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News Updates
History Exhibit To Open In Knoxville
Sun Photo by Nelson Morais Cherel Henderson, second from left, is the director of the East Tennessee Historical Society. On July 30, society officials, including Henderson, gave a tour for the news media, including The Greeneville Sun, of a new multimedia exhibit on three centuries of East Tennessee history called “Voices of the Land: The People of East Tennessee.” The grand opening will be Saturday and Sunday, Aug. 23 and Aug. 24. Admission will be free on those two days.
Source: The Greeneville Sun
by Nelson Morais
Date: 2008-08-21
From young Davy Crockett's first rifle to an American flag that adorned a Civil War bridge burner's coffin, Greene County's history is well represented in an exhibition on East Tennessee history that opens Saturday, Aug. 23, at the East Tennessee History Center in downtown Knoxville.
The permanent exhibit, "Voices of the Land: The People of East Tennessee," was developed for the History Center by the East Tennessee Historical Society.
The $3 million, 8,500 square-foot exhibit tells the story of more than three centuries of life in East Tennessee through the "voices" of 350 individual East Tennesseans. Its promotional literature states that the exhibit is "the only exhibition to encompass the entire history of East Tennessee."
Historical Artifacts
"Voices of the Land" features 500-plus historical artifacts, and includes more than 350 stories of individual East Tennesseans, as well as 25 media programs, including touch screen interactives and three feature videos.
The permanent exhibit opens Saturday and Sunday, Aug. 23-24, with a two-day, free event featuring traditional music, children's activities, storytelling, trolley tours to downtown Knoxville historic sites, reenactors and other events.
The multimedia, visually-arresting exhibit includes an authentic circa-1857 log cabin and outbuilding and a reenactment on video from three women's diaries. Part of one diary reenactment was filmed at the Dickson-Williams Mansion earlier this year.
The history of East Tennessee's 35 counties is told in the exhibit.
Greene County Artifacts
"Voices of the Land" includes at least 24 artifacts from Greene County, including the flintlock rifle "Betsy" bought by Crockett in 1803 when he was 17 years old.
According to exhibit literature, when Crockett fell in love, he traded the rifle to a neighbor for a "courting horse."
In the Civil War section of the exhibit, viewers of the exhibit will see the small remains of an American flag made circa 1861 that draped the coffin of one of five Unionist bridge burners that were caught and hanged.
It is explained that only a remnant of the flag remains because the bridge burner's widow cut stars and squares from the flag for loyal Unionists to pin to their coats for reunions and burials held in following years.
State Of Franklin Item
Among the other Greene County artifacts is the key to the capitol building of the State of Franklin, which was located in Greeneville.
The State of Franklin functioned as an independent government from 1784 until 1788. A replica of the capitol is on College Street.
According to Cherel Henderson, director of the East Tennessee Historical Society, exhibit-goers should plan on spending about one hour "to do the tour right" when visiting "Voices of the Land."
Other parts of the exhibit include a section on the presidency of 17th U.S. President Andrew Johnson, a Rev. Samuel Doak table and lithograph, and mission school books from Cedar Creek Academy missionaries in Greene County who established schools and churches throughout the Appalachian Mountains from about the 1880s to 1920.
Further, there is a very well preserved, tall chest of drawers constructed circa 1810-1820 whose original owner is reported to be Valentine Sevier, brother of John Sevier, whose first wife was Mary Dinwiddie. The Dinwiddies were prominent in Greene County from the time of its settlement in the 1700s. The chest of drawers descended in that family.
"History is exciting when it is personal," Henderson said.
'God Have Mercy On Us'
The exhibit includes the words of a worker at the secret city of Oak Ridge, where uranium was produced for the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, that ended World War II. The worker recalled her supervisor's warning, "(We) cannot tell you what you are doing. I can only tell you that if our enemies beat us to it, God have mercy on us."
Henderson credited Don Bible, an expert on the Civil War bridge-burners who lives in Mohawk, as "instrumental in helping us with artifacts and research."
Local Helpers
She also singled out Marie Harmon for helping with a loan of the mission school books, Wilhelmina Williams and Betsy Bowman.
Henderson said planning and assembling the exhibit took four years, with the "heaviest" work done in the past 12 months.
"We had a team of scholars we met with in the beginning that helped us with the story line," she said.
Henderson and Adam Alfrey, project manager of "Voices of the Land," led tours of the exhibit for the media, including a Greeneville Sun reporter, on July 30.
"I think East Tennessee is a kind of distinct region from the rest of the state politically, geographically and culturally. This exhibit shows the roots of those differences," Henderson said.
She said the diagonal valley that runs through East Tennessee was "first, the Great Indian Warpath, then the Great Wagon Road into East Tennessee from Virginia, and now primarily I-81."
She added, "The Cumberland plateau cut us off from the rest of the state in our early years."
"Overall, we were a land of small farms, without the (large) plantations of Middle and West Tennessee. We had much less slave ownership" than those two other regions of Tennessee, she said.
Hours of the exhibit are Monday through Friday, 9 to 4 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 to 4 p.m.; and Sundays, 1 to 5 p.m.
For more information, call the Historical Society at (865) 215-8830.
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