Shelbyville, Tennessee

Shelbyville is a city in and the seat of government of Bedford County, Tennessee, United States. The city was laid out in 1810 and incorporated in 1819. As of the 2020 census, Shelbyville had a population of 23,557. The city is a hub of the Tennessee Walking Horse industry and has been nicknamed "The Walking Horse Capital of the World".

Geography

Shelbyville is in Middle Tennessee on a Highland Rim limestone bluff upon the banks of Duck River, which flows around the southern and eastern sides of town.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 18.6 square miles (48.2 km2), all land.

Arts & culture

Shelbyville was featured in Miranda Lambert's video "Famous in a Small Town".

The city was also profiled in the film Welcome to Shelbyville, as part of the PBS documentary film series Independent Lens. The film spotlights recent demographic changes in the community, with a focus on the growing number of immigrants from Latin America and Somalia (both Somalis and people from the Bantu minority ethnic group).

Shelbyville was also featured in GADA film's Our Very Own (2005), directed by Cameron Watson. The film, dubbed "a love story to Shelbyville", highlighted some of the peculiar and humorous memories of Shelbyville in the 1970s.

Economy

Shelbyville is known as "The Pencil City" because of its historical importance as a center of wood-cased pencil manufacturing. It is still a site for manufacture of writing instruments. In 1982, National Pen Corporation purchased its largest competitor, U.S. Pencil and Stationery Company. Sanford Corporation produced the Sharpie, the world's top-selling writing instrument, in the city. It was in Shelbyville in 1991 that the world's longest pencil was produced, a plastic-cased pencil 1,091 feet (333 m) long, weighing 27 pounds (12 kg).

One of last four pencil manufacturers in the United States, Musgrave Pencil Company, is located in Shelbyville.

Other major business operations in Shelbyville include manufacturers Calsonic Kansei, Newell Rubbermaid, Cebal America, and Jostens; it is also home to a Tyson Foods facility and a distribution center for Wal-Mart, as well as several nationwide trucking businesses.

Education

Bedford County School District operates primary and secondary schools. Shelbyville Central High School is the local public high school.

After the end of non-penal slavery in the United States the AME Church opened a school for African-American children. The public school system graduated its first black class in 1890. The schools for African-American children operated by the district were East Bedford School and Bedford County Training School for Negroes (a.k.a. John McAdams High School and also Harris High School for Negroes). Schools racially integrated after 1964.

The Tennessee College of Applied Technology - Shelbyville is one of 46 institutions in the Tennessee Board of Regents System, the seventh largest system of higher education in the nation. This system comprises six universities, fourteen community colleges, and twenty-six technology centers. More than 80% of all Tennessee students attending public institutions are enrolled in a Tennessee Board of Regents institution.

Shelbyville was the home of Turner College, a HBCU established in October 1885 with support from the Kentucky Annual Conference AME Church. Bishop Henry M. Turner was its founding leader, and eventually the school was renamed for him. A private school supported by local people, there was a high school, a normal school, an "industrial institute," and a Bible study institute included in the institution. Located in two brick buildings, between 1920 and 1924 the institution had 385 students. Apparently the fiscal support for the school didn't continue though, and in the late 1920s the "starving little school" was permanently closed.

Notable people

Gordon Anderson (born 1944), sculptor

Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper (born 1954). In Shelbyville, his family owns the historic River Side Farmhouse, built for his great-great-grandfather, Jacob Morton Shofner, in 1890, and the Gov. Prentice Cooper House in Shelbyville, built in 1904 for his grandfather, William Prentice Cooper, who served as the mayor of Shelbyville. His father, Prentice Cooper, who was born in the River Side Farmhouse, was the Governor of Tennessee from 1939 to 1945.

Sumner Archibald Cunningham (1843–1913), founding editor of the Confederate Veteran, buried in Shelbyville's Willow Mount Cemetery.

Dickie Gardner, horse trainer

Daryl Holton Convicted Murderer

Joe Jenkins, Major League Baseball player

Harold A. Katz (1921–2012), Illinois state representative and lawyer

Sondra Locke (1944–2018), actress/director

Judy and Joe Martin, a married couple who trained horses together

Joyce Paul (1937–2016), country music singer

Ernest A. Pickup (1887–1970), printmaker

Samuel Escue Tillman (1847–1942), U.S. Army officer and superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York