1. A river formed by the confluence of two other rivers near Knoxville; it follows a U-shaped course to become a tributary of the Ohio River in western Kentucky; Also called: Tennessee River.
2. A state in east central United States; Also called: Volunteer State.
3. Village in Illinois (USA); zip code 62374.
State in E central US; nicknamed Volunteer State.
Area 109,200 sq km/42,151 sq mi.
Capital Nashville.
Towns and cities Memphis, Knoxville, Chattanooga, Clarksville.
Features Great Smoky Mountains national park; Cumberland River; Newfoundland Gap, with Clingmans Dome (2,024 m/6,643 ft), the highest point in the state; Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga; Nashville, the capital of country music, with Opryland US (Grand Ole Opry, the oldest radio show in the US, started 1925, is broadcast from here), the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, RCA Studio B, the Parthenon in Centennial Park (a copy of the Parthenon in Athens), Belle Meade Mansion (a Greek Revival house and thoroughbred breeding estate, former site of the Iroquois, the oldest amateur steeplechase in the US), Fort Nashborough (a re-creation of the 1779 log fort), Historic Second Avenue Business District, Downtown Presbyterian Church (c. 1851, Egyptian Revival), the Hermitage (Andrew Jackson’s mansion) and Andrew Jackson Center, and the Tennessee Botanical Garden at Cheekwood; Memphis, home of the blues, with the W C Handy Memphis home and museum, Sun Studio (the birthplace of rock and roll), Magevney House (1830s, th.
E oldest building in the city), and Pyramid Arena (1991); the National Civil Rights Museum, site of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr 1968; Shiloh national military park; Civil War battlefields at Chattanooga; Knoxville, with the Governor William Blount Mansion and the Armstrong-Lockett House (an 1834 farm mansion); Miss Mary Bobo’s Boarding House (1867) at Lynchburg; the headquarters of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), established 1933, the largest electricity-generating station in the US, at Knoxville; Oak Ridge National Laboratory, founded 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb; Fisk University, Vanderbilt University, and Belmont College, in Nashville; Graceland, the estate of Elvis Presley; dogwood trees, especially in Knoxville.
Industries cereals, cotton, tobacco, soy beans, livestock, timber, coal, zinc, copper, chemicals.
Famous people Davy Crockett, David Farragut, W C Handy, Cordell Hull, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Dolly Parton, John Crowe Ransom, Bessie Smith.
History settled by Europeans 1757; became a state 1796. Tennessee was deeply divided in the Civil War; the battles of Shiloh, Murfreesboro, Chattanooga, and Nashville were fought here.
Tennessee was explored by Hernando de Soto for Spain 1521, Robert de la Salle for France in the 1670s, and Virginia colonists James Needham and Gabriel Arthur for England in the 1680s. After England obtained the region as settlement of the French and Indian War 1763, it was occupied by settlers from Virginia and the Carolinas. After the Civil War, with Tennessean Andrew Johnson in the White House, it was the only former Confederate state not to have a military government imposed during Reconstruction. Coal and iron deposits attracted Northern capital, and by the early 1880s, flour, wool, and paper mills were established in all urban areas. Both prohibitionism and religious fundamentalism were strong; in 1925 the Scopes monkey trial was held in Dayton, and the law against the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools was not repealed until 1967. The 1930s brought large-scale development in the form of the federal Tennessee Valley Authority and prepared the state for the industrialization that follo.
Wed World War II.