The dramatic bend in the Tennessee River here was a Cherokee Nation trading post and later a ferry operated by Chief John Ross of Scotch and Cherokee descent. In 1838 the Cherokee were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and marched to present-day Oklahoma, leaving behind only their name for the mountains that frame the area, or for good fishing or perhaps for an eagle’s nest. Whatever the origin, Chattanooga became the name for the one-time Ross’s Landing when it was incorporated as a city in 1838.
As the only settlement of any consequence for over 100 miles in either direction on the Tennessee River, Chattanooga flourished on river trade, first in salt and then bacon and flour and whisky and cotton. In the 1850s the railroads arrived and the town became an even more important trade center. And an obvious prize during the Civil War. At first Confederates were able to repel invading Union forces but that only brought more Federal troops in overwhelming numbers and Chattanooga spent the last years of the war under Union occupation, used as a staging ground for General William Sherman’s march through Georgia.
The town’s natural assets and transportation framework attracted Northern money after the war and Chattanooga became a bustling manufacturing center. Growth was so rapid the town fancied itself “the Dynamo of Dixie.” Chattanooga paced the South in the production of iron and steel equipment and hosiery and furniture and patent medicines. After the population doubled in the 1920s, the city claimed more than 100,000 residents by 1930.
While powering the economic engine, industry was not so kind to the health of the community. The same mountains that enabled Chattanooga to officially adopt the nickname “Scenic City” also trapped pollutants from the factories to such a degree that in 1969 the federal government declared Chattanooga’s air to be the dirtiest in America. The city lost more than 10% of its population over the coming years. Not accepting its plight government and civic leaders tackled the problem and Chattanooga became the only major city to actually regain its lost residents in recent years.
Few cities the size of Chattanooga had their streetscape shaped so pervasively by one man as Chattanooga. Reuben Harrison Hunt was born the son of a merchant, planter and Civil War veteran in 1862. At the age of 20 Hunt was in Chattanooga working as a builder and carpenter with the Adams Brothers architectural firm. He studied architecture and won the commission to design a new building for his First Baptist Church. Hunt opened his own design firm and until 1935 was responsible for nearly every important building during the town’s boom years. Although he was not an architectural innovator Hunt interpreted the important design trends of the age for churches, commercial properties and public buildings. Many of Reuben Harrison Hunt’s buildings survive in Chattanooga one hundred years on and we will start our walking tour in the shadow of one of his best, a little project the American Institute of Architects was particularly fond of...
James White founded Knoxville in 1786 after he came from North Carolina to the Fork of the River, where the Holston and French Broad Rivers meet to form the Tennessee River. He later moved downriver and settled near First Creek. He built a series of cabins that came to be known as White’s Fort.
After the creation of the Southwest Territory in 1790, the appointed governor, William Blount, selected White’s Fort as the territory’s capital. James White set aside land adjacent to the fort for a new town, named “Knoxville” after Secretary of War Henry Knox. White employed his son-in-law Charles McClung, who had acquired rudimentary knowledge of surveying while in Philadelphia, to draw up lots for the new town, which were sold at auction on October 3, 1791. McClung named the early streets after those he remembered from his time in Philadelphia.
When Tennessee became a state in 1796, Knoxville was the capital but the town never really took off. Population grew slowly and when the state’s capital moved permanently to Middle Tennessee in 1818 the town trundled on as little more than a stopping point for travelers on the Tennessee River. The population was scarcely more than 2,000 by the middle of the 19th century.
Knoxville was just beginning to develop as a railroad and commercial center when the Civil War struck, pitting the town’s secessionists against Unionist in most of East Tennessee, where farms were small and slaves few. The town waffled between Confederate and Federal occupation and took a physical beating in the process. It eventually wound up in Union hands after 1863 which helped springboard the town to prosperity when the war ended.
By 1896 city boosters bragged that only Atlanta and New Orleans handled more trade than Knoxville in the South. Factories were churning out railroad cars, processing pink marble from nearby quarries, assembling furniture, and processing food. There were so many textile factories operating in Knoxville that it called itself “the Underwear Capital of the World.” The population by the middle of the 20th century was 125,000.
But that progress came with a price tag. In 1947 John Gunther, a travel writer known for his breezy observations that often became ingrained as truths, published a bestselling travel guide called Inside U.S.A. in which he blithely declared Knoxville to be the Ugliest City in America. It didn’t help that Time magazine chose to highlight that observation in its review of the book. Gunther’s description was not dismissed by city leaders and one of the first targets for extraction was a century-old marketplace that had once been the heart of the town and that is where we will begin our walking tour...
With its location on a high bluff above the Mississippi River and its annual floods, this site has long been highly sought for settlement. For 10,000 or so years the Chickasaw Indians occupied the bluff. In 1819 when Americans John Overton, James Winchester and future President Andrew Jackson laid out a town here they named it after another city that saw massive floods each spring - Memphis, Egypt, an ancient capital on the Nile River.
Memphis was a bawdy river town for most of its early existence but as the surrounding country settled and the railroad arrived the town population exploded in the 1950s form 6,000 to over 30,000. But lurking on the horizon was a one-two punch that would bring the city to its knees for most of the reminder of the century. The Civil War did not have a tremendous direct impact on Memphis but it did strip the town of much of its wealth. The yellow fever epidemics that appeared like clockwork in 1867, 1873 and 1878 had much direr consequences. About three out of every four people had disappeared from Memphis by 1880, either in flight or in a funeral procession. So many people left Memphis that it surrendered its city charter.
After “heavy black frost and ice one-sixteenth inch thick” on October 20, 1878 broke the last of the mosquito-borne plague the town improved sanitation and rebuilt. The first railroad bridge across the Mississippi River south of St. Louis was built in 1892, opening trade to the Southwest. As Memphis developed into a major transportation center the city became the greatest inland cotton market in the world and more hardwood lumber was bought and sold here than anywhere else in America.
But the most enduring export from Memphis would be its music. In 1909 W.C. Handy put his spin on the “lonesome songs” of the poor rural black farmers of Mississippi Delta and introduced America to the blues. Four decades later Elvis Presley provided his own interpretation on the same songs and gave the world rock and roll. In the first half of the 20th century evening visitors to downtown Memphis could hear music wafting down from the rooftop gardens of its grand hotels; today the music comes from a revitalized Beale Street that just a few decades ago was a district of falling down brick buildings.
Today about 600,000 visitors a year - about the same number as the people who live here - come to Memphis to see a single house, Elvis Presley’s Graceland, a National Historic Landmark open to the public since 1982. Not quite so many spend a lot of time looking at the downtown but that is where our walking tour will investigate, starting in a remnant of the original 1819 plan for the town...
There was nothing haphazard about the founding of Nashville. The Cumberland Valley was scouted and a settlement party organized. James Robertson, a man who President Andrew Jackson would refer to as “The Father of Tennessee,” led pioneers overland in the fall of 1779 to a verdant valley he had selected months earlier. The settlers drove herds of horses, cattle and sheep to the west bank of the Cumberland River, cleared land and constructed cabins. The following spring Colonel John Donelson commanded a flotilla of 30 flatboats containing the women, children and household goods for the settlement. It was called Fort Nashborough at first, for recently killed Revolutionary War general Francis Nash, but when North Carolina, which then legislated all lands to the Mississippi River, set aside 250 acres on the west side of the Cumberland River for a townsite the name was massaged to “Nashville” which didn’t sound so English.
By the time Tennessee was admitted to the Union as the 16th state, Nashville was a trade and manufacturing center with mills, foundries and smithies supplying the frontier. The state government spent time in Kingston and Knoxville and Murfreesboro and Nashville before settling here in 1843. At the time Nashville was experiencing a boom period borne of profitable steamboat trade on the Cumberland River.
Today Nashville basks in its image as Music City. But its musical roots do not run deep. Histories of the town written in the mid-20th century mention nary a word about music. The town was built on transportation and banking and publishing. From the 1850s onward, in fact, Nashville cultivated its image as the “Athens of the South.” It was the first Southern city to establish a public school system and a half-dozen colleges would open their doors in Nashville before 1900. In 1897 the city strutted its stuff before an estimated six million people during the Centennial Exposition celebrating the 100th anniversary of Tennessee statehood. In a bit of 19th century wizardry, President William McKinley kicked off the festivities by pressing a button in Washington that triggered a gun in Centennial Park; McKinley would later join the throngs at the fair.
Nashville’s ascendancy to music mecca in America began with the Great Depression. Economic hard times stifled record sales and helped popularize radio. In 1932 station WSM in Nashville boosted its power to 50,000 watts becoming a clear channel station whose signal at night could be picked up almost across the country. In those dusky hours WSM played country music mostly and on Saturday nights it aired a program it had begun in 1925 called Barn Dance, which would become known across America as the Grand Ole Opry. In the 1950s record producers in Nashville began smoothing out traditional instruments such as fiddles from “hillbilly music” to create a “Nashville sound” that meshed with new record buying public tastes of the times. By 1960 only New York was producing more recorded music than Nashville.
The 1950s were the only decade in the town’s history when Nashville lost population. In the 1960smore than 250,000 people moved to the city, a increase of 162%. They couldn’t all be songwriters, could they? Maybe. Our walking tour will see what the popularity of country music has wrought in downtown Nashville but first we will start where the town began, down on the west bank of the Cumberland River...