Stories from Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Everleigh and daddy drawing us 3, Lisa Johnson & her 3 daycare friends!

Our son(Fender)loves to be outside,so when we told him it was time to come in this was his look/pose he gave us! We thought is was just too cute not to share!

Nearing the mid-season mark for the Shelbyville Sharks, the team picked up another key win on Tuesday evening, blowing Marshall County out of the water 398-241. The win comes on the heels of a superb outing against perennial powerhouse Sewanee, where the Sharks took a tough one on the chin 398-233...

Shelbyville received the first state grant of the new fiscal year Tuesday -- personally presented by the governor. Gov. Bill Haslam awarded a check for $315,296 to improve sidewalks in Shelbyville's historic downtown. The grant is a 80/20 split, with Shelbyville kicking in the rest...

Having a bumper crop is always a good thing, and that's what going on outside Wartrace at Valley Home Farm. It's blueberry and blackberry picking time at the farm, in operation on Potts Road since 1835. But this year, the fields seem to be bursting at the seams with a huge crop...

The Bedford County 4-H Honor Club, along with the Lincoln County Club, hosted the Hi 4-H club of Stanislaus County of California this week as they toured different sights throughout Tennessee and Alabama. "We came here to learn about Tennessee. We have learned about the differences between here and California," said Tiffany Thompson, the president of the Stanislaus County 4-H Club...

John Davis got an endorsement Tuesday to be the county's standing architect. The Bedford County Financial Management Committee voted unanimously Tuesday to recommend Davis Stokes Collaborative of Brentwood to be the county's go-to architect. Davis, a principal of the firm, is a Bedford County native who has had a long-standing relationship with the school system...

Looking for some good Independence Day-themed movies? Here are three suggestions. They're entirely subjective -- based purely on my own opinions of movies I've seen. This 1972 production is based on the Broadway musical, so your enjoyment of it is, naturally, dependent on your tolerance for musicals. I love it, but my father -- who is a history buff -- stumbled across it one day and thought it ridiculous...

If you lived in New York City during the Civil War in the summer of 1863, you wouldn't have known about the Battle of Gettysburg until a couple of days after it happened, when the battle was reported in the pages of the city's newspapers. News of the time was delivered to editors either by telegraph -- the Twitter of the day, or via letters dispatched from the front by various war correspondents...

"Where's that road now?" "I've never heard of the place. Is it still there?" "Was he related to us?" These might be some of the questions posed by folks once they take out a magnifying glass and look at maps of Bedford County from nearly 150 years ago, drawn by officers who served in the Civil War...

While we're reprinting 150-year-old news accounts from New York papers about the Tullahoma campaign, oddly enough, the fight was also featured in this week's New York Times. In a section of the Times' website titled "Disunion," writer Peter Cozzens gives the details on the Tullahoma Campaign -- in one of the few contemporary pieces written about the local battle...

For three men in recovery, painting the sides of buildings is a way to give back to society. "We're excited to have the opportunity to give back," James Venable said. "It's not the easiest thing to do but we have to do it." Venable, Casey Fowler and Barney Oakley painted a mural at Our Town Community Park, the courtyard next to Pope's Cafe on the Square. The men are from the Tony Rice Center Inc. rehabilitation facility...

Horses are a common sight in this part of Tennessee, but folks checking the state out online can find where the best equine spots are. A new map of the state on the Pick Tennessee Products website, www.PickTnProducts.org, links up visitors directly to 196 different horse "hot spots" from one end of the state to the other...

Yvonne McChristian does a little bit of everything. She teaches dance classes twice a week, including one at the Shelbyville Recreation center on Friday mornings. Her basketball team went to the national championships in 2011 and her softball team is still going strong...

Because my maternal grandmother lived for many years in Hyattsville, Md., I got to visit Washington D.C., my mother's birthplace, more than most kids. I've always loved the city, and was delighted to read the Facebook posts when one of my nephews visited there for the first time a few weeks back...

They say home is where the heart is. It just so happens that Wayne Buckingham's heart is in the game of basketball. Having spent his college years playing at Clemson University, Buckingham has played professional both in the States and overseas. Along the way, he met, and learned from, plenty of other professional athletes. Now, Buckingham is coming back to Bedford County, and he's bringing all of the lessons he learned and the people he met with him...