business; charity; department stores; family; Goldsmith family; public service; retail merchandising; suburbs;
The Goldsmith Department Store Collection was given to the Memphis and Shelby County Room by descendants of company founder Jacob Goldsmith. Materials in the collection include family papers, letters, photographs and legal documents, as well as...
arts; Beethoven Club; entertainment; music; performing arts; theater;
Miss Martha Trudeau, a piano teacher, couldn't have dreamed of the possibilities when she invited three women to tea on October 27, 1888. They discussed the lack of classical music opportunities in Memphis and they decided to start a club, the...
discrimination; gender equality; National Organization for Women; nonprofit organizations; politics; women;
The National Organization for Women (NOW), a dedicated women's rights advocacy coalition, was founded in 1966, amid much controversy over the proposed direction of the women's rights movement. In its nascent stages, the national chapter of NOW...
books; celebrations; disease; entertainment; epidemics; festivals; insurance; Mardi Gras; public service; recreation; social life; yellow fever;
A leading citizen of Memphis in the decades after the Civil War, Colton Greene is best remembered as the originator of the Memphis Mardi Gras. Little is known of Greene’s early life other than that he was born in South Carolina in 1832. Greene...
Prior to World War II, Enschede, the largest cotton manufacturing city in the Netherlands, and Memphis, the Mid-South’s cotton-exchange center, maintained firm business ties. Enschede, situated six miles from the German border, was completely...
agriculture; authors; Bartlett, Tennessee; Bond family; business; Cordova; cotton; family; farming; government; medicine; politics; public service; railroads; slavery; writers;
Among the most prominent citizens of early Shelby County were three brothers, Samuel, John and Washington Bond. Samuel, born in 1804, was a practicing physician. During the late 1840s or early 1850s, he and his wife, Mary Lucy, built a splendid...
clubs; education; entertainment; Farrow family; neighborhoods; philanthropy; public service; recreation; social life; social organizations; study clubs; volunteerism; Whitehaven; women;
Whitehaven in the early 1900s was a small community with two churches, a school with some forty pupils, two stores and about twenty homes. Each afternoon a group of young ladies who called themselves the Whitehaven Walking Club took a walk...
Henry A. Montgomery was born in Fermanagh County, Ireland in 1829. At fifteen he began an apprenticeship with Thos. Karnahan & Sons, a timber, slate and iron dealership. He immigrated to Canada in the spring of 1848 and moved later that year...
airplanes; B-17; military; war bonds; World War II;
In September 1942 a new B-17 Flying Fortress was delivered to Bangor, Maine, to a crew of ten men led by Captain Robert Morgan. The airplane was named the Memphis Belle in honor of Margaret Polk, Captain Morgan’s fiancée in Memphis. -- The...
African Americans; agriculture; clubs; cotton; dentists; entertainment; mayors; police; public service; race; recreation; social life; women;
Dr. Ransom Q. Venson was a native of Rapides Parish, Louisiana. In 1912 he graduated from Meharry Medical School in Nashville and then moved to Memphis to establish a dental practice in this city. In 1934, he married Ethyl B. Horton, a native...
The Sultana left Memphis on April 27, 1865 carrying three times the number of passengers for which it was designed. Tragedy struck later that evening when the boilers ruptured, causing the steamer to explode. Many were killed immediately from the...
Gideon Johnson Pillow was born in 1806 near Columbia, Tennessee. He attended the University of Nashville and went on to practice law in Columbia with his good friend James K. Polk. Pillow and his wife Mary Martin Pillow had 14 children. -- Pillow...
art education; arts; clubs; historic preservation; museums; neighborhoods; public service; women;
Florence Makin McIntyre is remembered as the First Lady of Memphis Art. She was born in Memphis in 1878 and grew up in her family home, the Pillow-McIntyre House, at 707 Adams Avenue in the historic Victorian Village neighborhood. As a child she...
Future Memphis, Inc., was founded and incorporated in February 1961, when a group of business leaders meeting over lunch decided that the city needed an organization to determine what efforts could be made in business, education, the arts, or in...
Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, or Freedmen’s Bureau as it was commonly known, in March 1865 as the end of the Civil War drew near. An agency of the War Department, the Freedmen’s Bureau had two main...
E. William Hale was born in 1875 in Oxford Mississippi, and moved with his family to Whitehaven in 1894. In addition to running a farm, the Hale family owned a general store at the corner of Highway 51 and Whitehaven-Capleville Road in rural Shelby...
The firm of S.B. Williamson and A.S. Hancock, Grocers and Commission Merchants, was established at 49 Front in Memphis around 1850. Like similar businesses of their day, they sold a variety of items including groceries and farm supplies, and also...
Flooding impacted the society, business environment and ecology of the Mid-South. These mostly man-made disasters interrupted and permeated all aspects of life until the mid-twentieth Century. Floods were so frequent and sometimes so devastating...
airplanes; Battle of Memphis; Civil War; Korean War; martial law; mayors; military; planes; propaganda; public service; ration cards; war supplies; World War I; World War II;
The Memphians During War collection consists primarily of materials relating to the involvement of Memphians in the Civil War, World War I and World War II. -- The material on the Civil War largely relates to events which took place in Memphis and...
downtown; entertainment; fires; Goldsmith family; hotels; recreation; social life;
In the mid-19th century, the Gayoso House was known up and down the Mississippi River for its elegance and hospitality. Nestled in a grove of trees above terraces and landscaped gardens, it had a view of the river for fifteen miles. From the...
