Meigs County Tennessee History and Recollections.

09/02/2026

09/02/2026

Decatur Academy 1895-96

09/01/2026

Join us on September 12, 2026, at the Tennessee State Library & Archives in Nashville for the Current Research in Tennessee Archaeology (CRITA) conference, hosted by the Tennessee Division of Archaeology.

This free, day-long event, open to everyone, showcases the latest archaeological research happening across the state. Hear directly from archaeologists and students as they share new discoveries and insights into Tennessee’s rich and fascinating past.

Whether you’re a history buff, student, professional, or just curious, this event is for you!

View the full schedule & details at tnstateparks.info/TN-Archaeology

09/01/2026

The Battle of King’s Mountain, a small but consequential engagement fought in South Carolina in October 1780, was part of the larger Southern Campaign and involved almost exclusively American combatants—Patriot militia, many from what would become Tennessee, and led by Colonel Isaac Shelby, versus a Loyalist (Tory) force under British Major Patrick Ferguson. In our next free Lunch and Learn event on September 17, Dr. David Coffey will discuss the stunning Patriot victory that helped change the trajectory of the War for American Independence.

Learn more and RSVP 🎟️: https://tnmuseum.org/calendar-of-events/event/6243305

08/30/2026

There was a stretch of years up here when the prettiest dress a little girl owned might have started out as a sack of chicken feed, and nobody thought a single thing about it. 🧵

Feed and flour companies figured out somewhere in the 1930s that farm wives were already repurposing those cotton sacks into clothing, so they started printing them in actual floral patterns and bright colors instead of plain white, turning a practical necessity into something genuinely pretty. My grandmother told me she and her sisters would go with their daddy to buy chicken feed and get to pick which pattern he bought, since he needed three matching sacks to make a full dress. She still remembers the exact blue gingham pattern of her favorite one, worn to church every Sunday for almost two years before she outgrew it. Nothing about it felt like poverty to them at the time. It just felt like Tuesday. 🌼

It's easy to romanticize hardship from a distance, but there was real skill and real pride in a mother who could turn feed sacks into something a little girl felt pretty in. That kind of resourcefulness doesn't get talked about near enough these days. Did your family have any stories about clothes made out of something that wasn't originally meant to be worn?

08/30/2026

There's a wild green that grows along fence rows and ditch banks all through these mountains every spring, and if you don't know exactly what you're doing with it, it can actually make you sick. 🌿

Poke sallet comes from the pokeweed plant, and the young leaves have to be boiled and drained not once but twice, sometimes three times, to remove the toxins that make the raw plant dangerous. My grandmother learned it from her mother, who learned it from hers, picking only the tender young leaves in early spring before the stalks turned that telltale reddish purple. Once it's boiled down properly, poke sallet gets fried up with a little bacon grease and scrambled eggs, and it tastes something like a cross between spinach and collards, with a flavor you genuinely cannot buy at any grocery store no matter how hard you look. There was even a popular song about it back in the sixties that most folks outside these mountains have long since forgotten. 🍳

It's exactly the kind of food that required somebody older teaching you precisely how to do it right, because getting it wrong wasn't just unpleasant, it was actually risky. That kind of knowledge doesn't get passed down through a cookbook. Did anybody in your family ever cook poke sallet, or is this the first you're hearing of it?