Tennessee

Nashville has a full-size copy of the Parthenon. It was built for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in 1897, when the city liked to call itself the Athens of the South. The original was made of plaster and wood and meant to come down after the fair, but people loved it, and it was later rebuilt in concrete. It still stands in Centennial Park.

Tennessee is 3 states in one, and the pictures follow the land. East Tennessee is mountains. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established in 1934, and older photographs show the cabins, mills and small farms of the families who lived in the coves before the park. Chattanooga sits on the Tennessee River below Lookout Mountain, where Union troops fought the Battle Above the Clouds in November 1863.

Middle Tennessee is Nashville and the rolling farmland around it. Andrew Jackson's house, the Hermitage, is just outside the city. In 1925 a Nashville radio station began a Saturday night barn dance program that became the Grand Ole Opry, and the city's identity as a music town grew from there. West Tennessee is flat cotton country running down to Memphis, on the bluffs above the Mississippi. Memphis was a cotton market and river town, and Beale Street became a center of the blues in the early 1900s.

In 1933 Congress created the Tennessee Valley Authority to control flooding, make electricity and bring jobs to one of the poorest regions in the country. Norris Dam was its first big project, and TVA photographers documented the dams, the power lines and the farms and towns that were moved to make room for the reservoirs. Those pictures are a record of a whole landscape changing within a few years.

In the Smoky Mountain pictures, look for the cleared fields and fences on the slopes. Much of what is now forest inside the park was farmland or logged-over land in the early 1900s.