Our Atlas receives Tennessee History Book Award, 2009

Jack Masters accepts award on behalf of Doug Drake & Bill Puryear from Carol Roberts

The "Tennessee History Book Award, 2009" was presented by the Tennessee Library Association and the Tennessee Historical Commission at the annual TLA meeting in Memphis on March 19, 2010.

Our Atlas receives Award !!

We have been notified that our Founding of the Cumberland Settlements has won the annual Tennessee Library Association - Tennessee Historical Commission's History Book Award.

About 15 books published on Tennessee History last year were nominated and the committee reported that ours was unanimously chosen.

Thanks to the many folks making this prestigious award possible.

View our story on PBS Tennessee Crossroads

This segment primarily detailed early pioneer roads and was initially aired on Tennessee Crossroads Feburary 25, 2010. Filmed last November we thought the piece was done very well indeed by the folks at PBS in Nashville.

You can view the film by clicking here.

Feature Article in "The Tennessee Magazine"

The folks at "The Tennessee Magazine" feature our book and work in the December 2009 issue. The magazine is distributed monthly to over 500,000 members by Cumberland Electric Membership Corporation.

They did an exceptional job in photography and layout and we have experienced great sales as a result. You can see the entire article by:   clicking here

Authors enjoy First Sale & Signing at Gallatin Public Library

L - R David Wright, Bill Puryear, Doug Drake & Jack Masters
A successful book sale and signing was enjoyed Thursday evening October 15, 2009 at the Gallatin Public Library in Gallatin, Tennessee. We did not get a count of the attendees but we were busy signing books for the entire 2 1/2 hours!!

It's always a pleasure to see our old and new friends who enjoy the thrill of pioneer history in this part of Tennessee!!!

Our Founding of the Cumberland Settlements has arrived!!

After years of preparation our Atlas is safely in our warehouse and we expect all pre-publication orders to be shipped the week of October 5th. The best news is that new orders via our site will be immediately filled.

We are pleased with our books and are confident you will be as well. In the meantime, be sure to see our program schedule and if you see that we are in your area we will be more than happy to sign your books. We always have a supply of books at the signings for those of you who have not purchased yet.

Work has begun on the next series and we'll have more on them later.

Jack Masters for
Doug Drake & Bill Puryear

Tennessee State Historian, Walter Durham, Reviews our Atlas

Founding of the Cumberland Settlements, The First Atlas 1779-1804, Showing Who Came, How They Came, and Where They Put Down Roots is a piercing, almost breathtaking look at the Cumberland Country. This remarkable book and the accompanying disc that contains plats and descriptions of 1,500 North Carolina land grants represent an incredibly detailed study of its type. Doug Drake, Jack Masters, and Bill Puryear have produced an Atlas, but it is also an easy to read narrative history, a biographical sketch book, a trails and roads study, and an archive. It is a dossier of North Carolina land grants and a series of maps, cross referenced so that land grants, forts, stations, towns and cities, and even the residences of the settlers can be located. Its graphs and tables can lead one to elusive and at times unremarked history. It is majestically and copiously illustrated by David Wright and co-author Puryear. The combined, non-redundant indexes of the book and disc have a total of 18,000 entries.

The authors beautifully answer the question they posited: Who Came, How They Came, and Where They Put Down Roots. This is a valuable resource for anyone interested in early Tennessee and western history. It will surely be on the shelves of public libraries and universities in Tennessee and beyond. It is a special treasure for all of us who live in the Cumberland country.

--Walter T. Durham, State Historian