SHELBY COUNTY/MEMPHIS

Shelby County has more than 900,000 residents, making it the largest county by population in Tennessee.

Its history and culture is dominated by Memphis, the largest city in Tennessee.

Here are some of the more important points about the history of Memphis:

de Soto's discovery

History books will tell you that on May 8, 1541, Hernando de Soto discovered the Mississippi River somewhere around the city of Memphis. However, we don’t know exactly where along the river this happened. Also, keep in mind that Native American tribes in the area had been using the river for centuries. He was not the first person to discover the river, but he is believed to have been the first European explorer to find the river.

Today there is a park in Memphis called De Soto Park. The park contains a monument that says de Soto stood there to see the river, although no one really knows whether this is true or not.

To learn more about de Soto, click here to be taken on a virtual tour of the De Soto National Memorial in Florida.

Bluff City

Downtown Memphis originally sat on a bluff that overlooks the Mississippi River, which is why one of its nicknames is "Bluff City." Much of the bluff has been "smoothed" out at great labor over the years, but yoyu can still get a sense of what the bluff looked like at Martyrs Park in Memphis.

This land has contained human civilization many times throughout its history. First it was a Native American village called Chucalissa. Then it contained a French fort called Fort Assumption. Next came a Spanish fort called San Fernando de las Barrancas.

 

From about 1750 until 1820 there were all sorts of disputes about who actually owned the land on which Memphis stands. Back then all of West Tennessee was generally considered Chickasaw territory, but that didn’t stop some Europeans from claiming that they owned part of it. In 1783, the government of the state of North Carolina “opened” what it claimed as its “western territory” to settlement, which means it started selling land that it claimed to own as far west as the Mississippi River. A man named John Rice bought 5,000 acres (what is now downtown Memphis ) for 50 cents an acre.

Rice was later killed in an attack by Native Americans, and his brother later sold the land to Nashville lawyer John Overton for only 10 cents an acre. Overton did nothing with the land until 1818, when the American government acquired the rights to all of what is now West Tennessee from the Chickasaw Indian Nation. Overton then partnered with two of his friends (James Winchester and  Andrew Jackson). They sent surveyors down to start laying out a town on John Rice’s old land and named it Memphis, after a city in ancient Egypt. Today you can still dig up old newspapers from 1820 that advertise the original sale of town lots in Memphis.

Memphis' rival

For many years, it wasn't clear that Memphis would be the largest city in West Tennessee. Memphis had a rival located about 40 miles upstream, where the Big Hatchee River poured into the Mississippi River. It was called Randolph, and for a time, more cotton came through Randolph than came through Memphis.

Eventually, however, Memphis got the postal route, then the railroad line, and emerged as the larger and more prosperous place for   farmers to sell their cotton.

The former site of Randolph is now a ghost town. Click here for a virtual tour "In Search of Randolph."

When Memphis died

Today, when you get really sick, you probably aren't in any danger of dying. Not in the old days. Until about 80 years ago, doctors couldn’t really do much to help you when you were sick. And there were things called epidemics, when disease would spread at such a rate that many people would die. One of the worst epidemics in American history was the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, and it practically destroyed the city of Memphis.

 

In August 1878, doctors started reporting cases of yellow fever in Memphis. Among the symptoms of the disease were fevers, chills, a yellowing of the skin, and black vomit.

There had been yellow fever epidemics there before, and people were terrified of the disease. Within days over half of Memphis’s 45,000 citizens fled the city. About 20,000 citizens remained, and about 14,000 of them were African Americans (many of whom couldn’t leave because they didn’t have enough money to leave).

The next few weeks would be horrible ones. Churches became makeshift hospitals. People were dying at such a pace that they couldn’t bury the dead fast enough. Most other towns in the area declared a quarantine against Memphis, which meant that no one from Memphis was allowed to visit their city (for fear that the disease would spread).

For reasons no one will ever understand, African Americans proved far more likely to survive yellow fever than whites. Less than 1,000 of the 14,000 blacks who stayed in Memphis died from the fever. But about 5,000 of the 6,000 whites who stayed in the city died.

The epidemic ended when the weather cooled off in October, but Memphis would never be the same. The government of the city of Memphis had to declare bankruptcy at one point; the banks and investors that had bought bonds backed by the city of Memphis were later paid 50 cents for every dollar of their investment. Meanwhile, many of the people who fled Memphis during the yellow fever never returned. The number of people who lived in Memphis would eventually start growing again in the 1880s and 1890s. But you can imagine how nervous the mere utterance of the words “yellow fever” would make them.

By the way: People didn’t know what caused yellow fever to spread back then. Today we know that the disease was spread by mosquitos.

Piggly Wiggly

The rise and fall of Piggly Wiggly and its founder Clarence Saunders is one of the most bizarre American business stories of all time.  

At the time most grocery stores were owner-operated. Customers would walk in the door and give their lists to a clerk, who would retrieve their items. If the clerk had six people waiting, the customer had to wait for those in line to be served. Additionally, most grocery stores extended credit to their customers, which means they bought groceries with an IOU and then paid their bill at the end of the month or season.

 

In 1918 Saunders started his new chain, naming it Piggly Wiggly. “It took me two hours to find a name that was ridiculous enough,” he later said. From its inception it was successful. Each store was identical, with each product in the same location in each store. The stores had one-way aisles to expedite traffic and create order. Piggly Wiggly advertised heavily. By 1922 there were 1,200 Piggly Wiggly locations in the United States, making it the largest grocery store chain in the country by far.

However, in 1923 Clarence Saunders lost control over Piggly Wiggly after a long and complicated series of events involving ownership of the company’s stock. Saunders went from being wealthy to being poor overnight. Saunders did not give up, however, and later started another grocery store chain that also became big. (It, however, went bankrupt during the Great Depression).

Today there are still some Piggly Wiggly stores throughout the South, but they aren’t controlled out of Memphis anymore. Meanwhile Saunders’ home, the Pink Palace, is a museum. Among its many exhibits is a replica of a Piggly Wiggly store.

Rock, the blues and soul

It’s hard to explain how it was that Memphis became such a great place for music. The main thing to keep in mind is that the music and people who wrote and sang it generally came from outside of the city and then moved to the city to perform it to audiences in places like Beale Street and on radio stations. It was in Memphis that people could make their living performing music.. and make their living they did. Here are three of the most famous:

W.C. Handy

Today Memphis is rightfully known as the “Home of the Blues.” No one deserves more credit for this than W. C. Handy -- the “Father of the Blues.”

William Christopher Handy was born in Florence, Alabama. His father was a minister who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. But young W.C. Handy loved music, and in spite of his parents wishes set his sights on a musical career.

But it wasn’t easy. As a young man, Handy played with a minstrel show for a time, then later got a job as band leader at Alabama A&M University in Huntsville. 

In 1909, Handy moved to Memphis and began leading bands on Beale Street and writing music there. Two years later he wrote a campaign song, originally called Mr. Crump for “Boss” Ed Crump of Memphis . He later re-released the song under the name Memphis Blues.

Handy went on to write and publish many great blues songs such as Beale Street Blues, Yellow Dog Rag, and St. Louis Blues. In the 1920s and 1930s, a time when blues music was extremely popular, Handy was an international superstar. 

B.B. King

Rufus King was born on a plantation in Itta Bena, Mississippi and began playing music on street corners when he was a boy. Then, in 1947, he hitchhiked to Memphis, which is where just about every other African-American musician was moving at that time. His big break came the next year when he played on radio station WMEM, and soon he became a regular on Beale Street restaurants and clubs. His nickname became “Blues Boy,” so he soon shortened his name to “B.B” King.

B.B. King is not only one of the greatest blues musicians; he is also one of the hardest working. In 1956 he played 342 concerts – nearly one per day! Today he is a member of both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame.

Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley may have done more to change American popular culture than any other person who has ever lived.

Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1935, and his working class family moved to Memphis when he was a child. In 1954 a record producer named Sam Phillips signed him to a small recording label called Sun Records, and two years later he moved onto a much larger label called RCA. For a while it looked like Elvis might be a country star (he once appeared on the Grand Ole Opry), but his manager Colonel Tom Parker saw something different in his young star. In 1956 Presley began going on national television shows, and from that point his career skyrocketed -- to the delight of teenagers and the horror of parents.

Presley died on August 16, 1977. Every year on that day his fans still make a pilgrimage to his Memphis home, Graceland.

The King Assassination

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, is the single most famous thing to have ever happened in Memphis.

King was in Memphis to show support for sanitation workers who had gone on strike a couple of months earlier. The strike started in February (which meant that trash collection stopped in February). By late March it and the reaction to it had led to riots and the occupation of the city by 4,000 National Guardsmen.

 

These were tense times. On the night of April 3, King made his famous speech at Mason Temple, predicting that “I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.” Click here to read a lengthy excerpt from this speech.

The next day, while he was standing on the balcony of the hotel, he was shot and killed by James Earl Ray. King’s assassination led to riots all over the United States. Click here to read an account of this tragic event from someone who was there. After his murder the city of Memphis (under pressure from President Lyndon Johnson) began working with the sanitation workers' labor union.

The Lorraine Motel, where King was killed, is today the National Civil Rights Museum. Click here for a virtual tour of it.

More on Memphis

There is more about the city of Memphis and its history scattered throughout the Tennessee History for Kids web site.

Click here for a virtual tour of the Memphis Cotton Exchange, the wonderfully preserved heart of the mid-South's cotton industry.

Click here for a tour of the National Civil Rights Museum.

Edward "Boss" Crump was the most powerful man in Tennessee for decades. Ida Wells was an African-American woman who launched an anti-lynching crusade in the late 1800s. Robert Church was the South's first Africa-American millionaire.

Finally, here's a photo of the Shelby County Courthouse.

The Memphis Quiz

1. (TRUE OR FALSE) Hernando de Soto was the first person to discover the Mississippi River.
2. What American president co-founded Memphis?
3. What was the name of the West Tennessee town that rivaled Memphis in its early years?
4. What animal caused the spread of yellow fever in Memphis?
5. What was the name of Clarence Saunders’ grocery store chain?
6. What do the letters “B.B” in B.B. King’s name stand for?
7. Why was Martin Luther King visiting Memphis in April 1968
8. What became of the hotel where he was shot?

For more information

Memphis historian Perre Magness has written a wonderful book called Memphis: A Children's History. It can be purchased in the Memphis area at The Booksellers at Laurelwood, Burke's bookstore and Pinocchio.

Also, if you are going to be in Memphis you might consider scheduling a tour with Jimmy Ogle, a downtown guide who does specialized tours of everything from what it was like before the city was there to a history of its manholes.

Click here to visit his website.