agriculture; business; disease; economy; epidemics; family; home keeping; landowners; land speculation; political parties; politics; slavery; social life; weather; women; yellow fever;
Little is known about Anna (Annie) W. Conner; however, more can be ascertained about her ancestry. John O’Connor, the first of Annie’s ancestors to settle in America, migrated from Ireland in 1745 and settled in Culpeper County, Virginia, and...
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...
agriculture; Bedford family; cotton; Duke family; education; family; finding aids; Germantown, Tennessee; immigration; Nashoba; newspapers; public service; Shelby County; slavery; social life;
The Britton Duke Papers are a chronicle of an early Germantown, Tennessee, family. The papers were donated to the Memphis and Shelby County Room by Louise Duke Bedford, great granddaughter of Britton Duke, and her nephew, Edward C. Duke. The...
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...
appropriations; Crump, E. H.; government; immigration; law; legislation; military; pardons; parole; passports; politics; post office; public service; rural routes;
Kenneth McKellar was born in 1869 near Richmond, Alabama. In 1892, after receiving a Bachelor’s, Master’s and law degree from the University of Alabama, he moved to Memphis. He began his extensive political career when he was selected as a...
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...
agriculture; Bedford family; cotton; Duke family; education; family; Germantown, Tennessee; immigration; Nashoba; newspapers; public service; Shelby County; slavery; social life;
The Britton Duke Papers are a chronicle of an early Germantown, Tennessee, family. The papers were donated to the Memphis and Shelby County Room by Louise Duke Bedford, great granddaughter of Britton Duke, and her nephew, Edward C. Duke. 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...
Henry Loeb, III was born into a wealthy and prominent family in Memphis in 1920. After graduating from Brown University and serving as a Naval lieutenant World War II, he returned to civilian life in Memphis. As Secretary of Loeb’s...
bridges; casualties of war; family; fashion; government; law; mayors; military; parks; public service; railroads; recreation; social life; women; World War I;
Harry H. Litty was born in 1862 in Toledo, Ohio. After attending North Kentucky College, he began his business career with the Toledo, Cincinnati, and St. Louis Railroad. His work with the railroad brought him to Memphis, where he was an engineer...
Edward Hull Crump was born near Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1874. He was raised by his mother, Mollie Nelms Crump, after his father, a cotton planter and former Confederate officer, died during the yellow fever epidemic of 1878. When he was 19...
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...
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...
brothels; clergy; disease; doctors; epidemics; family; health; medicine; memorials; monuments; nuns; nurses; parks; physicians; priests; public health; public service; quarantines; religious orders; yellow fever;
In the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s Memphis was devastated by a series of deadly yellow fever epidemics. The disease, which was spread by mosquitoes, caused nausea, vomiting and delirium and destroyed cells in the liver, which cause the victim’s skin...
architecture; Civil War; clubs; education; entertainment; land grants; law; mayors; parks; recreation; slavery; social life; streets;
The Memphis Historical Society had its roots in the Old Folks of Shelby County, which was founded in 1857 and published a journal called the Old Folks Record. This organization evolved into the Confederate Relief and Historical Association in 1866...
ALSAC; building construction; cancer; children; entertainers; disease; health; hospitals; medical research; medicine; public service; St. Jude Children's Research Hospital; Thomas, Danny;
Danny Thomas was one of nine children of Lebanese immigrants. He was born Muzyad Makhoob in 1914 in Deerfield, Michigan and was raised in a loving, yet poverty-stricken home in Toledo, Ohio. His name was Americanized to Amos Jacobs, but in 1940...
Morris Solomon was born in Lomza, Poland in 1894. As a young man he moved to Memphis, where his relatives owned a small grocery store called the Sunset Market. Solomon became a police officer in 1919, starting out as a patrolman and going on to...
arts; business; cemeteries; funerals; landscape architecture; libraries; market research; Memorial Park; postcards; public service; sculpture; women;
Katherine Hinds was born in Mississippi and spent her early years in Tupelo. She attended Randolph Macon Woman’s College in Virginia, but transferred to Southwestern College (now Rhodes) in Memphis and went on to graduate Phi Beta Kappa in...
Maxine Atkins was born in 1929, the youngest of the three children of Joseph and Georgia Rounds Atkins. Maxine graduated from Booker T. Washington High School at age 15 in 1945. She went on to earn a Bachelor’s degree in biology from Spelman...
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...
