Tennessee
Thirty-six dollars of the wages, salary, or income of any person drawing forty dollars or less per month shall be exempt from legal process at date of service of process.
Household goods and provisions are exempt. The list includes practically every article to be found in the average home. The liberality of the law may be judged from the fact that one hundred gallons of sorghum molasses and twenty pounds of coffee are listed. The list ends with: twenty bushels of peanuts, three strings of red peppers, two gourds, two punger gourds, a carpet in actual use by the family, not exceeding in value twenty-five dollars, and two hundred bushels of cotton seed.
If the head of the family is engaged in agriculture there is further exempt in his hands the following property: Two plows, two hoes, one grubbing hoe, one cutting knife, one harvest cradle, one set of plow gears, one pitch-fork, one rake, three iron wedges, five head of sheep, and ten head of stock hogs. There is exempt in the hands of each mechanic in the State who is engaged in the pursuit of his trade or occupation one set of mechanic’s tools, such as are usual and necessary to the pursuit of his trade; and, if he is the head of a family, two hundred dollars’ worth of lumber or material, or products of his labor; also one gun in the hands of every male citizen of the age of eighteen years and upward, and every female who is the head of a family; to the heads of families fifty pounds of picked cotton and twenty-five pounds of wool, and a sufficient quantity of upper and sole leather to provide winter shoes for the family; also, three hundred pounds of tobacco in the hands of the actual producer; also thirty-five dollars’ worth of roughness, to consist of oats, fodder, and hay, or either of them.
A homestead or real estate in the possession of or belonging to each head of a family, and the improvements thereon, to the value in all of one thousand dollars, shall be exempt from sale under legal process during the life of such head of a family, and shall inure to the benefit of his widow and be exempt from sale in any way at the instance of any creditor or creditors during the minority of the children occupying the same and until the youngest child reaches the age of twenty-one years.