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TENNESSEE
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.
Eastern Tennessee
Until the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority,
the opening of Great Smoky Mountains National
Park and the building of the interstate highways,
life had continued in the remote hills and valleys
of eastern Tennessee in much the same way as it
had ever since the arrival of the first pioneers.
Now visitors flock here for its endless expanses
of natural beauty; and as a result, especially
in the fall, the Smokies can get clogged with
traffic. Most communities are small, and either
over-touristed or just bland. The two main cities,
modern Knoxville and picturesque Chattanooga,
have much in common, including healthy post-World
War II industrial growth, thanks to cheap TVA
power.
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