Hunter Museum of American Art
Painting, sculpture, photography, craft, and new media span colonial portraiture to contemporary work while an 1905 mansion, 1970s structure, and modern wing frame changing ideas of display.
Places and wildlife — page 55
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Creative Discovery Museum
Water, music, art, engineering, climbing, early-childhood play, and temporary programs create a hands-on visit that rewards building, testing, performing, and starting again.
Museum of Appalachia
Dozens of relocated log structures, tools, folk art, musical instruments, gardens, and animals form an open-air collection shaped by founder John Rice Irwin’s intensive collecting.
East Tennessee History Center
Permanent and changing galleries connect Cherokee homelands, frontier settlement, divided Civil War loyalties, industry, migration, music, and everyday life across a mountainous region.
Discovery Park of America
A ten-story central museum and fifty-acre grounds combine natural history, science, transportation, regional history, agriculture, military artifacts, historic buildings, and a recreated wetland.
McClung Museum of Natural History & Culture
Archaeology, anthropology, ancient Mediterranean objects, fossils, decorative arts, and Tennessee natural history share a research museum on the University of Tennessee campus.
Knoxville Museum of Art
Regional historical and contemporary art surrounds Richard Jolley’s enormous glass installation, while changing exhibitions connect Knoxville makers to wider American movements.
Andrew Jackson's Hermitage
The mansion, cabins, fields, cemetery, museum, and archaeology interpret Andrew Jackson’s political life alongside the labor and family histories of more than 150 enslaved people.
Belle Meade Historic Site
A Greek Revival mansion, grounds, outbuildings, horse-breeding history, and the Journey to Jubilee tour reveal both an influential stud farm and the enslaved labor that sustained it.
Ryman Auditorium
Built for revival meetings, later home to the Grand Ole Opry, the Ryman joins architecture, broadcasting, segregation history, touring performance, and unusually responsive acoustics.
Graceland
The mansion, personal collections, aircraft, cars, stage clothing, archives, and memorial garden reveal Elvis Presley’s domestic taste, creative career, business world, and extraordinary afterlife.
Sun Studio
The upstairs exhibition and original recording room connect Sam Phillips, blues artists, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and the technology of early independent recording.
Andrew Johnson National Historic Site
A visitor center, tailor shop, early home, Homestead, and cemetery examine Johnson’s rise from poverty, presidency after Lincoln, impeachment, and deeply consequential opposition to Black civil rights.
Fort Donelson National Battlefield
Earthworks, river batteries, roads, monuments, and winter terrain preserve the February 1862 campaign that opened the Cumberland River and produced Ulysses S. Grant’s first major victory.
Shiloh National Military Park
Preserved fields, woods, landing, monuments, trenches, and the national cemetery interpret the April 1862 battle whose scale shattered expectations of a short Civil War.
Stones River National Battlefield
Battlefield remnants, the national cemetery, earthworks, and the Hazen Brigade Monument interpret the 1862–63 fight and the occupation, emancipation, and community changes that followed it.
Manhattan Project National Historical Park — Oak Ridge
Oak Ridge’s Manhattan Project story survives through museums, neighborhoods, overlooks, industrial landscapes, and controlled federal sites rather than a single conventional park entrance.
Carter House
The house, outbuildings, farm office, bullet-scarred structures, and battlefield interpretation make the November 1864 Battle of Franklin physically immediate.
Carnton
The house, cemetery, surviving landscape, and archaeological evidence interpret the Battle of Franklin, its wounded, the McGavock family, and the enslaved people whose labor shaped the property.
President James K. Polk Home and Museum
Polk’s surviving adult home, furnishings, documents, exhibition hall, and garden frame a one-term presidency defined by territorial expansion, war with Mexico, and intensifying conflict over slavery.
Alex Haley Museum and Interpretive Center
Haley’s boyhood home, family objects, interpretive center, and oral-history context explore the stories he heard in Henning and the worldwide influence of Roots and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Pinson Mounds State Archaeological Park
At least fifteen mounds, geometric earthworks, a museum, and trails preserve one of the country’s largest Middle Woodland ceremonial complexes, active roughly two thousand years ago.
Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park
A Middle Woodland enclosure occupies a dramatic peninsula between the Duck and Little Duck rivers, where earth-and-stone embankments, gateways, waterfalls, and a museum challenge the old “fort” name.
C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa
Preserved mounds, archaeological collections, a reconstructed dwelling, hands-on exhibits, and collaboration with Native communities explain a settlement occupied for centuries near the Mississippi River.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Ridges, old-growth coves, extraordinary salamander diversity, historic communities, waterfalls, and the Appalachian Trail fill a park whose apparent wilderness also carries displacement and land-use history.
Fall Creek Falls State Park
Fall Creek Falls, Cane Creek Falls, overlooks, forest trails, lake recreation, and a deep Cumberland Plateau gorge create many different visits inside one large state park.
South Cumberland State Park
Separate trail systems reach Savage Gulf overlooks, Stone Door, Grundy Forest, waterfalls, sandstone cliffs, and backcountry camps across the southern Cumberland Plateau.
Reelfoot Lake State Park
Shallow water, standing cypress, bayous, boardwalks, eagles, waterfowl, fish, and earthquake history define a northwest Tennessee lake formed during the 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes.
Roan Mountain State Park
Doe River forest, historic Miller Farmstead, rhododendron, streams, cabins, and trails occupy the lower mountain below the Appalachian Trail and Roan Highlands.
Radnor Lake State Natural Area
Forest trails, lake-edge habitat, owls, waterfowl, reptiles, wildflowers, and an accessible education-center area create a nature sanctuary minutes from central Nashville.
Frozen Head State Park
More than eighty miles of trails cross forested ridges, waterfalls, streams, old prison-country roads, and the summit of Frozen Head in a large, rugged state natural area.
Burgess Falls State Park
A short ridge trail follows the Falling Water River past successively larger cascades to the 136-foot main falls and a historic hydroelectric landscape.
Cummins Falls State Park
A 75-foot terraced waterfall drops into a popular swimming hole reached through a rugged gorge, while a separate overlook offers a safer view without entering the river corridor.
The Lost Sea Adventure
Guided tours descend through Craighead Caverns to an underground lake crossed by glass-bottom boat, with cave formations, anthodites, mining traces, and layered human history along the route.
Ruby Falls
A guided route through Lookout Mountain reaches a 145-foot waterfall in a limestone chamber, with narrow passages, formations, and a surface overlook above Chattanooga.
Cumberland Caverns
Commercial walking tours enter large rooms and passageways within one of Tennessee’s longest known cave systems, while separate adventure routes add crawling, ladders, and undeveloped terrain.
Cumberland Trail
Completed sections of the Cumberland Trail link gorges, waterfalls, overlooks, historic routes, and forest along the eastern escarpment, but gaps mean it is not yet one continuous casual thru-hike.
Fiery Gizzard Trail
The Fiery Gizzard traverses boulder fields, hemlock coves, waterfalls, sandstone bluffs, coal-mining remnants, and plateau forest between Foster Falls and Grundy Forest.
Cheekwood Estate & Gardens
Formal gardens, woodland sculpture, seasonal displays, model trains, an art museum, and the 1930s Cheek mansion create a designed landscape that changes markedly through the year.
Memphis Botanic Garden
Japanese design, native plants, roses, herbs, magnolias, conifers, sensory spaces, children’s landscapes, and seasonal displays create distinct ways to compare structure, habitat, and horticultural care.
Tennessee Aquarium
Separate River Journey and Ocean Journey buildings connect Appalachian streams, Tennessee River species, wetlands, forests, reefs, penguins, butterflies, and marine life through a watershed narrative.
Nashville Zoo at Grassmere
Species-focused habitats, a large playground, veterinary interpretation, Grassmere Historic Home, and shaded paths turn the zoo into both a wildlife and local-landscape visit.
Memphis Zoo
Large cats, primates, hoofstock, reptiles, aquarium habitats, and conservation programs occupy a broad Overton Park campus with architectural layers from many eras.
Zoo Knoxville
Red pandas, reptiles, otters, elephants, primates, and children’s nature play anchor a compact zoo known for breeding and conservation work with endangered species.
Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies
Sharks, rays, penguins, coral-reef species, jellyfish, touch experiences, and a long moving walkway through Shark Lagoon create a high-energy indoor counterpoint to the Smokies.
Nashville Crayfish
This olive-to-reddish crayfish survives in rocky runs of the Mill Creek watershed inside metropolitan Nashville, making urban water quality inseparable from species survival.
Tennessee Cave Salamander
This permanently aquatic salamander inhabits cave streams and pools in the southern Cumberland Plateau and related karst, with Tennessee holding the core of its known range.
Laurel Dace
Laurel dace survive in a few small, cool streams on Tennessee’s Walden Ridge, where spring flow, forest shade, and barriers from invasive fish shape an extremely narrow future.