The Tennessee Senate established the Tennessee Historical Commission on January 23, 1919 for the purpose of collecting and organizing information relating to Tennessee and the First World War. Although the Commission was nearly inactive after the death of its first director in 1921, its scope began expanding after it was reorganized under Judge Samuel Cole Williams in 1940. The most notable of these expansions came in 1971 when the Tennessee General Assembly placed the Commission in charge of executing the provisions of the 1966 Historic Preservation Act. In this role, the Commission was responsible for conducting a county-by-county survey of Tennessee's historic structures, placing the most significant of these buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, auditing state projects using federal funds to identify any potential threats to cultural heritage, assisting the public in administering tax incentive programs, and working with the Certified Local Government program.