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, arrived 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 nonslaveholding smallhold 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 economy.
