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
(First of two parts)
When William Gibbs McAdoo stepped down from his position as secretary of the treasury in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson expressed his keen regret over losing the "distinguished, disinterested and altogether admirable service you have rendered this country." The role that Chattanooga played in giving a start to this "World war cabinet officer, former senator, and distinguished in law, finance and shipping" is little known.
McAdoo was born near Marietta, Ga., shortly before Gen. William T. Sherman's army swept across the McAdoo farm and left the family in "biting poverty." Growing up in Milledgeville, he and his siblings were "always illy clad, inadequately covered, shivering in wretchedness." Reconstruction, he wrote, "was a nightmare of misgovernment, carpet-baggers, unheard-of-taxes, swarms of idle negroes and discouraged white men. The land was filled with low rascals who had come from the North to make their fortunes." The elder McAdoo was judge, educator and Confederate soldier, and his wife was a talented writer.
Philip M. Chase's doctoral dissertation in 2008 pointed out that the father had high hopes for his fourth son and required him to practice declamation and debate for hours at a time and to memorize melodramatic poetry.
After his father joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee, young William entered its law school but left before graduating to earn living expenses as a court clerk. He came to Chattanooga in 1882 to be deputy clerk for the federal district court.
During his 10 years in Chattanooga, he first shared an office with John T. Lupton, also a promising attorney, who abandoned law for Coca-Cola bottling, and then formed a partnership with another young lawyer, J.H. Barr. He quickly made a wide circle of friends. One was Sarah Hazelhurst Fleming. When the two married at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in 1885 , the Times reported that "The church was brilliantly illuminated. Besides all the gas jets, fully fifty tapers were lighted. Beautiful plants were placed upon and around the altar and lovely flowers and plants were in the nave in great profusion. When the bridal party reached the church, the organ pealed an anthem and the male chorus, numbering twenty, all attired in white cassocks, proceeded up the aisle in twos, chanting the hymn." In "Chattanooga's Story," John Wilson wrote "Chattanoogans found McAdoo to be a very genial, lovable young fellow with a liking for hard work. He was a live wire who made friends easily and kept them."
In 1887 McAdoo made a trip to Ohio to induce manufacturing firms to come south for opportunities in Chattanooga. Soon officials of a large mower and reaper works moved to the city's Central Avenue.
McAdoo left Chattanooga in 1892 for Knoxville in an unsuccessful attempt to electrify its street car system. He then moved to New York City, where he joined Francis R. Pemberton, son of Confederate Gen. John C. Pemberton, to form Pemberton and McAdoo, selling investment securities. After a second streetcar failure in Knoxville, the ambitious young lawyer returned in 1897 to New York City, where he led an effort to build a railway tunnel under the Hudson River connecting Manhattan with New Jersey.
In 1908 the popular president of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad oversaw the opening of the two "McAdoo tubes," now part of the PATH rapid transit system. His railroad's motto was "Let the public be pleased."
At the Democratic Convention in Baltimore in 1912, Vice-Chairman McAdoo promoted Woodrow Wilson for the presidency. Wilson won the top office and appointed McAdoo secretary of the treasury. After Congress established the Federal Reserve System in December 1913, the secretary oversaw the development of the central bank as its first chairman (ex officio).
When the war broke out in Europe, British and French investors began to liquidate their American securities, convert them to gold and repatriate their holdings to Europe, thus weakening the U.S. dollar. McAdoo boldly closed the New York Stock Exchange for four months. NYU economist William Silber wrote in 2007 in "When Washington Shut Down Wall Street," that the treasury secretary averted a panic and collapse of the American financial system in the early stages of the war and laid the groundwork for a decisive shift in the balance of power from Europe to the U.S.
The federal government took over the operations of the nation's disjointed railroads during the war emergency, and President Wilson appointed the McAdoo to an additional position as director general of the railroads.
Frank (Mickey) Robbins is an investment adviser with Patten and Patten. For more visit Chattahistoricalassoc.org.