Tennessee Trivia & Tidbits - Page 12

Looking for Tennessee trivia? Try our list Tennessee little know facts, tidbits and trivia.

Blount Mansion in Knoxville, built between 1792 and 1830, served as the Southwest Territory’s Capitol and later as the birthplace of Tennessee—where the Tennessee State Constitution was drafted.

first appeared: 12/8/2002

The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis is housed in the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain in 1968. The museum preserves the history of the American Civil Rights Movement.

first appeared: 12/1/2002

The state’s coldest temperature ever recorded was 32 degrees below zero in Mountain City (pop. 2,383) on Dec. 30, 1917.

first appeared: 11/24/2002

For the Tennessee bicentennial celebration in 1996, Johnson County created Tennessee Tapestry, a drama about the history of the county and state. It was so popular that it is now performed annually.

first appeared: 11/17/2002

In the last 75 years, the University of Tennessee football program has won 448 games—more than any other Division I team.

first appeared: 11/10/2002

Shelby County has Tennessee’s lowest elevation: 182 feet above sea level.

first appeared: 11/3/2002

Nashville entrepreneur Joel Cheek in 1892 developed a recipe for premium coffee and supplied it to the Maxwell House Hotel. Cheek later sold his Maxwell House brand coffee to General Foods.

first appeared: 10/27/2002

Pal’s, a restaurant chain with 17 locations in East Tennessee, in 2001 became the first business in its industry to receive a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest award for business excellence.

first appeared: 10/20/2002

Built two years before Tennessee became a state, the 1794 Sam Houston Schoolhouse in Maryville (pop. 23,120) is the state’s oldest one-room log school. Student ages back then ranged from 6 to 60.

first appeared: 10/13/2002

The Tennessee River Freshwater Pearl Farm at Birdsong Resort and Marina near Camden (pop. 3,828) is America’s only freshwater pearl farm.

first appeared: 10/6/2002

And speaking of good eating, Bush Brothers & Co., headquartered in Knoxville, has been in business since 1908. Bush Brothers’ first product was canned tomatoes.

first appeared: 9/29/2002

Built in 1770 by William Cobb, Rocky Mount in Piney Flats is the oldest original territorial capitol in the United States. It was used until 1792 and now serves as a living history museum.

first appeared: 9/22/2002

The Tennessee coneflower, a wildflower growing only in the cedar glades, was one of the first plants to be federally protected as an endangered species in 1979.

first appeared: 9/15/2002

Thousands of volunteers, including children and scientists, are helping with the All-Taxa Biodiversity Inventory of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which spreads across East Tennessee into North Carolina. Begun in 1997, the classification of all park species is the largest undertaking of its kind.

first appeared: 9/8/2002

The state has such town names as Byrdstown (pop. 903), Ducktown (pop. 427), Eagleville (pop. 464), Eagleton Village (pop. 4,883), Parrottsville (pop. 207), and Pigeon Forge (pop. 5,083).

first appeared: 9/1/2002

Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, was born in Chattanooga in 1894. By the time her heyday in the 1920s ended, she had sold hundreds of thousands of records and become the most respected African-American singer in America.

first appeared: 8/25/2002

Perhaps the best known anti-slavery editor was William Gannaway Brownlow, who started the Tennessee Whig newspaper in Elizabethton (pop. 13,372) in 1839. From 1865 until 1869, he took a hiatus from publishing to become the state’s Reconstruction governor.

first appeared: 8/18/2002

Elihu Embree, a Quaker from Jonesborough (pop. 4,168), established the country’s first anti-slavery newspaper in 1819, calling it the Manumission Intelligencer.

first appeared: 8/11/2002

Clarence Saunders established the country’s first self-service grocery in Memphis in 1916, calling it Piggly Wiggly. He never explained the name.

first appeared: 8/4/2002

When Tennessee became a state in 1796, its population was 77,000. In 2000, it was 5,689,283.

first appeared: 7/28/2002

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