Read more Chattanooga History Columns
- Gaston: Paul John Kruesi was Edison's right-hand man
- Robbins: The old Richardson's house and the Civil War
- Gaston: James Williams was a man of the world
- Raney: Mason Evans, the 'Wild Man of the Chilhowee'
- Gaston: The legacy of Adolph Ochs endures
- Martin: Ed Johnson said, 'I have a changed heart,' the day before his lynching in Chattanooga on 1906
- Thomas: The inventiveness of Judge Michael M. Allison
- Moore: Chattanooga's first Chinese community
- Summers, Robbins: Chattanooga's Tuskegee Airman - Joseph C. White
- McCallie: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 says so!
- Gaston: John McCline's Civil War - from slave to D.C. parade
- Raney: Exploring Chattanooga businesses in the Green Book
- Elliott: Remembering the Freedmen's Bureau in Chattanooga
- Gaston: Nancy Ward was a beloved, respected Tennessean
- Martin: Prohibition - the noble experiment
- Elliott: 'A shameful, disgraceful deed': The destruction of the Sewanee cornerstone
- Gaston: Robert Cravens was ironmaster, Chattanooga area's first commuter
- Robbins: Dr. T.H. McCallie's Christmas 1863
- Robbins: Journalist writes of a trip to Missionary Ridge in 1896
- Summers, Robbins: Mine 21 disaster - gone but not forgotten
- Elliott: Collegedale incorporates to avoid Sunday 'blue laws'
- Gaston: 'Marse Henry' Watterson's journalism fame began in Chattanooga
- Robbins: Orchard Knob battle recalled in 1895
- Elliott: Chattanoogans joined in an 'orgy of joy and gladness' on Armistice Day, 1918
- Thomas: Noted service, speakers are marks of Rotary Club of Chattanooga since 1914
- Summers and Robbins: Remembering noted Tennessee author North Callahan
- Raney: 'I auto cry, I auto laugh, I auto sign my autograph'
- Gaston: Sequoyah's alphabet enriched Cherokees
- Robbins: A look at Sam Divine's life during the Civil War
- Robbins: Memories of a Confederate nurse
- Robbins: More notes from Bradford Torrey's 1895 visit to Chickamauga Battlefield
- Robbins: Journalist in 1895 details visit to Chickamauga Battlefield
- Elliott: Telephone exchange firebombing was distraction for grocery store robbery
- Gaston: Worcester brought Christ's message to Cherokee at Brainerd Mission
- Robbins: 1896 travel diary: 'A Week on Walden's Ridge'
- Gaston: Elizabeth Strayhorn, WAC Commandant at Fort Oglethorpe
- Robbins: The history of the Friends of Moccasin Bend National Park
- Moore: Do you own a Sears Roebuck home?
- Summers and Robbins: Camp Nathan Bedford Forrest in World War II
- Gaston: Hiram Sanborn Chamberlain remembered
- Elliott: Daisy the center of tile, ceramic manufacturing in Hamilton County
- Gaston: FDR inaugurates the Chickamauga Dam
- Summers, Robbins: Interned WWII Germans had it easy at Camp Crossville
- Elliott: A war correspondent on Lookout Mountain
- Gaston: Chickamaugas finally bury hatchet in Tennessee Valley
- Gaston: Chickamaugas in Chattanooga
- Robbins: The history of the Riverbend festival
- Raney: Sadie Watson, the first woman elected in Hamilton County government
- Moore: Remembering Chattanooga's Hawkinsville community
- Elliott: Welsh coal miners transformed Soddy after the Civil War
- Gaston: Chattanooga's best-kept secret
- Elliott: Cabell Breckinridge loses his horse
- Raney: Martin Fleming is the people's judge
- Gaston: The amazing career of Francis Lynde
- Martin: Hamilton County's Name Sake: Alexander Hamilton
- Summers, Robbins: The crosses at Sewanee
- Bledsoe: The fiery truce at Kennesaw Mountain
- Moore: Talented architect's life cut short by tragedy
- Rydell: Chattanooga's place in soccer history
- Robbins: Tennessee Coal, member of the First Dow Jones Industrial Average
- Raney: In the barber chair
- Lanier: Becoming the Boyce Station Neighborhood Association
- McCallie: John P. Franklin: Living history among us
- Barr: Chattanooga's first railroad: The Underground Railroad
- Summers, Robbins: Charles Bartlett was a Pulitzer Prize winner, Kennedy confidant
- Rainey: 'We have seen it'
- Elliott: Feinting and fighting at Running Water Creek and Johnson's Crook
- Gaston: The Spring Frog Cabin at Audubon Acres
- Raney: Wauhatchie Pike was moonshine motorway
- Robbins: Oakmont was home of venerable Williams clan
- Summers and Robbins: Rebirth of the Mountain Goat Line
- Elliott: Bad investments led to Soddy Bank failure in 1930
- Summers and Robbins: Pearl Harbor attack left football behind
- Gaston: Jolly’s Island namesake had long ties with Sam Houston
- Return Jonathan Meigs, Indian Agent
- Moore: Did you know about St. Elmo's other two cemeteries?
- Summers: Orme - Marion County's almost lost community
- Davis: Spooky revival at Sharp Mountain in 1873
- Robbins: The story of Longholm
- Raney: Women labored to help the U.S. win World War I
- Even in the city, the 'wheel' changed everything
- Murray: Confederate dilemma after Chickamauga
- J.B. Collins — Newsman extraordinaire
- Robbins: The Story of the Lyndhurst Mansion
- Chattanooga artist and wife lost on the Lusitania
- Chattanooga History Column: Battelle, Alabama and the Battelle Institute
- John Ross, a founder of Chattanooga
- Hamilton County casualties in World War I
- Chattanooga Power Couple
- 'Somewhere in France'
- The Ray Moss family
- Battery B from Chattanooga
- Ulysses S. Grant, Clark B. Lagow, and the Chattanooga Bender
- Songbirds Museum Timeline
- Hamilton County World War 1 roster
- The Soddy Girl and the Memphis Belle
- Blues icon Bessie Smith was the Empress of Soul
- Women's Army Corps at Chickamauga
- Emma Bell Miles' life at the top of the 'W'
- The Tivoli Wurlitzer is one of Chattanooga's priceless assets
- Chattanooga in struggle for freedom during Civil War
- October 1918, Chattanooga paralyzed by Spanish flu epidemic
- Eli Lilly and the Ditch of Death
- One hundred years ago, Chattanooga goes to war
- The legacy of Anna Safley Houston
- Harriet Whiteside was ahead of her time
- Southern Adventist University
- Chattanooga native's writings aided Civil Rights movement
- Zion College, Chattanooga's only African American College
- The North Shore's hidden past
- Mayme Martin -- Businesswoman and community leader
- Thomas Sim's epic struggle for freedom
- Top of Cameron Hill was price of rerouting interstate
- Cameron Hill has rich history
- Temperance movement included Harriman university
- The sweetest music this side of Heaven
- Conquistadors at Chattanooga
- Chattanooga and the 'General'
- Chattanooga's first Thanksgiving, 1863
- Chattanooga's greatest flood caught city unaware
- Opening the Cracker Line
- European trip in 1900 enlightens Sophia Scholze Long
- Sophia Scholze Long spoke out when others were silent
- Little South Pittsburg and its big silent movie stars
- Lot attendant recalls hottest job in Chattanooga
- Chattanooga's Forest Hills is final resting place for known, unknown
- Burritt College -- Pioneer of the Cumberlands
- Chattanooga's nicknames trace city's evolution
- The 25th annual meeting of the Tennessee Press Association
- Clemons Brothers Furniture Store
- The Short Life of the USS Chattanooga
- Ellen Jarnagin McCallie lived a truly remarkable life
- Dr. Jonathan Bachman was a revered city father
- Second guessing the Confederate failure on Missionary Ridge
- Nancy Kefauver, ambassador for the arts
- William Gibbs McAdoo kept his Southern roots
- Chattanooga's Secretary of the Treasury
- Howard Baker remembered as a statesman/photographer who snapped history
- Tivoli's last picture show
- The history of one of Chattanooga's oldest businesses
- Chattanooga's roller derby skaters
- Myths of Coca-Cola in Chattanooga
- Chattanooga's neighborhood grocery stores
- The tale of the Scottsboro Boys
- The people's history of Chattanooga
- Howard School is Chattanooga's reminder of Reconstruction
- Elevator operator, painter, mystery man: meet Rice Carothers
- Raulston Schoolfield made enemies amid his rise to power
- Website lets users peer into Chattanooga's past
- The flood of 1917
- Chattanooga's 'wickedest woman' buried at Forest Hills
- History of Cummings Highway
Howard School, which celebrated its 150th anniversary in August 2015, is arguably Chattanooga's most visible symbol of Reconstruction, a period described by historian James W. Loewen as "that period after the Civil War when African-Americans briefly enjoyed full civil and political rights."
The school is named after U.S. Gen. Oliver O. Howard (1830-1909), who in June 1862 lost an arm at the Battle of Seven Pines-Fair Oaks in Virginia. After fighting at Gettysburg and Chancellorsville, he was transferred to the Army of the Cumberland in Chattanooga, where he took part in the Union assault that captured Missionary Ridge.
Appointed commander of the Army of the Tennessee, he fought in Atlanta and joined Sherman's famous March to the Sea. Howard was known as the "Christian general" for making policy decisions based on his strong religious beliefs. From May 1865 to July 1874 he served as commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau where his mission was to integrate freed slaves into society. In 1874 he went to Washington Territory, where he pursued and received the surrender of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce.
At the war's end, thousands of blacks poured into Chattanooga and other Southern cities.
By early 1865, several thousand freed people occupied Camp Contraband across the river from Chattanooga. Among groups responding to the crisis was the American Missionary Association. Ewing Ogden Tade, born in Illinois in 1828, became interested in the association while a student at Iowa College (later Grinnell) in Davenport, Iowa, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1858. He then studied at Chicago Theological Seminary and was ordained a Congregationalist minister in 1862. By 1865 he was in Memphis preaching to slaves while his wife, Pennsylvania native Amanda Louise, and his brother, James A. Tade, taught in a Freedmen's School.
Promoted to field agent, Tade began working with the freedmen at Camp Contraband in Chattanooga. His principal contribution was the organization of Howard School, located at Sixth and Pine in a former Confederate medical facility, a newly whitewashed wooden building that was 50 feet square. He staffed the school with Northern teachers from the missionary association and Western Freedmen's Aid Commission, and solicited free textbooks from Northern publishers. In May of 1867 he was named city school commissioner, and a few months later the Board of Aldermen designated Howard the city's first public school.
The Tennessee State Historical Marker for Howard School describes Tade as a black Congregationalist minister. But C. Stuart M. McGhee, in his Tennessee Historical Quarterly (Winter 1984) article "E. O. Tade, Freedmen's Education, and the Failure of Reconstruction in Tennessee," groups Tade with "other Northern white teachers [who] helped to facilitate the emancipated blacks' desires for training and literacy." McGehee prefaces that statement by crediting the freedmen themselves as providing the main impetus for educational opportunity.
Tade also sought to improve religious and economic opportunities for the freedmen. In 1867 he organized a church at Ninth and Lindsay streets, called variously Union Chapel, Pilgrim Church, and finally the First Congregationalist Church of Chattanooga. Both blacks and white Northerners attended the church, until blacks set up their own churches and drifted away. Tade purchased land near the federal fortifications at Fort Wood to build housing for 50 to 100 families, known among blacks as "Tadetown." He also organized a branch of the National Freedmen's Savings and Trust Bank.
As Hamilton County's first superintendent of education, he reported early in 1869 that Hamilton County had 82 public schools, 28 of them for blacks-quite an accomplishment in a state that before the war was prejudiced against public schools.
As the state and local power structures began to re-emerge, Tade's projects suffered. White schools received more funding, the Freedmen's Bank closed, and the land in Fort Wood that had been confiscated by the Freedmen's Bureau was returned to its pre-war owners.
In 1873 Ewing Tade left Chattanooga. After a year teaching at Tusculum College, he and his family left the South. He was a missionary to the Indians and Chinese in California and built Congregational churches in Antioch and San Mateo. He returned east several times, once to receive an honorary doctorate in divinity from Grinnell, but never again visited Chattanooga.
After Tade died in Los Angeles in 1919, a colleague wrote in The Grinnell Review: "He was a kind-hearted man but attacked the evils of the world with stunning blows. He was one of the champions of Liberty."
Kay Baker Gaston is a regional historian and former Chattanoogan. For more visit Chattahistoricalassoc.org.