Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Henning, TN

Henning is an incorporated town in Lauderdale County, Tennessee, some 50 miles north of Memphis.

Founded in the late 1800s, the town is named for William H. Henning, a prominent businessman and railway official.

The 2020 census counted 871 people in Henning, down from 945 in the 2010 census.

The 2020 census counted 491 households and 315 families in Henning.

The Battle of Fort Pillow, a Civil War battle fought near Henning, ended with Confederate troops under General Nathan Bedford Forrest massacring nearly 300 Black Union troops after they had surrendered, an atrocity that led the Union to refuse further prisoner exchanges.

Henning was the boyhood home of author Alex Haley, who as a child heard on the front porch of his grandparents' Henning home the family stories that he later wove into his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Roots.

That home, built in 1918 and 1919 by Haley's grandfather Will E. Palmer, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 and is now the Alex Haley Museum, operated under the Tennessee Historical Commission; Haley, who died in 1992, is buried in the front yard, a few feet from the porch.

A modern Interpretive Center added to the Alex Haley Museum site, housing exhibits on Haley's literary career and the background of Roots, was dedicated in 2010.

In 2012 the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians placed 79 acres of land in Henning into federal trust, making it the only Native American tribe that owns land in Tennessee.

The Tennessee Department of Corrections operates the West Tennessee State Penitentiary in unincorporated Lauderdale County, near Henning.