|
A shallow rectangle, only one hundred miles from north to south,
TENNESSEE stretches 450 miles from the Mississippi to the Appalachians,
and divides into three distinct regions. The marshy western third of the
state occupies a low plateau edging down toward the Mississippi. Only in
the far southwest corner do the bluffs rise high enough to permit a
sizeable riverside settlement - the exhilarating port of Memphis .
Tennessee's largest city is a magnet for music fans, as the birthplace
of urban blues and long-time home of Elvis . The fine plantation homes
and tidy old towns of middle Tennessee 's rolling farmland reflect the
comfortable lifestyle of its pioneers; smack at the heart of this is
Nashville , still country music's capital, despite upstart competition
from Branson and Myrtle Beach. The mountainous east shares its top
attraction with North Carolina - the peaks, streams and meadows of Great
Smoky Mountains National Park .
Tennessee's first white settlers, most of them British Protestants,
arrived from across the mountains in the 1770s to settle in the hills
and hollows of the Appalachians. Initially relations with the Cherokee
were good. However, demand for land increased, and confrontations
throughout the state culminated in 1838 with the forced removal of the
Indians on the "Trail of Tears." One of the main congressional opponents
of this process was Davy Crockett , familiar from legend as the heavy-drinking
hunter in a coonskin cap. When Civil War came, the plantation owners of
the west maneuvered Tennessee into the Confederacy, against the wishes
of the nonslaveholding smallhold farmers in the east. The last state to
secede became the primary battlefield in the west, the site of 424
battles and skirmishes.
Despite economic development to rival any in the country, soil erosion
and farm mechanization led to a mass migration to the cities in the
years before World War I. The fundamentalist beliefs of these
transplanted hill-dwellers (whose folk and fiddle music served to spark
Nashville's country scene) influenced a prohibition movement that kept
all of Tennessee bone-dry until 1939, and still sees a majority of
counties forbidding the sale of alcohol. The New Deal of the 1930s
brought significant changes. In particular, the Tennessee Valley
Authority , created in 1933, harnessed the flood-prone Tennessee River ,
providing much-needed jobs and cheap power, and ignited the transition
from an agricultural to an industrial economy.
|
|
chattanooga |
knoxville |
memphis |
nashville |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Few cities are so identified with a song as CHATTANOOGA , in the
southeast corner of Tennessee. Though visitors expecting Tex Beneke's
More Information
.... |
Surrounded by the backwoods wilderness of the Great Smoky, the
Cumberland and the Blue Ridge mountains, KNOXVILLE , the original
More Information .... |
The cotton-trading capital of the Delta, MEMPHIS , perched above the
Mississippi two hundred miles west of Nashville and three hundred south
of St Louis,
More Information .... |
Set amid the gentle hills and fertile farmlands of central Tennessee,
NASHVILLE attracts six million people each year a mixture of devoted
fans
More Information .... |
|
