5th Grade ESL Tennessee History
Part Three:  Leaving the Farm

A mother and daughter plant a garden in DeKalb County in the 1940's
PHOTO: TN State Library and Archives
  What happened after the Civil War?
1) Many Tennesseans left their family farms and moved to the big city to work at the factories.  Why do you think this happened?

Students at the Little Greenbrier School in Elkmont
PHOTO: TN State Library and Archives
2) Life changed for many people.
  • Families left their extended families and lived as a core family.
  • Children no longer had farm chores to do.  They had more time to go to school. Would you have liked this change?
  • Songs were written about these hard times of change. They became the lyrics of country music and the blues.

Miners at the Dunlap Coke Ovens Park
PHOTO: Dunlap Coke Ovens Park
3) Large factories and industrial operations were built throughout Tennessee.
  • Coal mines were plentiful and copper became heavily mined in Polk County (east of Chattanooga)
  • Factories made everything from clothes to furniture. e.g., Shelbyville, Tennessee because known as Pencil City, USA, because of its pencil factories.

Our New Tennessee History Words
* factories: Factories are buildings where goods are manufactured.
* extended families: An extended family includes your grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and other relatives.
*core family: Your core family includes your father, mother, brothers, and sisters.
*lyrics: The words to a song are called its lyrics.
*blues: The blues is a type of slow, sad-sounding jazz.
*industrial operations: Industrial operations manufacture goods and services for sale.
*plentiful: When there is a lot of something, it is plentiful.
*copper: Copper is a reddish-brown metal.

Read more about this time in history on  Tennessee History for Kids. Click here to learn about the histories of the University of Tennessee, Fisk and Vanderbilt -- all of which came out of this era; here to read about African-American publisher Richard Boyd; here to read about Robert Church, the South's first black millionaire; here to read about James Napier; here to read about Mary Murfree; click here to be taken to Rugby, former site of a colony started in Tennessee in the 1880s.
  Click here to go to the next section.