Vacation in Tennessee

Vacation in Tennessee

Many tourists like to have a vacation in the state of Tennesse so they can have a vacation in the state to see the culture, the history, the cities, towns and rural areas of the state. Some may want to see the culture, entertainment and history of the state. Some may want to have a cabin, cottage, house, apartment, flat or villa in the state. Some may want to see the state to see the views and culture. Some may want to see the major tourist attractions of the state such as the historic venues and landscapes and mountains.

Tennessee is a state located in the Southern United States. In 1796, it became the sixteenth state to join the Union. The capital city is Nashville, and the largest city is Memphis.

Major cities in the state include ; Bristol, Chattanooga, Clarksville, Jackson, Johnson City, Kingsport, Knoxville, Memphis, Murfreesboro, Nashville

Bristol is a city in Sullivan County, Tennessee, USA. It is the twin city of Bristol, Virginia, which lies directly across the state line between Tennessee and Virginia. The boundaries of both cities run parallel to each other along State Street located in their common downtown district. Along with Kingsport, Tennessee and Johnson City, Tennessee, the Bristols form the Tri-Cities.

Chattanooga, is a large city in Tennessee, and the seat of Hamilton County, in the United States of America. It is located in southeast Tennessee on Chickamauga and Nickajack Lake, which are both part of the Tennessee River, near the border of Georgia, and at the junction of three interstate highways, I-24, I-75, and I-59.

Clarksville is a city in Montgomery County, Tennessee, USA. Clarksville is the county seat of Montgomery County and is Tennessee's fifth largest city. Clarksville is the principal central city of the Clarksville, TN-KY metropolitan statistical area, which consists of Montgomery County, Stewart County, Tennessee, Christian County, Kentucky and Trigg County, Kentucky,

Clarksville is the home of Austin Peay State University. The Fort Campbell, Kentucky, United States Army post, home to the 101st Airborne Division, is approximately 10 miles from Clarksville, straddling the Tennessee-Kentucky state line.

Clarksville was incorporated in 1785, and named for General George Rogers Clark, frontier fighter and Revolutionary War hero. Clarksville is home to The Leaf-Chronicle, established in 1869.

Nashville lies on the Cumberland River in the northwestern portion of the Nashville Basin. Nashville's topography ranges from 385 ft above sea level at the Cumberland River to 1,160 feet above sea level at its highest point.

Tennessee borders eight other states: Kentucky and Virginia to the north; North Carolina to the east; Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi on the south; Arkansas and Missouri on the Mississippi River to the west. Tennessee ties Missouri as the states bordering the most other states. The state is trisected by the Tennessee River. The highest point in the state is Mt. LeConte at 6,593 feet, Clingman's Dome, which lies on Tennessee's eastern border, is the highest point on the Appalachian Trail but it is on the North Carolina side of the state line. The lowest point is the Mississippi River at the Mississippi state line. The geographical center of the state is located in Murfreesboro.

The state of Tennessee is geographically and constitutionally divided into three Grand Divisions: East Tennessee, Middle Tennessee, and West Tennessee. Tennessee features six principal physiographic regions: the Blue Ridge, the Appalachian Ridge and Valley Region, the Cumberland Plateau, the Highland Rim, the Nashville Basin, and the Gulf Coastal Plain. Tennessee is home to the many caves in the United States.

vacation in tennessee

The Blue Ridge area lies on the eastern edge of Tennessee, bordering North Carolina. This region of Tennessee is characterized by high mountains, including the Great Smoky Mountains, Chilhowee Mountain, the Unicoi Range, and the Iron Mountains range. The average elevation of the Blue Ridge area is 5,000 feet above sea level. Clingman's Dome is located in this region.

West of the Highland Rim and Nashville Basin is the Gulf Coastal Plain, which includes the Mississippi embayment. The Gulf Coastal Plain is, in terms of area, the predominant land region in Tennessee. It is part of the large geographic land area that begins at the Gulf of Mexico and extends north into southern Illinois. In Tennessee, the Gulf Coastal Plain is divided into three sections that extend from the Tennessee River in the east to the Mississippi River in the west. The easternmost section, about 10 miles in width, consists of hilly land that runs along the western bank of the Tennessee River. To the west of this narrow strip of land is a wide area of rolling hills and streams that stretches all the way to Memphis; this area is called the Tennessee Bottoms or bottom land. In Memphis, the Tennessee Bottoms end in steep bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. To the west of the Tennessee Bottoms is the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, less than 300 feet above sea level. This area of lowlands, flood plains, and swamp land is sometimes referred to as the Delta region.

To the west of East Tennessee lies the Cumberland Plateau; this area is covered with flat-topped mountains separated by sharp valleys. The elevation of the Cumberland Plateau ranges from 1,500 to 1,800 feet above sea level. West of the Cumberland Plateau is the Highland Rim, an elevated plain that surrounds the Nashville Basin. The northern section of the Highland Rim, known for its high tobacco production, is sometimes called the Pennyroyal Plateau and is located in primarily in Southwestern Kentucky. The Nashville Basin is characterized by rich, fertile farm country and high natural wildlife diversity.

The area now known as Tennessee was first inhabited by Paleo-Indians nearly 12,000 years ago. The names of the cultural groups that inhabited the area between first settlement and the time of European contact are unknown, but several distinct cultural phases have been named by archaeologists, including Archaic (8000-1000 B.C.), Woodland (1000 B.C. - 1000 A.D.), and Mississippian (1000-1600 A.D.), whose chiefdoms were the cultural predecessors of the Muscogee people who inhabited the Tennessee River Valley prior to Cherokee migration into the river's headwaters.

In the 16th century, three Spanish exploration expeditions passed through what is now Tennessee. The Hernando de Soto expedition entered the Tennessee Valley via the Nolichucky River in June 1540, rested for several weeks at the village of Chiaha (near modern Douglas Dam), and proceeded southward to the Coosa chiefdom in northern Georgia.

Chronicles of the Spanish explorers, while scant, provide valuable information regarding the Tennessee Valley's 16th-century inhabitants. Most of the valley, including Chiaha, was part of the Coosa chiefdom's vast sphere of influence. Inhabitants spoke a dialect of the Muskogean language, and lived in complex agrarian communities centered around fortified villages. Cherokee-speaking people lived in the remote reaches of the Appalachian Mountains, and may have been at war the Muskogean inhabitants in the valley. The village of Tali, visited by De Soto in 1540, is believed to be the Mississippian-period village excavated at the Toqua site in the 1970s. The villages of Chalahume and Satapo, visited by Pardo in 1567, were likely predecessors (and namesakes for) the later Cherokee villages of Chilhowee and Citico, which were located near modern Chilhowee Dam.

Possibly because of European diseases devastating the Native tribes, which would have left a population vacuum, and also from expanding European settlement in the north, the Cherokee moved south from the area now called Virginia. As European colonists spread into the area, the native populations were forcibly displaced to the south and west, including the Muscogee, Yuchi, Chickasaw and Choctaw peoples. From 1838 to 1839, the US government forced Cherokees to leave the eastern United States. Nearly 17,000 Cherokees were forced to march from Eastern Tennessee to Indian Territory west of Arkansas. This came to be known as the Trail of Tears, as an estimated 4,000 Cherokees died along the way. In the Cherokee language, the event is called Nunna daul Isunyi— the Trail Where We Cried.

In the days before statehood, Tennesseans struggled to gain a political voice and suffered for lack of the protection afforded by organized government. Six counties, Washington, Sullivan and Greene in East Tennessee and Davidson, Sumner, and Tennessee in Middle Tennessee, had been formed as western counties of North Carolina between 1777 and 1788.

After the American Revolution, however, North Carolina did not want the trouble and expense of maintaining such distant settlements, embroiled as they were with hostile tribesmen and needing roads, forts and open waterways. Nor could the far-flung settlers look to the national government, for under the weak, loosely constituted Articles of Confederation, it was a government in name only.

The westerners' two main demands, protection from the Indians and the right to navigate the Mississippi River, went mainly unheeded during the 1780s. North Carolina’s insensitivity led frustrated East Tennesseans in 1784 to form the breakaway State of Franklin.

John Sevier was named governor, and the fledgling state began operating as an independent, though unrecognized, government. At the same time, leaders of the Cumberland settlements made overtures for an alliance with Spain, which controlled the lower Mississippi River and was held responsible for inciting the Indian raids. In drawing up the Watauga and Cumberland Compacts, early Tennesseans had already exercised some of the rights of self-government and were prepared to take political matters into their own hands.

Such stirrings of independence caught the attention of North Carolina, which quietly began to reassert control over its western counties. These policies and internal divisions among East Tennesseans doomed the short-lived State of Franklin, which passed out of existence in 1788.

Southwest Territory

When North Carolina finally ratified the Constitution of the United States in 1789, it also ceded its western lands, the Tennessee country, to the Federal government. North Carolina had used these lands as a means of rewarding its Revolutionary soldiers. In the Cession Act of 1789, it reserved the right to satisfy further land claims in Tennessee.

Congress designated the area as the Territory of the United States, South of the River Ohio, more commonly known as the Southwest Territory. The territory was divided into three districts, two for East Tennessee and one for the Mero District on the Cumberland, each with its own courts, militia and officeholders.

President George Washington appointed William Blount as territorial governor. He was a prominent North Carolina politician with extensive holdings in western lands.

Admission to the Union

In 1795, a territorial census revealed a sufficient population for statehood. A referendum showed a three to one majority in favor of joining the Union. Governor Blount called for a constitutional convention to meet in Knoxville, where delegates from all the counties drew up a model state constitution and democratic bill of rights.

The voters chose Sevier as governor. The newly elected legislature voted for Blount and William Cocke as Senators, and Andrew Jackson as Representative.

Tennessee leaders thereby converted the territory into a new state, with organized government and constitution, before applying to Congress for admission. Since the Southwest Territory was the first Federal territory to present itself for admission to the Union, there was some uncertainty about how to proceed, and Congress was divided on the issue.

Nonetheless, in a close vote on June 1, 1796, Congress approved the admission of Tennessee as the sixteenth state of the Union. They drew its borders by extending the northern and southern borders of North Carolina, with a few deviations, to the Mississippi River, Tennessee's western boundary.

In the early years of settlement, planters brought slaves with them from Kentucky and Virginia. Enslaved African Americans were first concentrated in Middle Tennessee, where planters developed mixed crops and bred high quality horses and cattle, as they did in the Inner Bluegrass region of Kentucky. East Tennessee had more subsistence farmers and few slaveholders.

During the early years of state formation, there was support for emancipation of slaves, founded in part on fears by whites of competition with slave labor (who could be hired out) in the middle and eastern parts of the state. At the constitutional convention of 1796, free Negroes were given the right to vote if they met residency and property requirements. Efforts to abolish slavery were defeated at this convention and again at the convention of 1834. The convention of 1834 also marked the state's retraction of suffrage for most free African Americans. By then slaveholding had expanded markedly in the state, especially in the Mississippi Delta where cotton planters held large groups of enslaved African Americans, often numbering in the hundreds.

The American Civil War, to a large extent, was fought in cities and farms of Tennessee, only Virginia had more battles.

Many battles were fought in the state, most of them Union victories. Ulysses S. Grant and the United States Navy captured control of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers in February 1862 and held off the Confederate counterattack at Shiloh in April of the same year.

Capture of Memphis and Nashville gave the Union control of the Western and Middle sections. Control was confirmed at the Battle of Stones River at Murfreesboro in early January 1863.

After Nashville was captured (the first Confederate state capital to fall) Andrew Johnson, an East Tennessean from Greeneville, was appointed military governor of the state by Lincoln. The military government abolished slavery in the state and Union troops occupied much of the state through the end of the war. The long occupation depleted resources and contributed to a breakdown in the social order in many areas.

The Confederates continued to hold East Tennessee despite the strength of Unionist sentiment there, with the exception of pro-Confederate Sullivan County.

The Confederates besieged Chattanooga in early fall 1863 but were driven off by Grant in November. Many of the Confederate defeats can be attributed to the poor strategic vision of General Braxton Bragg, who led the Army of Tennessee from Shiloh to Confederate defeat at Chattanooga.

The last major battles came when the Confederates invaded in November 1864 and were checked at Franklin, then totally destroyed by George Thomas at Nashville in December.

In 1925, WSM, a powerful Nashville radio station, began broadcasting a weekly program of live music which soon was dubbed the Grand Ole Opry. Such music came in diverse forms: banjo-and-fiddle string bands of Appalachia, family gospel singing groups, and country vaudeville acts like that of Murfreesboro native Uncle Dave Macon. Still the longest-running radio program in American history, the Opry used the new technology of radio to tap into a huge market for “old time” or “hillbilly” music. Tennessee thus emerged as the heartland of traditional country music—home to many of the performers as well as the place from which it was broadcast to the nation.

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