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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, appeared 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 non-slaveholding
small hold 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.
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