Forbes just dropped its list of the 250 greatest innovators in American history, and guess what?! Four of them call the 901 home.
FedEx founder Fred Smith
Piggly Wiggly creator Clarence Saunders
Holiday Inn visionary Kemmons Wilson
Trailblazing entrepreneur Robert R. Church Sr.
They all earned their spots on the list, and every single one of their stories started right here.
That’s four people from one city who fundamentally changed how Americans ship packages, buy groceries, travel the country, and build generational wealth.
Let’s break down why each of these Memphis legends made the cut.
Fred Smith turned a C-term paper into a $90 billion empire
You’ve probably heard this one, but it never gets old. While studying at Yale in the mid-1960s, Fred Smith wrote an economics paper proposing a radical idea: a dedicated air freight network that could deliver packages overnight using a central hub. His professor was reportedly unimpressed. The paper earned a C. Smith didn’t sweat it. After serving two tours in Vietnam as a Marine (earning a Silver Star and a Bronze Star along the way), he came home and built the thing anyway.
Federal Express launched out of Memphis on April 17, 1973, with 14 small jets delivering 389 packages to 25 cities. Why Memphis? The airport was centrally located, rarely closed for weather, and had room to grow. Those early days were rough. FedEx was burning through about a million dollars a month. At one point, after getting turned down for a critical loan, Smith flew to Las Vegas with the company’s last $5,000, hit the blackjack tables, and walked away with $27,000—just enough to cover the fuel bill and keep the planes flying one more week. That week bought him enough time to secure real funding.
Today, the Memphis SuperHub at Memphis International Airport is the largest cargo sorting facility on the planet, processing over 180 million packages a year. FedEx employs more than 30,000 people in Memphis and generates over $90 billion in annual revenue. That “C paper” turned out just fine.
Clarence Saunders invented the way every single person on Earth buys groceries
Before Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly on September 6, 1916, at 79 Jefferson Avenue in Memphis, grocery shopping looked completely different. You’d walk into a store, hand a list to a clerk behind a counter, and wait while they grabbed your items. No browsing. No price tags. No choosing between brands. Saunders thought that was ridiculous.
His Piggly Wiggly introduced self-service shopping: open shelves customers could browse, price tags on every item, and checkout stands at the exit. He even patented the concept (U.S. Patent No. 1,242,872 for a “Self-Serving Store”). Why the name Piggly Wiggly? When people asked, Saunders reportedly said, “So people would ask me that very question.” The man understood marketing before marketing was a thing.
By the early 1920s, there were over 1,200 Piggly Wiggly stores nationwide. Saunders also tried to take on Wall Street short-sellers in a legendary stock battle. He nearly pulled off one of the biggest financial power moves in history before the New York Stock Exchange changed the rules on him mid-fight. He lost everything, including the massive pink marble mansion he was building in East Memphis. That unfinished mansion? The city turned it into the Pink Palace Museum, which is still one of Memphis’s most beloved landmarks.
And Saunders wasn’t done. In the late 1930s, he invented the Keedoozle (basically an automated grocery store where customers used a key to select items that arrived at checkout via conveyor belts). It was Amazon Go about 80 years too early. The technology couldn’t keep up with his brain. Piggly Wiggly still operates over 500 stores today across 17 states.
Kemmons Wilson made family road trips not terrible
In the summer of 1951, Memphis homebuilder Kemmons Wilson loaded up his wife Dorothy and their five kids for a family road trip to Washington, D.C. The motels along the way were inconsistent, dingy, and charged extra per child…sometimes $2 a head, which added up fast for a family of seven. Wilson was so fed up that he told Dorothy, “I’m going to build a chain of hotels, and they will never charge for children.”
He wasn’t kidding. The first Holiday Inn opened on August 1, 1952, at 4941 Summer Avenue in Memphis. The name? A joke. His architect Eddie Bluestein named it after the 1942 Bing Crosby movie Holiday Inn as a placeholder. It stuck. Wilson opened four Holiday Inns in Memphis—one on each major highway into the city—and then went national.
The concept was revolutionary because it was reliable. Every Holiday Inn had air conditioning, a phone in every room, a swimming pool, a restaurant, free parking, free ice, and no charge for kids under 12. That iconic green-and-yellow sign became one of the most recognizable landmarks on American highways. By the late 1960s, Holiday Inn was the largest hotel chain in the world, with a new location opening somewhere on the globe roughly every two and a half days. Wilson also pioneered Holidex, one of the first computerized reservation systems, in 1965.
Wilson’s motto tells you everything: “Work only half a day. It makes no difference which half. It can be either the first 12 hours or the last 12 hours.” The Kemmons Wilson School of Hospitality and Resort Management at the University of Memphis carries his name today.
Robert R. Church Sr. built an empire starting from literally nothing
Robert R. Church Sr.’s story might be the most powerful of them all. Born into slavery in 1839 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Church survived the Memphis Massacre of 1866. He was shot in the back of the head and left for dead during a white mob’s attack on Black residents. He survived.
When the devastating Yellow Fever Epidemic hit Memphis in the 1870s, killing thousands and causing tens of thousands to flee, Church stayed. As property values collapsed, he used his savings to buy real estate at rock-bottom prices. It was a bet on Memphis’s future, and it paid off enormously. Church became one of the first African American millionaires in the South, building a fortune through real estate, saloons, restaurants, and a hotel with vast holdings along Beale Street.
In 1899, he built Church Park and Auditorium on Beale Street entirely at his own expense, a six-acre park with a 2,000-seat auditorium that became one of the only public recreational spaces available to Black Memphians during segregation. Both Booker T. Washington and President Theodore Roosevelt spoke there. In 1906, he founded the Solvent Savings Bank and Trust Company, one of the first Black-owned banks in Tennessee, serving a community that white banks refused to.
Church’s legacy extends through his son, Robert Church Jr., who founded the Lincoln League and became one of the most influential Black political organizers in the South. The Church family’s story, from slavery to wealth to political power, is woven into the very fabric of Beale Street and Memphis itself.