Help Preserve Tennessee’s Stories
“It has been a wonderful experience. Doing these interviews has brought back memories and
gotten us to thinking about what this community has meant to all of us.
We had it in our hearts and minds. Now we’re beginning to get it down on paper.”
What happens when you gather a dozen volunteers and more than 30 participants to work together over several months to collect interviews, pore over old church records, dig through old school books, and comb through a treasure trove of photographs?
You encounter stories of baptisms in Mossy Creek, fish fry events commemorating Emancipation, and gatherings at Cherokee Dam. You get recollections of blackberry picking and football games. You gather memories of chess pie from a favorite school cook at a long-ago shuttered school.
In short, you strengthen a community in the present day by shedding light on that community’s past. Not only that, you preserve it for future generations.
This is the work of our program The Neighborhood Story Project, which we implemented this summer in Jefferson City’s Jay Bird Hill neighborhood and other sites around the state. At each site, Tennesseans were empowered to research and share the histories—and have a voice in the future—of the places they call home.
With your support we can continue to engage with these stories. Your tax-deductible year-end gift to Humanities Tennessee will help preserve local histories, as well as civic life and literary arts, for all Tennesseans.
Please consider donating today.