Word: townely
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...more than 80 years, Dayton, Tenn., has had a monkey on its back. That monkey is the English naturalist Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday is being celebrated on Feb. 12 in hundreds of cities around the world. Darwin's treatise On the Origin of Species was instrumental to the town's famous 1925 Scopes trial, which pitted noted trial lawyers Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan against each other in a fight to determine whether evolution should be taught in Tennessee public schools. (Read TIME's original 1925 story on the Scopes "monkey trial...
Though Bryan and the creationists initially won this fight, the law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools was eventually overturned in the 1960s. And while most people in this town of 7,000 have been content to move past history, a Wisconsin-based atheist group, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, rubbed it in by purchasing a 12-ft. by 25-ft. billboard on the southern side of town to remind them of Darwin's legacy - and his milestone birthday. "Praise Darwin," the billboard reads. "Evolve Beyond Belief." (Read the 1955 TIME review of the original production of Inherit...
...communications with us," Gaylor says, adding that a company representative told the Chattanooga Times Free Press that he was a Christian and would not take money for any sign that supported Darwin or his birthday. In the end, the FFRF purchased a billboard on the outskirts of town from a company not based in Dayton...
...overwhelmingly Christian and conservative small town less than an hour's drive north of Chattanooga, Dayton landed the Scopes trial in 1925 after the American Civil Liberties Union announced a search for a teacher willing to challenge a state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. Town leaders, eager to boost the local economy with the media attention a trial would bring, came up with a 24-year-old science teacher named John Thomas Scopes, who was willing to teach Darwinist theory instead of creationism...
Once Scopes was indicted and the trial began in July, hundreds of newspaper reporters descended on the town to cover the circus-like event, which featured fully clothed chimpanzees performing on the courthouse lawn and a fair bit of ridicule from newspaper columnist H.L. Mencken, who declared that residents were little more than backward "yokels...