Two wonderful women shaped this city in ways that could not have looked more different on paper, and yet somehow their legacies run through the same soil.

Martha Ingram arrived in Nashville as a young mother, building a life with her husband and raising their family while quietly absorbing the business world around her. When Bronson Ingram died in 1995, she stepped into his place at the helm of the family company, a role few expected, and fewer still could have filled. She could have simply kept the seat warm. Instead, she willed the Schermerhorn Symphony Center into existence, gave decades to TPAC and Nashville Rep, Nashville Opera and Nashville Ballet, Frist Art Museum, and left a lasting legacy across Vanderbilt that went well beyond a wing or a title. Hers was a philanthropy of stewardship, the quiet belief that what you're given, by circumstance or by inheritance, is meant to be passed on, not kept.

Dolly Parton came from the opposite direction entirely, up a mountain hollow in Sevier County, a house with no running water and more kids than beds. She built everything from a voice and sheer will, and then turned around and gave it back. Her Imagination Library put more than three million free books into the hands of children on nearly every continent.When the world needed help most, she wrote a check for one million dollars to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, money that went straight into early research that led to a COVIDvaccine. The stories of her discreet acts of kindness are still coming to light. Hers was a philanthropy that remembered exactly what it felt like to have nothing.

Text: Dave Mahanes