Tennessee’s history is on the move with alumnus Caleb Williams

Tennessee's history is on the move with alumnus Caleb Williams

Williams is on the team coordinating the logistics to move thousands of artifacts per week for the state museum's move to a new facility.

By Janel Shoun-Smith | 08/21/2026

It's unlikely that the Maryville boy whose favorite vacations were to Williamsburg, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina, ever thought he would become the caretaker for a massive storehouse of Tennessee history, and yet here he is, on the team coordinating the most significant project to hit the Tennessee State Museum in decades.

Caleb Williams (BA '22), has always loved history, but he never expected to get what he calls his "dream job" so soon after college.

As operations coordinator for the Tennessee State Museum, he works to ensure the safety and proper storage of the museum's 170,000+ artifacts on a daily basis, but especially these days as the collection is on the move to a new, state-of-the-art facility in East Nashville.

At the moment, he is coordinating logistics to move thousands of artifacts per week, he said. Every item must be packed in certain ways to prevent damage and unpacked in its appropriate climate conditions in the new building.

"To be able to have the whole history of the state of Tennessee, which is so long and vast, to work one day with thousands-of-years-old Native American artifacts and the next day work with a Civil Rights era artifact, the variety is compelling to me as a history professional," said Williams, who has lived his whole life in Tennessee, in Maryville and Nashville.

Always a history buff growing up, one of the factors that drew him to Lipscomb for college was the chance to go to Vienna, Austria. "I had always been fascinated with the history of Central Europe," he said. "It was exactly what I was looking for: living in a historic city, not a campus, and getting to live and breathe the history of this historic place."

In addition to a milestone experience, Williams also came away from Vienna with a future wife, Sara Wilson Williams (LA '18, BSN '22).

As graduation grew closer, Williams knew he wanted to work in public history, the museum-and-historic-site side of the profession. So he started part-time positions at Nashville's Fort Negley Park and Belmont Mansion, as he began pursuing graduate school.

"The mission of public historians is to engage with the public and teach history in a way that is widely understandable by a wide audience," said Williams. "While we are trained as an in-depth historical researchers, we try to distill that information in a way that anybody can understand and relate to. Our mission is that history should belong to everybody, and not just those who enjoy reading 500-page books."

His initiative paid off, and in February 2022 he began work as an associate registrar at the Tennessee State Museum. Registrars are the collection managers who install and take down exhibits, arrange the loans of artifacts and ensure proper packaging and storage for items traveling to storage or other exhibit sites, such as legislators' offices or traveling exhibits.

He worked on his master's from Middle Tennessee State University while working at the museum, writing his thesis on one of his favorite topics, the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and '60s.

"History really kind of explains the world that we live in. It contextualized everything from our road work to our social circle and systems and government processes. It's this pool of knowledge to explain the world around us."

In January 2024, Williams was promoted to museum operations coordinator, just in time to be assigned to the move of the museum's 200-year-old artifacts collection to the museum's newly constructed state-of-the-art storage facility in East Nashville. With such a large move ongoing-and expected to continue for some time-"I have my fingers in a lot of pies," chuckled Williams, who works with a project manager, half a dozen museum registrars and a contracted art handling manager, among others.

Because of various maintenance problems at the museum's current storage facility, in the James K. Polk Cultural Center's lower levels below the theaters of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, the state built a new, 65,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art storage facility and began moving the collection in April 2025.

The museum's exhibit hall for the public moved from the Polk Center to Rosa Parks Boulevard in 2018.

Different types of artifacts, such as those made of wood versus silver or paper versus textiles, ideally need to be stored in different temperature, humidity and lighting conditions to avoid deterioration, said Williams. When differing items are all stored in one space (as in the Polk Center), caretakers must split the temperature difference, he said.

Overhead pipes running in the ceiling above the artifacts (also the case at the 24-story Polk Center) could potentially leak and cause water damage. Many items must also be stored in an acid-free environment, and bugs and potential fires must also be considered.

The state's new facility has no water pipes running directly over the storage areas and the rooms can be sealed off from one another, allowing for customized temperature, humidity and light controls for the items stored in that particular room, said Williams.

Visiting historians, archaeologists and independent scholars, will soon be able to view artifacts in a climate-controlled workspace. The facility features specialized in-house labs for preservation treatments or repair and staging rooms where objects can be laid out safely on oversized work tables.

Williams says he sees his current role as a real privilege. "Moving a whole collection is not something that every history professional will get to do in their career, especially to move from an old building with a lot of problems to a brand new building."

Among the museum's historic artifacts are a collection of Civil War flags, sculptures by William Edmonson, (the first African-American artist to have a solo exhibition at New York City's Museum of Modern Art) and items related to all three presidents from Tennessee: a hat and sword worn by Andrew Jackson, a coat made by Andrew Johnson and a cane belonging to James Polk.

"To be able to have the whole history of the state of Tennessee, which is so long and vast, to work one day with thousands-of-years old Native American artifacts and the next day work with a civil rights era artifact, the variety is compelling to me as a history professional," said Williams.