J. T. HANNA, proprietor of the Anchor Woolen Mills, Maryville, Tenn., was born in Jefferson County, Ind., in 1825, and reared in South Hanover, Ind. When fifteen years old he went to Pittsburg, Ind., where he learned his trade, and then started a woolen mill at Rochester, Ind. He left there after eighteen years, and engaged in the same business at Kankakee, Ill., for ten years. In 1875 he came to Maryville, Tenn., and under the firm name of HANNA & WATKINS began operating woolen and carding mills at the site of the Maryville Woolen Mills, and so continued until 1880, when he built his present mills. He is now manufacturing a line of general woolen goods, and consuming about 50,000 pounds of wool annually. His wife, Philora (TRUE), is a native of Indiana; she was born at Indianapolis, Ind. They have two sons and two daughters.
His father, Samuel HANNA, was born in Cumberland County, Penn., in May, 1777, and married Elizabeth WHITE, a native of the same place. He then moved to Ohio, and from there to Jefferson County, Ind. He afterward moved to Logansport, Ind., and laid out the HANNA addition to the town. He died there in 1840; the mother died at Kankakee, Ill., in 1872. Our subject is the fourth child of five sons and three daughters, two brothers and one sister of whom are living.
Source: Goodspeed Publishing Co. History of Tennessee from the Earliest Time to the Present: Together with an Historical and a Biographical Sketch of from Twenty-Five to Thirty Counties of East Tennessee. Chicago: Goodspeed, 1887.