Dayton, Tennessee
A town in Rhea County in eastern Tennessee, where the schoolteacher John Scopes was tried in July 1925 for teaching evolution.
Dayton lies in Rhea County, Tennessee. The indictment read to the jury in July 1925 charged John Thomas Scopes, a teacher in the public school of Dayton, with teaching that man is descended from a lower order of animals (Scopes trial transcript p. 309). He was found guilty and fined (Scopes trial transcript p. 313). See the Fundamentals and the Modernist Controversy.
What happened here
- 1910 to 1925, firm dateThe Fundamentals and the Modernist Controversy
Twelve volumes called The Fundamentals are sent free to Protestant ministers from about 1910. In the 1920s a dispute between Fundamentalists and liberals over the Bible, miracles and modern knowledge divides American churches and reaches a courtroom at Dayton.