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Hickory Withe is an unincorporated community in Fayette County, Tennessee, United States, and is within the Memphis metropolitan area. For several years it functioned as an incorporated town, and was so treated at the 2000 census, at which time it had a population of 2,574. [edit] History
The community of Hickory Withe was settled in 1834 by families who moved from the region around Prosperity, South Carolina. One of the first acts of these settlers was to form the congregation of Prosperity Presbyterian Church, which was founded on the fourth Sunday of December, 1834. This congregation united with another Presbyterian congregation, Mt. Pleasant Presbyterian Church, in 1907 to form Hickory Withe Presbyterian Church, which is still active today. That church, meeting in an historic property on Donelson Drive, is all that remains of what once was "Main Street" of Hickory Withe: Donelson Drive used to be home to a post office, a general store, a cotton gin, and a two-room school house, in addition to the church. The school facility was deeded to the Hickory Withe Presbyterian Church in 1974, and is maintained today; the remaining businesses and buildings have been removed, leaving only residences and the church. Efforts to incorporate Hickory Withe led to revisions of Tennessee laws regarding incorporation and annexation. In the mid-1990s supporters of the idea of incorporating Hickory Withe went to Lieutenant Governor John S. Wilder, who was from nearby Braden and had represented the area in the Tennessee Senate since 1966, with the idea of sponsoring a bill which would allow Hickory Withe to incorporate, something which could not be accomplished under the then-existing law. Wilder learned that he could not introduce an act allowing only for the incorporation of Hickory Withe as this would be rejected by the courts as unconstitutional, so it was necessary for any act to help Hickory Withe to incorporate to be worded in a broad enough fashion to allow any similar area in Tennessee which also desired to incorporate to do so as well. The eventual bill which passed was drawn in such a way as to allow almost any previously-unincorporated area to incorporate, and several attempted to do so, including, famously, an apartment building near Elizabethton. The resulting legislation became known, somewhat derisively, as the "Tiny Towns Bill". Most of the towns which were set up, or were attempted to be set up under the act, seemed primarily to be efforts to prevent areas from being annexed by larger jurisdictions which charged property tax. The Tennessee Supreme Court struck down the new legislation on November 19, 1997, less than a year after it entered the books. Corrective legislation enacted since has required any new town being set up to have a property tax rate set as a condition of its incorporation (and that rate cannot be "zero"). Towns set up under the "Tiny Town" law, like Hickory Withe, were not automatically dissolved with the act's repeal, although some have subsequently taken this step. [edit] Research Tips
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