Alfred Leland Crabb

Dr. Alfred Leland Crabb was born on January 22, 1884 in Plum Springs, Kentucky. He was the son of James Wade, a farmer, and Annie Arbuckle Crabb. He spent his elementary years in a one-room school at Plum Springs. In 1906, he embarked on an academic career and was subsequently educated at Bethel College, George Peabody College (today a part of Vanderbilt University), the University of Chicago, and Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in 1925 from Peabody College. In 1911, he married Bertha Gardner. They had one son, Alfred Leland Crabb Jr., who taught English at the University of Kentucky.

Interspersed with the years of his formal education, he was teacher and later principal at several rural schools in Kentucky and Louisiana. After receiving his doctorate, he taught at what is now Western Kentucky University, where he soon became dean. In 1927 President Bruce Payne invited Crabb back to Peabody College, where he became professor of education, retiring in 1949. Crabb assumed the editorship of the Peabody Journal of Education in 1932, a position he retained until 1970. For this publication, and for the Peabody Reflector, he wrote hundreds of articles, essays, editorials, and poems.

A native of Warren County, Kentucky, Dr. Crabb wrote a biography of the development of Nashville, textbooks and articles for educational journals in addition to his novels. Crabb was best known for his trilogy of historical novels published between 1942 and 1945 that featured Nashville landmarks: Dinner at Belmont, Supper at the Maxwell House, and Breakfast at the Hermitage. The historical sites and traditional southern meals of their titles reflect Crabb's interest in the southern way of life in Nashville during the last half of the 19th century. These three novels span from the eve of the Civil War to 1897, the date of the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition, and depict a period of upheaval for the city, state, and nation. Almost as popular as Crabb's Nashville trilogy was the Civil War trilogy that followed: Lodging at the Saint Cloud, A Mockingbird Sang at Chickamauga, and Home to Tennessee.

Southern food, folk music, tall tales, and detailed descriptions of Tennessee's flora and fauna are the hallmarks of Crabb's writing. Two of his most colorful creations, a nameless driver and his sidekick, College Grove impart a wide variety of southern and rural folklore and music.

Like many historical novelists of his time, Crabb adopted an old-fashioned style. Though writing in the modern era, he shared the values of the pre-modern society he described. His works featured everything that modernism lacked: continuity, certainty, and closure. Most importantly, Crabb revealed his pre-modernist sensibilities in the power he gave his characters to shape events rather than be shaped by them. His protagonists always viewed their lot as meaningful fate, never as random happenstance.

In addition to the Nashville and Civil War trilogies, he authored Journey to Nashville: A Story of the Founding, (1957) in which he described the adventures of the Wataugan parties on their trek through the wilderness and waters of Tennessee to establish the settlement first called Fort Nashborough. Home to the Hermitage, a novel about Andrew and Rachel Jackson toward the end of her life, was dramatized and presented on the Cavalcade of America radio program in 1948. He wrote two books about his native state, Home to Kentucky: A Novel of Henry Clay in 1953, and Peace at Bowling Green (1955) a story of a community from the pioneer times of 1803 to the end of the Civil War. In Nashville: Personality of a City (1960) he described the various people, places, and subjects for which he had demonstrated a fondness in his fictional work.

Crabb was a colorful personality. Memoirs of him attest that he always wore a coat and carried a scratch pad and stubby pencil in its pocket. While teaching at Peabody in the 1940s, the typist for his manuscripts was a student, future Playboy centerfold Bettie Page. On October 16, 1972, the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce saluted Dr. Crabb as a "student-educator-editor-author and goodwill ambassador and Nashville civic leader for more than half a century."

Crabb died on Monday October 1^st 1979 in a Lexington, Kentucky nursing home. The cause of death was “just accumulation of 96 years,” his son Alfred Leland Crabb Jr., of Lexington announced at his funeral in 1979.

After his death, by the Senate Joint Resolution No. 189 by Senator Henry, Crabb was honored by the state of Tennessee for his work in capturing the great state’s history and culture.