Current Exhibits

History speaks through the Museum of East Tennessee History's permanent and changing exhibits! At the heart of the museum is the award-winning signature exhibit, Voices of the Land: The People of East Tennessee, a moving, artifact-rich journey through more than 300 years of life in East Tennessee. Popular, too, is the East Tennessee Streetscape, a true step back in time, wherein visitors can peruse the Corner Drug Store or climb aboard Island Home-bound Streetcar No. 416. Several times a year, changing exhibits installed in the Rogers-Claussen Feature Gallery highlight special stories from East Tennessee's past.

So, come explore the region's history and heritage! The following exhibits are currently on display:

"It'll Tickle Yore Innards!"

A (Hillbilly) History of Mountain Dew

June 29, 2019 to January 20, 2020

“[Mountain Dew]’s pretty much a religious obsession for me.”
—Chris Whitley, 27-year-old superfan of Mountain Dew, Jackson, Mississippi
Mountain Dew. Your parents likely warned you about the neon-green soda. Doctors and dentists despise it. Yet, across the United States—especially in the South and Midwest—there are “superfans” of the...

Voices of the Land: The People of East Tennessee

Section 2: The Land Beckons

The Land Beckons Their vallies are of the richest soil…. Should this country once come into the hands of the Europeans, they may with propriety call it the American Canaan. —J. W. Gerard DeBrahm, Fort Loudoun engineer, 1756 The great God of Nature has placed us in different situations…. He has given each their land…he has stocked yours...
Voices of the Land: The People of East Tennessee

Section 3: A Land Divided

A Land Divided East and west Tennessee will, in the end … form two separate states … by the limits which nature herself has formed … in separating them by the high mountains of Cumberland, and … by the total difference in their commercial relations. —F. A. Michaux, M. D., traveling botanist, 1805 With the frontier behind them,...

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