High History 3 - Tennessee History for Kids

HIGH SCHOOL HISTORY
Part Three: War, gunpowder and epidemic

The War Memorial Building in Nashville is dedicated to all Tennesseans who fought and died in World War I.

When people talk about things that happened in Tennessee between 1910 and 1920, they generally focus on World War I (Alvin York in particular) and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. We're going to add some interesting and important things to that discussion, such as the Old Hickory powder plant, the influenza epidemic and the Dixie Highway.

Alvin York poses during World War I
PHOTO: Library of Congress

Alvin York

Alvin York is one of the most famous war heroes in American history. When he was originally drafted into the U. S. Army in 1917, he resisted going to war, claiming that his religion prohibited him from killing another man. But he lost his legal battle to stay out of the service and was sent to France to fight. The next year, in the Battle of the Argonne Forest, York performed brilliantly. According to stories (which are impossible to verify), he killed 25 Germans and captured 132 prisoners.

Click here to read an excerpt from York's New York Times obituary.

York in the 1960s
PHOTO: York Historic Park

Incredibly, we're still learning things about Alvin York that no one knew. In November 2006 several researchers from Middle Tennessee State University traveled to the battlefields of France and -- using battle maps and satellite navigation aids -- may have located the exact spot where York earned the Congressional Medal of Honor. Click here to learn more about this.

Old Hickory

World War I left its mark on Tennessee, and the most vivid example of this is the town of Old Hickory (near Nashville). For obvious reasons the military needed a lot of gunpowder for the war effort. In 1917 the federal government decided to build a large gunpowder plant northeast of Nashville, at a place where the Cumberland River creates an area surrounded on three sides by water (security is rather important when you are creating gunpowder). The place soon became known as Old Hickory (after President Jackson).

The Old Hickory plant in the 1920s
PHOTO: Tennessee State Library and Archives

The construction of the Old Hickory plant was a Herculean undertaking. It took two thousand men, five hundred mules, and twenty-nine days to build a railroad spur to the site. After that came men, bricks, lumber, steel, concrete and more men, lumber, steel, and concrete. Some of the men worked on the factory itself -- a massive structure with 68 boilers and nine 200-foot smokestacks. Others built houses for the estimated 30,000 people who would be working there.

At the height of the construction phase about 50,000 people -- carpenters, laborers, machinists, mechanics, welders, architects, and engineers -- were working around the clock on Old Hickory's powder factory. Many of the workers slept in shifts, ten to a room, in tiny shacks called tar babies. Others stayed in hotels and boardinghouses in Nashville or Gallatin and commuted by train every day.

On July 1, 1918 -- less than six months after the project had been announced -- Old Hickory began producing gunpowder. By November it was producing a million pounds of gunpowder a day. In building the powder plant and its surrounding village, the government spent $85 million, about $3 million of which went to DuPont (the company that built the facility under contract with the federal government).

When the war ended in November 1918, however, the United States Army didn't need all that gunpowder. Soon thereafter, it abandoned its new plant at Old Hickory. Five years later DuPont bought the facility (but not the surrounding village) from the federal government. It converted the facility to a civilian chemical plant (which it remains today). The surrounding village became known as Old Hickory, Tennessee (which it remains today).

The influenza epidemic

A military hospital in Kansas curing the influenza epidemic
PHOTO: National Museum of Health and Medicine

You may not read much about this in any of your history books. But this epidemic killed at least twice the number of people who died in World War I. And, unlike World War I, it wasn't confined to the battlefields. It came home. People died in homes, hospitals, churches, and in the streets, of towns and cities across Tennessee. Nearly 8,000 people died in Tennesee from the influenza epidemic, though a lot more got the disease, thought they were going to die and managed to survive.

Today we live in a world where most of us are vaccinated against just about every killer disease. But people weren't then. And it is almost impossible for us to imagine what happened when the epidemic made its way through Tennessee in the late fall of 1918. People were dying so fast that undertakers were having a hard time keeping up. You might have a co-worker, or classmate, who is fine one day, home sick the next, and dead the third, leaving the rest of the office, or class, wondering who else might be infected. Church services were called off in many Tennessee cities for months. The worst cities hit were Memphis, Nashville, and Old Hickory. "The man who dug his neighbor's grave today might head the funeral procession next week," one Nashville physician wrote.

By February 1919 the epidemic was over. But the catastrophe eventually resulted in a wave of reform and professionalization within the medical community. Prior to that time, it was generally easier to become a doctor than it was to graduate from an undergraduate college. But partly as a result of the epidemic, large national foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation began spending millions on medical education, focusing its efforts on creating large well-endowed medical schools.

Meharry Medical College in the 1920s
PHOTO: Meharry Medical College

Nashville, for instance, had seven small medical schools prior to 1918. A few years later it had two -- Vanderbilt Medical School (for whites) and Meharry Medical College (for African Americans) -- that were much better endowed than those seven had been. And when the Vanderbilt Medical School opened in 1925 it was the largest combined hospital and medical school under one roof in the United States.