First Tennessee Bank

Around the bank, the city emptied. About 25,000 residents fled Memphis within two weeks of the first reported death on August 13, 1878. The fever ran until mid-October, infecting over 17,000 and killing 5,150. Black residents, long thought immune, caught it in large numbers, though only 7 percent of the infected died. In 1879 the legislature revoked the city charter. Black leaders used their numbers during the epidemic to put Black patrolmen on the police force for the first time, and they stayed until 1895.

What the plaque says

First Tennessee Bank Despite the hardships and divided loyalties of the Civil War, First National Bank of Memphis received Charter No. 336 from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on March 25, 1864. Renamed First Tennessee in 1971, the city's first federally chartered bank has been headquartered within blocks of its original 8 South Court Street location ever since. During the 1878 yellow fever epidemic, bookkeeper Charles Q. Harris single- handedly kept the bank open to serve customers and distribute relief funds to Memphians.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — 0.4 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 0.9 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• Sun Studio — 0.9 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 0.9 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.

More markers nearby

• Piggly Wiggly — steps away
• Marion Scudder Griffin 1879-1957 — steps away
• Forrest's Early Home — steps away
• Virginia ("Ginnie") Bethel Moon 1844-1926 — steps away