Tennessee History

HISTORY OF TENNESSEE

Geography

*All Tennessee is divided into three parts. Until the early 1980s, signs on the Interstate said, "Welcome to the Three States of Tennessee," although this was eventually changed to help sponsor a sense of state unity. Still, the Grand Divisions of the state, East, Middle, and West Tennessee are still meaningful. The state flag shows three stars, the state quarter has three musical instruments—the fiddle for East Tennessee mountain music, the guitar for Nashville country music, and the trumpet for Memphis blues, and chances are that as the students have gotten to know each other, they’ve introduced themselves, in part, by telling what part of the state they come from.

*The geographical regions of Tennessee have been very important in shaping the history of the state as well. Each region was settled at different times, in different ways, by different people, who used the land in distinct ways. Indeed, until the interstate highways connected the different regions, many parts of Tennessee were more connected to their neighbouring states than they were to other parts of their own state.

*This is also a curiosity about Tennessee, incidentally: we have eight other states on our borders. No other state has more, and only one (Missouri) can match us. We touch Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, and Kentucky, and most of them have higher income taxes and property taxes, but lower sales taxes than we do.

*Draw Tennessee on the board. The 2000 census gave us a population of 5,689,283.

*Tennessee is about 432 miles from east to west, and 106 miles from north to south, although measuring diagonally from Mountain City to Memphis it is over 500 miles, and parts of Canada are closer to Johnson City than Memphis is, if you draw a straight line. The state is 34th in size in the US, and covers 42,244 square miles.

*Tennessee’s eastern border is approximately defined by the Appalachian Mountains and the western border by the Mississippi river. The northern and southern boundaries were supposed to match certain lines of latitude, based on North Carolina’s colonial boundaries, but they (especially the northern border) tend to shift north and south on the map because different parts were surveyed at different times, with varying degrees of accuracy.

*Using the map on page 2, demonstrate the following regions:

*The eastern-most part of Tennessee is the Unaka range of the Appalachian Mountains, also known as the Great Smokey Mountains. Unaka comes from a Cherokee word meaning ‘white,’ so we could also call them the White Mountains. The Appalachians are an old range of mountains, made principally of sedimentary rock upthrust by tectonic action, but badly eroded by age and therefore relatively low in altitude—and, since much of the rock is limestone, it is full of interesting caves. For early settlers, however, the Appalachians were a barrier to settlement, and so most early settlers arrived down...

*The Great Valley of Tennessee is a ridge and valley system of long, low ridges and river valleys running well up into Virginia and even Pennsylvania, and down into Georgia. Most of Tennessee’s earliest settlers came into the area down this valley, traveling from Virginia or Pennsylvania, so that, although until December of 1789 North Carolina claimed all of what is now Tennessee, many of our earliest settlers did not come from that state—a fact that would lead to trouble in the 1780s.

*The Tennessee River (and many of its tributaries) flow down the Great Valley, and once East Tennessee began to be settled, other pioneers followed these rivers into Middle Tennessee, although that was a hazardous undertaking, because before TVA improved the rivers in the 20th century, people traveling on the Tennessee faced dangerous waters at ‘The Suck’ near Chatanooga and the rapids of Muscle Shoals in Northern Alabama.

*Despite the dangers, many early travelers used these rivers—which is why a flatboat is part of the State Seal—because the Great Valley was cut off from Middle Tennessee by the Cumberland Plateau (named after the Duke of Cumberland, younger son of King George II), which, though flat on top, has very steep sides and is hard to travel over.

*The Cumberland Plateau is cut in the south by the Sequatchie Valley, which falls about 1000 feet in elevation below the top of the plateau around it.

*All this so far is East Tennessee.

*Middle Tennessee begins where the Cumberland Plateau falls away to the Highland Rim. This is an area of fertile soil that makes up most of Middle Tennessee, except for the Central Basin of Nashville Basin in the centre of the Highland Rim.

*The Central Basin includes the city of Nashville, and is watered by the Cumberland River. Consequently, it was the second part of Tennessee to be settled. However, today it suffers from pollution because the Rim around it tends to keep air pollution from being blown away.

*The Western Highland Rim is higher than the Eastern Highland Rim, but it drops sharply away into the Western Valley of the Tennessee River, where that river winds back from Alabama. This is the boundary between Middle and West Tennessee, and it also has fertile soil.

*West of the Tennessee River is a broad area that is often considered to be just part of the Gulf Coastal Plain, the flat lands along the Mississippi River as it flows down to the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, it can be divided into the Plateau Slope, as the Highland Rim slopes down towards the Mississippi, and into the Mississippi River Flood Plain itself. Both of these regions are very flat, and they contain some of the richest land in Tennessee (made up of alluvial soil from river overflow and loess deposited by glaciers in previous ice ages)—they were the heart of cotton plantations in Tennessee in the past, and still see a lot of cotton farming today.

*The Mississippi River Flood Plain also contains the only true, natural lake in Tennessee, or at least the only one of much size. Although TVA has created many artificial lakes by drowning rivers, Reelfoot Lake was created in December 1811-January 1812 by the New Madrid (Missouri) Earthquakes, which were so violent that church bells rang in Boston, sections of land sank, and the Mississippi River flowed backwards. Some of it flowed into an area where the land had subsided, and formed Reelfoot lake, a shallow, broad body of water, with very interesting life. Lake County, in Northwestern Tennessee is named after Reelfoot Lake, which to-day is part of Reelfoot Lake State Park.

*The Highland Rim is the largest single region in Tennessee, covering over 12,000 square miles. Both the Great Valley and the Plateau Slope cover about 8,000, and the Central Basin and the Cumberland Plateau cover about 5,500 each.

*The difficulty of crossing the Appalachian Mountains and the Cumberland Plateau, and the ease of using the rivers, especially the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi, and the Great Valley for transportation, meant that for the first 150 years or more of Tennessee’s existence, the Grand Divisions of Tennessee were not as well linked to one another as they were to nearby regions of neighbouring states, and this, along with different soils and climates (which permitted the growing of different crops) produced distinct regional differences in culture, politics, and population growth across the state.

*There will be a quiz on Geography on Tuesday, and, because rivers were so important to early Tennessee settlement and trade, there will be a quiz on them on Wednesday, and we’ll probably include Reelfoot Lake too, just for fun. Each quiz will have ten items.