The site that would become Memphis, the 18th largest city in the United States, began on the eastern banks of the Mississippi River, settled by various tribes of Native American Indians who lived there for untold thousands of years. Evidence indicates that the first town was founded around 1000 C.E. — a brief occupation known as the Ensley Phase that paved the way for more stable Native American communities in the following centuries.
                 
Settlements came and went, but around 1500 C.E., Chickasaw Indians controlled the bluffs on which Memphis now sits. Known as Mound Builders, the Chickasaw built massive mounds that still overlook the river today.

In 1541, Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto discovered the Mississippi River just south of Memphis. One hundred years later, French explorers sailed through, leading to French forts and occupation of the land. Tennessee became a U.S. territory in 1790, then a state in 1796. And though the land on which Memphis would ultimately rise still belonged to the Chickasaw Indians, the Chickasaw Nation relinquished it to the United States in 1818. One year later, the city of Memphis was surveyed, designed, and mapped.                 

General — and later U.S. President — Andrew Jackson, General James Winchester, and Judge John Overton are the primary founders of Memphis. When they mapped the city in 1819, Memphis was only four blocks wide and boasted a population of about 50.

The founders named the city Memphis, after the ancient capital in Lower Egypt that also sat on the banks of a mighty river — The Nile. The city of Memphis was chartered on Dec. 19, 1826, and James Winchester’s son, Marcus, became the new city’s first mayor.

Thanks to its strategic location on a major waterway — the Mississippi River — Memphis became an immediate and natural draw to a flood of European immigrants.

The potato famine that blew into Ireland in 1845 on the wings of an airborne fungus sent one million starving Irish peasants to U.S. soil — many into what became Memphis’s first neighborhood, the Pinch District, named after the newcomers’ malnourished, “pinch-gut” appearance.

At roughly the same time, a volatile stew of civil unrest and political discord had reached the boiling-over point throughout Europe, driving weary, opportunity-seeking Germans, Italians, French, and Austrians to America’s welcoming shores.

What ensued was a symphonic blend of circumstance, location, talent, business acumen, and true grit that pushed Memphis out of its Wild West days into the arms of progress. The immigrants established businesses, provided labor, built churches, and introduced artistic culture to a decidedly coarse, backwater town.                 

Memphis would flourish and fail throughout the next two decades. With the building of the Memphis Navy Shipyard in the mid 1840s and the Memphis and Charleston Railroad in 1857 — the last link in a chain of early railroads that connected the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi River — Memphis boomed as a center for commodities trading of two kinds: cotton and slavery. Both are publicly acknowledged today at Auction Square on North Main, which displays a plaque commemorating the two kinds of trade that — for better and worse — shaped much of Memphis’s current-day economy.

Because of memphis’s central location in the nation and its excellent transportation systems, the city became a coveted asset to the Union and Confederacy alike during the Civil War.                                    
                 
At the outset of the war, Memphis served as a military supply depot for the Confederacy. But soon after the failed river battle of June 6, 1862, Memphis became the Union headquarters for Army Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. From the river bluffs, as many as 10,000 people watched the Union victory — a short battle that reportedly provided a picnic-like atmosphere for the onlookers.

Gen. Grant established his headquarters at the Hunt-Phelan House at 533 Beale, where he planned the siege of Vicksburg. During that time, many of the newly freed slaves from the area flocked to the safety of Memphis and gathered near Grant’s headquarters for protection.

This marked the beginning of the black community’s relationship with Beale Street. From 1862 to 1867, Civil War displacements and Union Army occupation produced a phenomenal growth in the black population of the city. By 1865, the number of blacks in the city accounted for 16,509 of Memphis’s 27,703 inhabitants.

But whereas memphis escaped the civil war virtually untouched, it subsequently collapsed and died from the yellow fever epidemics of the 1870s. The devastation was so severe that Memphis was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1879 and surrender its charter.

The irony of the epidemic and the circumstances of the time, perhaps, was that while the white population was especially susceptible to the mysterious disease — later discovered in 1900 to be caused by diseased mosquitoes that made their way to Memphis from Caribbean or West African ships docking in New Orleans — much of the black population survived and remained to rebuild the city. Robert R. Church Sr., a freed slave who became the area’s first African-American millionaire, bought the first bond issued to restore the city’s charter in 1893 — at a price of $1,000.

Memphis fought its way back with a determined tenacity and grit that marks it to this day. The city’s first skyscraper — the D.T. Porter Building — rose 11 stories in 1895 to become the tallest building south of St. Louis, boasting one of the South’s first elevators. The “Father of the Blues,” W.C. Handy, played his way to Beale Street, where he penned his classic “Memphis Blues” in 1909, setting the stage for another significant chapter in the city’s remarkable music heritage.

Union Station train station opened in 1912, followed by another station, Central Station, in 1914, both precipitating the largest building boom the area had seen to date. Piggly Wiggly, America’s first self-service grocery store, was founded in Memphis and opened in 1916 at 79 Jefferson. By the 1920s, the city’s elite were soon showing off their finery at The Peabody Hotel and Orpheum Theatre. The good times were rolling once more.

But Memphis would be tested yet again.

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