On September 2nd 1940 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in Tennessee to open the nation’s newest National Park. In Britain the country had been at war for a year and was fighting for survival that long hot summer in the air fight that became known as the Battle of Britain. America was by contrast, on vacation:
As Gary and I stared at the huge photograph of Newfound Gap all we could see was the vast swathes of litter scattered underfoot. We both noticed it independently of each other. We are products of our own era.
Nashville is the capital of Tennessee, founded 217 years ago and home to 1.3 million people. If you’ve heard of the city you know it as the place where country music thrives and leads the way. For Covid leery people like my wife and I a concert in mask-free Nashville is out of the question for now. but we are lucky in that Barbara and Gary knew where to go on a rainy afternoon in a city apparently still half closed by the extended New Year’s Holiday weekend.
There are 96 lights in the ceiling of the atrium of the State Museum in its splendid new abode, a temple of the history of and understanding of Tennessee and where it’s seven million residents have come from. The design in the dome is there to represent the state wild flower, the passion flower. Confusingly the Iris is the state’s official cultivated flower and the one most often quoted.
The particular duality of Tennessee continues with the three stars on the state flag. They represent the fact that Tennessee was the 16th state admitted to the union (the third”new state” after the 13 colonies) OR the stars represent the mountainous east, the rolling middle third and the plains of the western third of the state. You choose.
They quilt in Tennessee and this extraordinary modern building acknowledges that fact with designs included in the architecture.
We started out wandering at random and picked up at docent at two pm for an hour long tour that accidentally stretched to 75 minutes. He was surprised by our enthusiasm for the subject even though Gary and Barbara were aware of a lot of it.
I had no idea such a magnificent building might exist, never mind the stories contained within.
I was attracted to the history of course, the stories of abolishing child labor, of prohibition, of suffrage.
Baby faced State Representative Harry Burn voted against women getting the vote. He voted that way twice when the 19th Amendment hung in the balance and Tennessee could have been the state to top the balance in favor of amending the constitution. Then he got a note from his mother who urged him to get on with it. So he did. And women got the vote. “Hurrah and vote suffrage!” She wrote to her son on the floor of the house. By so few words can history hang in the balance.
Blacks were in a different category of course in the southern pantheon and their story came later. But Prohibition was already cheerfully subscribed to before the entire nation went dry.
I have been meaning to find a biography of William Walker who it turns out is from Tennessee. His exploits in Latin America before the civil war deserve to be known because he was a very strange character. He loved slavery and wanted it imposed everywhere so he went to Mexico and gave it a shot there. He ended up in Nicaragua as President(!) pushing the locals to enslave themselves. That went about as well as you might imagine. I heard about him when I was last in Central America and am determined to fig into his life. Imagine my surprise at seeing him stare back at me from the walls of this place.
“Damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead!” is the famous saying attributed to a native son of Tennessee of all places. David Farragut served 59 years in the US Navy becoming the country’s first full admiral. His father was Spanish and came to the Caribbean to run a trading ship. He served in the Revolutionary Navy in South Carolina and moved to Tennessee to run a river boat. And I had no idea Farragut’s son the Admiral was from Tennessee. Here he is:
Our docent tour started in the Pleistocene era when hairy elephants called mammoths wandered the state and humans ate them.
I find the idea of elephants, albeit hairy ones, roaming the forests of Tennessee to rather odd but a cave explorer four years ago found a near pair of moccasins from 350 AD well preserved and clearly identifiable. One farming brother donated one moccasin to the museum the other declined. Here it is:
From Pleistocene to more modern times the museum charts a course through history. The docent talking to Gary and Barbara:
Another bizarre find was an 18th century canoe dug up from a river bed by a farmer and out to use as a manger. The feeding cows wore out one side of the old canoe.
You can see the wavy side in the photo below. The thirty foot piece of timber had to be moved by crane from the old museum to the new one while it was under construction and the building was completed around it.
A Conestoga wagon built in the city of that name in Pennsylvania. It was donated by descendants of the family that used it to travel to the fro tier of Tennessee and later out west tonTexas and then back again.
The story of westward expansion encapsulated below:
It’s a common theme as we try to redress the wrongs of the expansion but the toughness and bravery of the pioneers is illustrated by the way they traveled and lived.
For a while Tennessee was the frontier and Indians lived by treaty in the west of the state, a buffer against Spain who occupied the Louisiana Territory. After the Louisiana Purchase brought the western areas into the US the Indians in treaty lands no longer served as a buffer and they were moved out unceremoniously on the Trail of Tears. Consequently there is no Indian reservation land left in Tennessee.
The State of Tennessee produced more Presidents than you might imagine. Three men came from here to govern the US in the mid 19th century. Andrew Jackson hated banks and vetoed plans to prolong the Second Bank of the United States.
James Polk whose inauguration hat you are modeled below by Barbara was president during the land grab that was the Mexican War. Andrew Johnson, the third of them became the accidental president after Lincoln’s murder.
Below we find loot from the Mexican war when a soldier stole Mexican General Santa Ana’s wine chest and brought it home. All these bizarre artifacts are held by the state thanks to the historical society founded in 1830 would you believe and who preserved these items for the state.
I got caught up in the history of Tennessee and ignored a lot of more contemporary stuff including I’m sorry to say the music.
Tennessee’s role in the Civil War was totally ambiguous. The state voted twice against secession and only swung to the Confederacy after Lincoln basically called for a draft to raise troops to fight. Much of the state opposed seceding and one county actually wanted no part of it and declared independence.
There were bloody battles in the state and the battles of Franklin and Nashville in late 1864 basically wiped out Confederate General Hood’s army and ended the war in the western half of the Confederacy.
Tennessee was predictably southern in reconstruction and the Jim Crow years though the states response to the required integration of education was interesting.
I’d heard about the battles in Arkansas and Louisiana to keep black students out of white schools but I’d never heard about the passive aggression in Tennessee.
There was no opposition to integration here. The schools simply ignored the pioneer black students in their midst. The tactic was demoralizing and effective at sending most of the integrated students back to their former schools. I had never heard of this non violent tactic used by the segregationists.
After a heavy diet of history and dog walking we had dinner at an Indian restaurant owned by a chef frequently seen on the food channel.
Oddly enough Maneet Chauhan was herself eating with friends in the dining room of her restaurant much to Laynes’s delight but she slipped away and done to none of the diners. Oh well.
It was a fine dinner in good company celebrating the modern diverse Nashville home to country music and a wide array of dining.
The Food Network describes Chauhan as the “Queen of spice” and we found that to be true in the appetizers we shared:
And the lamb korma three of us chose for the main course:
And an unusual green Mac and Cheese side dish…
Gary asked the waiter, a jovial drummer in real life to take our photo…
…but for some reason Rusty wasn’t allowed in.
When eventually we got home Rusty and I passed out while the sturdier members of the crew stayed up to dissect a very long day of moochdocking.
