The Place Time Cannot Erase: The Jackson-Madison County Library's TN Room

Story by Shelby Tyre

Photos by Maddie McMurry

December 13, 2024, Christmas at the Carnegie. That night, I feel the weight of Jackson’s history for the first time. I had been to the Carnegie before, but that night, before the festivities began, I let myself slow down. I wander through the displays, pausing here and there until I find myself standing in front of a collection about Sonny Boy Williamson, the legendary blues musician.

I read every word, study every artifact, and let the presence of his story settle over me. Jack Wood approaches me and says, “That’s me, I was there, I helped find his grave.” He has worked in the Tennessee Room at the Jackson-Madison County Library for years. He had actually helped track down the very artifacts on display in front of me.As a lover of history — local, national, and international — I was hooked. We talk for an hour, discussing not just Sonny Boy, but the vast, often hidden history of Jackson that lives within the Tennessee Room. 

As a filmmaker, I find my mind spinning with possibilities. Before we part ways, I ask Jack if I can visit the Tennessee Room to hear more about what he and others had discovered over the years.

I imagined something grand — a dedicated space, carefully curated like a museum. But when I arrive, what I find is something different, something denser, something alive.

The room is overflowing. Boxes labeled with names, dates, and handwritten notes line the walls. Shelves, lined with thick binders, groan under the weight of history itself.

It is not a room of displays — it is a room of discovery. 

I meet Evelyn Keele, the Tennessee Room Manager, and Miller Coleman, the Tennessee Room Librarian. 

Everything here is fragile, not just because of age but because paper is living history, and time is always trying to erase it.

“Paper is acidic by nature,” Evelyn tells me. “It actually destroys itself over time.”

That’s why every document in this room is placed into acid-free folders, stored in carefully controlled conditions, and sometimes digitized. Preservation is slow, costly, necessary work. 

Without this process, the past would crumble away. But in this room, history waits.

Evelyn shows me a pair of wedding shoes from the 1850s, delicate and small.

Church bells ring out the union of Mary Jane Baldwin and Robert Cartmell.

Cartmell’s diaries would become one of the most valuable records of Jackson’s history. 

On a low shelf sits a gas pipe from the 1870s, once used to light Jackson’s streets before electricity changed everything. A simple piece of metal, but in its time, it was progress. 

The streets are dirt, lined with storefronts and bustling with farmers, merchants, and families.

I’m there, Downtown Jackson in the 1800s.

Inside St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, a quiet ceremony is unfolding. A baby is baptized. A name is written but only a first, no last, no family to claim in freedom. Years later, when emancipation comes, this will change. Some will choose their own names — Bond. Freeman. Washington. Jefferson. Others will carry the names of those who once owned them. Now, hundreds of years later, those same names rest in a binder, carefully preserved — written, recorded, and finally remembered.

A young poet in Denmark, Tennessee, sits at a desk, writing. He dreams of being published. His correspondence with Edgar Allan Poe is full of hope, full of ideas. But Poe dies before they can ever bring those ideas to life.

It’s 1905, and Avon Kenneth Weaver has brought Coca-Cola to Jackson, situated on Royal Street. Delivery trucks rattle along the brick roads, their wooden crates packed with bottles. The factory hums with motion, workers moving quickly to fill, cap, and load the next shipment. Jackson is alive with industry, expansion, and the sound of progress. 

I see all of this in a collection of photos Miller presents to me. 

I hear the whistle of a train, transporting people, goods, and soldiers… a young Jackson-born man being sent off to war. Fear and worry rattling his and his family's minds. Not knowing that he would soar through enemy skies, navigating air battles.

Now, almost 100 years later, his memory lives on in a delicate, carefully preserved pair of his aviator goggles.

1936, inside an office in Jackson, Congressman Herron Pearson leans over his desk, reading an invitation from the Japanese Empire. At the time, it was a diplomatic formality, nothing more. He doesn’t yet know that war is on the horizon, that alliances will fracture, that history will soon mark these letters with weight they don’t yet hold.

Sitting nearby is a ticket to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second inauguration. It was meant to be used, but for whatever reason, Pearson never went. Instead, the ticket remains pristine, untouched — like a door that was never walked through, a moment in time frozen forever.

A sharp crack of a gavel echoes in a courtroom.

Judge Q.S. Anderson stands in his office in Jackson, preparing for what would become the most important trial of his career. He was born here, educated here, but fate took him far beyond Tennessee. His role as a Nuremberg Trials judge would place him before Nazi war criminals, hearing testimonies of horror that reshaped the world’s understanding of justice.

His letters home — written in the very hand that once signed legal documents in this town — speak of the awe and weight of his task.

Another moment, another room, mid-1950s. 

A young girl stands before the congregation, her voice rising in gospel hymns passed down through generations — the ones history tried to forget.

One day, the world will know her as Ruby Falls, the first Black woman to chart on the country music charts. 

And then time will try to erase her. But her voice will soar. 

Now, her tombstone is being repaired and her legacy honored in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

The dust settles on the documents, the letters, the names. History remains.

Across from me, Evelyn and Miller just smile. This is what they do; they carefully hold time, making sure it is not erased. 

I wonder how they handle pieces of our history every day without letting the weight of it consume them. 

How one day, our own stories will sit on these shelves. What will they say about us?

Maybe that’s why Evelyn, Jack, Miller, and the volunteers devote their time to this room. 

Because they feel it too — this pull of history.

The handwritten names of enslaved individuals, longing for freedom. The words of poets, dreaming of recognition. Forgotten voices, now rediscovered. 

Because it’s more than just records in folders or facts in books — it’s tangible, personal, alive.

"I always tell people I can't believe they pay me to come here. I should be paying something to come here to do this," Evelyn tells me.

They don’t want history to sit in folders, untouched. They want people — especially young people — to know that history is not just something in books. It is ours. A collection of what lived before us. 

They encourage volunteers to help preserve and digitize records. They promote history competitions for students, hoping to inspire the next generation to ask questions, to look deeper, to uncover their own city’s story. 

Because history should never feel distant. It should feel like home.