives.
History·Sevier County
The Fire Of 1856
In March 1856 a fire took the Sevier County courthouse in Sevierville, the jail beside it, forty-one houses and most of the town's businesses, and with the courthouse went almost every county record written before that year. The Sevier County Archives begin in 1856 for that reason, and anyone tracing a family in the county runs into the same wall.
History·Sevier County
The Forks Of Little Pigeon
Sevierville stands where the West Prong runs into the Little Pigeon River, and the settlement that grew at the junction was called the Forks of the Little Pigeon before it was called anything else. Isaac Thomas put a farm, a trading post and a tavern at the confluence in 1783, and Spencer Clack and James McMahan followed him. The Dumplin Treaty, signed at Major Hugh Henry's station in 1785, opened the land south of the French Broad River and brought in more settlers.
History
The Greenfield Barn
The barn standing in the field on this Maury County ridge was built for Leland Greenfield in 1959, out of timber grown on the farm itself. Greenfield had raised his first tobacco crop on the ground in 1932, and his family had owned it for a hundred years by the time the State of Tennessee bought the farm and deeded it to the Natchez Trace Parkway in 1977.
History
The Hard Trip Home
They were called Kaintucks whether or not they came from Kentucky: farmers and boatmen off the Ohio and the upper Mississippi who built a flatboat, loaded it with corn, pork, whisky, hemp or tobacco, floated it down to Natchez or New Orleans, sold the cargo, then sold the boat itself for its planking, and turned round and walked.
Education
The Huntsville Meridian
The Tennessee state line the parkway crosses in southern Wayne County is also a survey baseline. In 1807 Thomas Freeman, an Irish-born surveyor who had already run part of the boundary between the United States and Spanish Florida and led Jefferson's expedition up the Red River, was sent to settle where Tennessee ended.
Education·Sevier County
The Imagination Library
The Imagination Library began in 1995 as a Sevier County programme, run by the Dollywood Foundation from an office on Main Street in Sevierville, and for its first years it mailed free books to children in this one county and nowhere else. Any child registered gets a book a month from birth until the age of five, chosen for their age and addressed to them by name. Dolly Parton said she started it for her father, Robert Lee Parton, who could not read or write.
History
The Land Pirates
The most famous of the Natchez Trace robbers was Samuel Mason, born in Virginia in 1739, a militia captain in the Revolution who went into river piracy at Cave-in-Rock, a cavern on the north bank of the Ohio in what was then the Northwest Territory, before moving the operation onto the road. Travellers walking north with the proceeds of a sold flatboat on them were an obvious market, and the road gave them nowhere to go but forward. In 1803 the governor of the Mississippi Territory, William C.
History
The Last Twenty Miles
The Natchez Trace Parkway took sixty-seven years to build. Ground was broken in 1937, a year before Congress made it a unit of the National Park Service on 18 May 1938, after a survey ordered in 1934 and a campaign led by Thomas J. Busby, a Mississippi congressman who got his survey bill through and watched his construction bill fail. The Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration all took a hand.
Music History·Sevier County
The Locust Ridge Cabin
Dolly Parton was born in January 1946 in a cabin on the Little Pigeon River in Sevier County, the fourth of twelve children of Avie Lee and Robert Lee Parton, and the house the family kept through her childhood was a two-room cabin on Locust Ridge. Her father sharecropped and grew tobacco. The cabin had no electricity and no running water, and it is the home behind My Tennessee Mountain Home, the album RCA released in April 1973 and the first record for which she wrote every song.
Industry & Science
The Napier Mine
The ore that fed the furnaces on the Buffalo River came out of a shallow open working about a mile away. In 1827 John McClish sold the land with the old ironworks on it to John Catron and John C. McLemore; Catron was sole owner by 1828, ran it as the Buffalo Iron Works, and went on to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States. The panic of 1833 forced him out, and the works passed to his son John Catron junior and to George F. Napier.
Music History·Davidson County
The Nashville Sound
By the late 1950s rock and roll had taken country music's audience and its radio slots, and the men who ran the Nashville studios made a commercial decision that still divides people. Chet Atkins at RCA and Owen Bradley at Decca began stripping the fiddle and the pedal steel out of records and putting in string sections, smooth background vocals from the Jordanaires and the Anita Kerr Quartet, and a crooned lead instead of a nasal one.
Industry & Science
The Phosphate Dinkeys
The limestone under Lewis County carries phosphate, and for roughly forty miles of parkway the road runs through or beside the rock that holds it. What was taken out around Gordonsburg was blue rock, the bedded, unweathered grade, worked from shafts driven into the ledges rather than from open pits.
Film History·Sevier County
The Pines Theater
The building at the corner of Joy Street and Court Avenue in downtown Sevierville went up in 1928 as the Watson Motor Company, a car dealership built by J. B. Waters Senior. When civilian car and truck production stopped for the war in 1942, Waters closed the dealership and turned the showroom into a picture house. It opened in 1944 as Sevierville's first movie theater, seating around seven hundred, and it ran westerns in the daytime and live entertainment at night.
History
The Post Road
In 1799 Winthrop Sargent, governor of the Mississippi Territory, recommended opening a post road north, and his reasons were national security first and the mail second. What he asked for was a road to Knoxville. He did not get it: the Cherokee refused passage across their country, and when the Choctaw and the Chickasaw agreed in 1801 the road ran to Nashville instead.
Music History·Davidson County
The Quonset Hut
In 1954 the bandleader and producer Owen Bradley and his brother Harold, a guitarist, paid 7,500 dollars for a two storey house at 804 16th Avenue South and built a recording studio in the basement. The street was residential and there was no music business on it. They were there because Decca had threatened to move its country division to Dallas, and they could buy there because Nashville had rezoned those residential avenues for commercial use.
History
The Seat That Moved
Lewis County was made in 1843 out of fractions of Maury, Lawrence, Wayne and Hickman, and named for Meriwether Lewis on the stated ground that his remains lay buried and neglected within its limits. It then spent half a century deciding where to put the courthouse. The first courts sat, as the act provided, at John Blackburn's house on Swan Creek, and in 1846 the seat was formally placed there and named Gordon.
History
The Steamboats Won
The Natchez Trace was busiest for about forty-five years, and it was busy because the Mississippi runs one way. A flatboat could carry a crop down to Natchez or New Orleans but could not be worked back up against the current, so it was broken up and sold for its lumber and the crew walked home. Steam took the reason away.
History·Sevier County
The Unionist County
When Tennessee voted on separation on 8 June 1861, Sevier County went against it by 1,528 votes to 60, better than ninety-six percent, while the state as a whole voted to leave by more than two to one. East Tennessee was full of counties like it, and Sevier County's loyalists organised a Home Guard that August. It drilled openly at first.
Transport·Williamson County
The WSM Tower
On 5 October 1932, seven years to the day after WSM first signed on, the station switched on a new transmitter in what was then open farmland in Williamson County. The antenna was a Blaw-Knox diamond cantilever: a steel lozenge 878 feet tall balanced on a single insulated point at its base, so that the whole tower is the radiator rather than a mast carrying a wire. At the time it was the tallest radio tower in the United States.
History
Tough As Hickory
In the winter of 1812 Andrew Jackson took about two thousand Tennessee volunteers down to Natchez, expecting orders to move against the British at New Orleans. Coffee's cavalry rode down the Natchez Trace; Jackson took the infantry by river. The orders never came. A War Department letter dated 6 February 1813 reached him on 15 March and told him to disband his men where they stood, some four hundred and fifty miles from home, with no pay, transport or rations arranged. Jackson refused.
Music History·Davidson County
We Shield Millions
WSM went on the air on 5 October 1925 from the fifth floor of the National Life and Accident Insurance Company building at Seventh Avenue and Union Street. The call letters were not chosen for their sound. They stood for the company motto, We Shield Millions. A National Life executive named Edwin Craig is generally credited with the idea.
History·Davidson County
Where I-40 Cut Jefferson
Jefferson Street was the commercial spine of Black Nashville. Fisk University, Meharry Medical College and Tennessee State sat along or near it, and the mile and a half between them held groceries, barbershops, tailors, churches, restaurants and the nightclub circuit that made the street a stop on the chitlin circuit. In the 1960s the state of Tennessee routed Interstate 40 straight down it.