On the intersection of South Highland Avenue,and Vaughn Street lies the historical marker for Mary Ellen Vaughn. The marker sits where Vaughn Training school once stood and its inscription states:
Born in Alabama, in 1893 Mary Ellen Vaughn, a graduate of Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), Chicago Business College, and Tennessee A & I College (now Tennessee State University), lived in Murfreesboro, Tennessee,the last thirty years of her life. In 1920 she founded the Murfreesboro Union, the city's first African-American newspaper.
Thirteen years later, in 1933 she founded and operated the Vaughn Training School for African American adults. As a nurse, Vaughn worked for the Commonwealth Fund to improve rural health in Rutherford County and was a Civil Rights advocate. Vaughn Street is named in her honor.
Vaughn was born in Montgomery Alabama in 1893, but found her way to Murfreesboro in 1920 to help take care of her uncle, William Bibb. From there she began to leave an impact on the community, namely through the creation of Rutherford Counties first African American newspaper, The Murfreesboro Monitor, which published obituaries, births, events, and advertisements from individuals from the African American community.
Vaughn Training school was a segregated school which taught adults basic skills regarding reading, writing, and the alphabet, but also included vocational skills important in building a community such as cosmetology or sewing for 25 cents a week. Vaughn’s motivation for opening the school was, in her words, “to elevate the race to high ideals, to lift them up and encourage them to live better lives.” The school closed in 1951 due to Vaughn’s declining health and she passed in 1953. Vaughn was buried in the northern area of Rutherford County in section M of the Evergreen Cemetery, having her final rest be alongside many people formerly enslaved at Oakland Mansion.
Long before the Broad Street Project of the early ‘50s and final relocation of City Hall to this site, 211 W. Vine St. served another role in the community. Around 1891, freed slave and grocery store owner King Ganaway had a house built here for his family that would become a center for the community and the childhood home of King Daniel Ganaway, his son and remarkable photographer.
King Daniel, named for his father and grandfather, was born October 27, 1884. From a young age, he was interested in religion, nudging him towards Chicago after high school graduation in 1902. Once there, he became involved in John Dowie’s evangelical movement and came across Pauline Barrew, who soon became his wife and mother of their only child, Lucille.
Though Ganaway began working as a butler for the well-to-do Mary Lawrence, he used his almost nonexistent spare time to develop— pun intended— photography skills. This hard work and perseverance paid off when he finally snapped a shot entitled “The Spirit of Transportation” that won the Wanamaker’s Department Store National Photographic Contest, which skyrocketed him to success as a freelance photographer for the Chicago Daily News, National Geographic, and many other publications. Typically, he captured industrial life and was eventually hired by the Chicago Bee in 1925. That same year, an interview with Ganaway appeared in The American Magazine in which he discussed his humble beginnings, the African American community of Murfreesboro at the turn of the century.
Hattie Murfree Ganaway, King Daniel’s mother, “was the friend and adviser of the whole neighborhood.” He mentions how theirs was the only piano around, they had plenty of books, and his mother’s willingness to open her house as “the center of every gathering” for those in need taught him that there is “value and worth in every human being, no matter how low and insignificant.”
Ganaway would eventually become a Bible teacher before he died, quietly and on his own, in 1944. King Daniel Ganaway’s descendants, Brenda and Tim Fredericks, only in the past twenty years discovered their relation to Ganaway and have exhibited his same spirit of determination in uncovering and sharing his legacy with as much of their family and the world as possible.
