East Tennessee History · County by county
The last eastern capital of the Cherokee Nation, the Army post that ran the Trail of Tears, a railroad town that Lincoln wanted badly, a county split between Union and Confederacy, a backyard foundry that grew into a stove empire, and a Pentecostal church that made Cleveland its world headquarters.
Bradley County sits in the southeast corner of the Tennessee Valley, between the Hiwassee River on the north and the Georgia line on the south. It was carved out of the Ocoee District, land that belonged to the Cherokee Nation until the Treaty of New Echota. [S400] Much of the Cherokee removal story happened here. The U.S. agency for Cherokee affairs stood at present-day Charleston on the Hiwassee. [S400][S233] Red Clay, on the Georgia line, was the last capital of the Cherokee Nation in the East. [S401][S420] Fort Cass at Charleston was the Army’s headquarters for the removal. [S409][S430] From Rattlesnake Springs, north of Cleveland, perhaps 13,000 Cherokees set out on the Trail of Tears in 1838. [S412][S413]
The General Assembly created the county on February 10, 1836, and named it for Col. Edward Bradley. Its seat, Cleveland, honors Col. Benjamin Cleveland, a hero of the battle of Kings Mountain. [S404][S440] The railroad made Cleveland a junction worth fighting for in the Civil War, and the county’s people split bitterly between Union and Confederacy. [S444][S450] After the war, the Hardwick family’s backyard foundry grew into a company that turned out more than 250,000 stoves a year by the 1980s. [S403] The Church of God, which began in the mountains of East Tennessee and western North Carolina, made Cleveland its headquarters and founded what is now Lee University. [S402]
The county counted 108,620 people in the 2020 Census. [S406] It has two incorporated cities, Cleveland and Charleston, and Census-designated places including South Cleveland, East Cleveland, Hopewell, Wildwood Lake and McDonald. [S406][S117]
A state marker on U.S. 64 near McDonald says that Hernando de Soto’s expedition of 1540 followed the Great War and Trading Path, which ran from northeast to southwest and passed near that spot. [S467] By the 1700s this was Cherokee country, south of the Overhill towns on the Little Tennessee. [S3] (Our Monroe County history tells the Overhill story.)
The Hiwassee Purchase of 1819 moved the border. The Cherokees gave up the land between the Little Tennessee and the Hiwassee, and from 1819 until the Treaty of New Echota in 1835 the Hiwassee River was the line between the Cherokee Nation and the United States. [S233] Calhoun, on the north bank, went to the new McMinn County. Everything south of the river, including all of today’s Bradley County, stayed Cherokee land for another generation. [S233] (Our McMinn County history covers the north bank.)
The south bank became the federal government’s front door to the Cherokee Nation. Return Jonathan Meigs, a Revolutionary War veteran, ran the government’s trade and diplomacy with the Cherokees for more than twenty years. The Heritage Center’s panels say he moved the Cherokee Agency to the Hiwassee Garrison near the mouth of the river, then upstream, and finally to present-day Charleston by 1817. [S233] The Tennessee Encyclopedia dates the agency at Charleston to 1819 and calls the place the "gateway to Indian country." Among the agents who served there were Meigs, Hugh Montgomery and Joseph McMinn. [S400] Meigs kept the agency until his death in 1823. [S233]
Lewis Ross, brother of Principal Chief John Ross, came to the area about 1820 and acquired large tracts along the Hiwassee. [S233] He kept a store at the agency that stayed open until the removal in 1838. [S400] In 1836 appraisers valued his Charleston property, with its house, farm buildings and orchards, at nearly $25,000. He also enslaved African Americans, who likely built the house and worked in his businesses. [S233]
Not every Cherokee family lived the same way. By the 1830s many lived much like their white neighbors, on farmsteads with a house, barn, corncrib and fields of corn grown partly to fatten hogs for market. [S427][S401] In 1825 the Cherokee Council allowed Cherokees to hire American tradesmen to set up shops in the Nation and teach their trades. Within a few years blacksmith shops were run across the Nation by Cherokees or by the people of African descent they enslaved. [S428] Another marker records John Walker Jr., known as "Chief Jack," a grandson of Nancy Ward whose home stood near today’s Keith Street and Stuart Road in north Cleveland. He belonged to the party that favored a voluntary removal treaty. His murder by James Foreman in 1834 led to one of the most famous criminal trials in early Tennessee. [S438]
In the late 1820s and early 1830s Georgia moved against the Cherokees inside its borders. It passed laws forbidding the Cherokees to meet for any purpose except to sign away their land (between 1828 and 1830, says a park panel; the Tennessee Encyclopedia dates the ban to 1832), and it divided their land by lottery. [S421][S401] The Cherokee capital had been at New Echota, Georgia. After meeting once in Alabama in 1831, the national council moved in 1832 to Red Clay, just across the line in Tennessee. [S421][S12]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia counts eleven general councils at Red Clay between 1832 and 1837, some attended by as many as five thousand Cherokees. [S401] A War Department removal treaty was put to two councils there in 1832; the council rejected it unanimously and sent a delegation to Washington. [S401] The Cherokees took their case to Congress, to the president and to the U.S. Supreme Court, which had ruled in their favor in Worcester v. Georgia. [S401][S400] Principal Chief John Ross led the fight to keep the eastern lands. His last home in the East was at Flint Springs, about four miles northeast of the council ground. [S401][S420]
The Cherokees divided. In 1834 the "treaty party" of Major Ridge, John Ridge and Elias Boudinot began working openly for a removal treaty. [S401] At a full council at Red Clay in October 1835, a proposed removal treaty was overwhelmingly rejected. The writer John Howard Payne, author of "Home, Sweet Home" and a champion of Cherokee rights, was there. [S420][S429] Two months later, while Ross was in Washington, the Ridge faction signed the Treaty of New Echota without the consent of the principal chief. [S401][S430] The U.S. Senate ratified it on May 23, 1836, by a single vote. [S12]
The councils at Red Clay went on protesting. In October 1837 the English geologist George W. Featherstonhaugh, then surveying for the federal government, attended a council here. He described the "unceasing current" of Cherokee men, women and children moving about the grounds in perfect order, most of them grave and thoughtful at the choice before them. [S423] He slept in a rough log hut with gaps between the logs and heard hymns from the council house as he fell asleep. [S424] Brig. Gen. John E. Wool and his troops camped at a spring about a quarter-mile east and watched the meetings. [S420]
Tennessee State Parks says the Cherokees drew water during the councils from the Blue Hole Spring, which flows into Mill Creek; a park panel calls the councils’ water source the Great Council Spring. [S414][S422] A council was scheduled for 1838 but never met. [S401] In March 1838 Jane Bushyhead, nearly fourteen, wrote to a former schoolmate from "Red Clay, Cherokee Nation" that she might never see her again if "we Cherokees are to be driven to the west by the cruel hand of oppression." [S435][S401]
Nobody knows exactly where the council house stood. Three archaeological digs between 1973 and 1976 could not find it. Today’s reconstruction follows a painting by John Mix Stanley and eyewitness descriptions of a long log structure with open sides and benches for the delegates of the eight districts. [S421]
The Army arrived before the treaty did. On September 1, 1834, Company F of the 4th U.S. Infantry reached the agency and set up Camp Cass, later Fort Cass, named for Secretary of War Lewis Cass. [S233] Officers often stayed at Lewis Ross’s house. After 1836 the post grew to include storehouses, cribs, stables, offices and a bakery. Agent Hugh Montgomery’s old house became a storehouse and magazine and later a hospital. A log magazine with a picket wall and blockhouses was built near the riverbank. [S233]
In April 1837 the Superintendent of Cherokee Removal, Gen. Nathaniel Smith, wrote from the agency that the Cherokees said "they would rather die here than go west to die." [S431] The Cherokees were given until May 23, 1838, to leave on their own, and few did. [S433] That May, Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott and about 7,000 federal troops and state militia began rounding up Cherokees across Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and Alabama. [S430][S12] From his headquarters at the agency Scott warned that "thousands and thousands" of soldiers were approaching "to render resistance and escape alike hopeless." [S433] Smith reported more than 600,000 rations on hand, with boats and wagons to carry the people off. [S432] A visiting officer wrote in June that the agency was "thronged with Indians, contractors, teamsters" and others hoping to make money. [S437]
Fort Cass became the largest of the three emigrating depots for the removal, with internment camps spread across an area of about 12 by 4 miles. [S430][S233] Lt. Henry Prince, who arrived in June 1838, drew the only known map of the depot. [S233] Summer in the camps was deadly. In July 1838 the Army’s disbursing agent described diarrhea, dysentery and fevers "prevailing to a great and deplorably fatal extent," with measles and whooping cough spreading since early June. [S434] One surviving voucher pays for 469 coffins, for 185 adults and 284 children who died in the Fort Cass camps over about two months. [S431]
Three parties left by boat that summer, but drought had lowered the rivers. The federal government then let John Ross oversee the rest of the removal, and most Cherokees went by land. [S12][S233] Lewis Ross supplied the detachments with food and other necessities. [S233] The largest group gathered at Rattlesnake Springs, in the Dry Valley north of Cleveland. [S413][S400] The National Park Service says perhaps 13,000 Cherokees left from there, in 13 organized detachments. [S412] The National Register nomination says the last council of the eastern Cherokees met there and resolved to carry their constitution and laws to the new land. [S413] It also describes one departure. On the morning of November 10, 1838, Richard Taylor’s detachment formed up: 1,029 people, 51 wagons and 358 riding horses, in a column a mile long. Friends and relatives who would follow later stood along the road to say goodbye. [S413]
The detachments left between August and December 1838 and reached Indian Territory between January and March 1839, about five months on the road. [S413] An estimated 4,000 Cherokees died in the camps and on the trail. [S12][S401][S436] Enslaved African Americans were forced west with the Cherokees who held them, in numbers no one recorded. [S233][S413] In December 1838 President Martin Van Buren told Congress that the removal had had "the happiest effects." [S436]
Traces of the Cherokee years survive on the land. A marker at the Cooper homeplace near Blythewood Road says the house was built by Hair Conrad, "a Cherokee Indian, who led the Trail of Tears." [S439] Rattlesnake Springs is still private farmland, with the owners’ house standing over the main spring, according to its National Register nomination; please respect it as private property. [S413]
Tennessee did not wait for the removal to finish. The act of February 10, 1836, created "the county of Bradley" from the land south of the Hiwassee. Until a seat was chosen, the courts were to meet at a Methodist camp ground. The same act said the county seat would be called Cleveland. [S404] The act named it "in honor of and to perpetuate the memory of Col. Edward Bradley, late of Shelby County." [S404] The Tennessee Blue Book describes him as a Tennessee militia officer, colonel of the First Regiment of Tennessee Infantry in the War of 1812, and a member of the state house and the Shelby County court, who died in 1829. [S405] The Tennessee Encyclopedia and a state school marker also call him a Revolutionary War veteran; the Blue Book does not mention Revolutionary service. [S400][S464][S405]
On January 20, 1838, the legislature made the settlement at Taylor’s Place the county seat and named it Cleveland. [S440] Col. Benjamin Cleveland, born in Virginia, had led the Wilkes County, North Carolina, militia at Kings Mountain on October 7, 1780. [S440] The town was incorporated under an act of the 1841–42 legislature. [S407] Schools came early. The Oak Grove Male Academy, chartered December 16, 1837, was the first academy in the Ocoee Purchase. Its home was on what is now Central Avenue, and the building was used for school until 1903. [S441] Masonic Lodge No. 134 and the town founded the Masonic Female Institute in 1848, and it opened in 1856. [S442]
Settlers had come even before the treaty. John McPherson, a miller, was an early settler in the Eureka Valley and in 1834 one of the five founders of Candies Creek Baptist Church. [S443] Charleston grew up around the old agency. An 1839 town plan shows Lewis Ross’s store and home at Market and Scott streets. [S233] Before the Civil War, fewer than one in ten people in the county were African American, and nearly all of them were enslaved. [S233]
The East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad tied Cleveland to Knoxville and Chattanooga and crossed the Hiwassee at Charleston, its only bridge over that river. [S444][S445] That crossing made the little county a prize in the war that followed.
When the Civil War began, most people in Cleveland favored the Union. Confederate troops moved in during 1861 to hold the railroad and the Hiwassee bridge. [S444] A U.S. flag flew briefly on the courthouse square before Confederates took control. [S450] On the night of November 8, 1861, Union loyalists burned the Charleston bridge, one of the East Tennessee bridge burnings that led Confederate authorities to tighten their grip on the region. [S445] In June 1862 Abraham Lincoln said that taking and holding the railroad "at or east of Cleveland" was "as fully as important as the taking and holding of Richmond." [S444]
Families split. Pleasant Craigmiles and his brother William stayed loyal to the Union, while two other brothers went with the Confederacy. Rebel soldiers searched Pleasant’s house, and one held a pistol to his chest in front of his family. His daughter Augusta once handed Confederate troops a tiny American flag. [S450] The miller John McPherson hid the courthouse’s Union flag in his home from 1861 on and was jailed by the Confederates in Knoxville and Tuscaloosa. [S443] Ainsworth Blunt, principal of the Masonic Female Institute, fled the county rather than be forced into Confederate service, as the student diarist Myra Inman noted. [S442] In Charleston, Henry Benton Henegar was a Unionist and his wife Margaret a secessionist. He left whenever Confederates held the town, and she stayed no matter which army was in charge. [S446]
War came home in 1862 and 1863. On November 4, 1862, a train wreck south of Cleveland killed 17 Confederate soldiers, who are buried in a mass grave in Fort Hill Cemetery. [S447] During the fight for Chattanooga in late November 1863, Union Col. Eli Long’s cavalry cut the railroads to Knoxville and Dalton and burned Cleveland’s copper-rolling mill, the only one in the South. [S444][S442] Long’s men camped at the Masonic Female Institute until a Confederate attack from Charleston drove them back to Chattanooga. [S442][S444] Nineteen-year-old Pvt. Hazard Barrere of the 1st Ohio Cavalry was mortally wounded on Inman Street. Enslaved people of a Confederate sympathizer, Jane Hardwick, carried him into her house, where she and her daughters nursed him until he died. [S447]
The Union victory at Missionary Ridge on November 25, 1863, put Bradley County in Federal hands for the rest of the war. [S444] On November 30, with the Hiwassee bridge damaged by retreating Confederates, Gen. William T. Sherman was held up at Charleston. In the parlor of the Henegar House, Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana handed him Grant’s order to march to the relief of Knoxville. [S445][S446] Family tradition says Sherman told Margaret Henegar that "when I get through with the Southland a bird can’t live here!" [S446] On December 28, 1863, two of Confederate Gen. Joseph Wheeler’s cavalry divisions attacked a 300-wagon Union supply train crossing the Hiwassee at Charleston. Union infantry held, Long’s cavalry charged, and the Confederates fled toward Dalton. The Cumberland Presbyterian church became a hospital. [S445]
That winter the valley at Blue Springs, southeast of Cleveland, filled with the Union IV Corps’ First Division under Gen. David S. Stanley. By April 1864 more than 9,000 men were camped there, facing the Confederate army at Dalton. [S448] On February 10, 1864, more than 2,000 people gathered in Cleveland to see the Stars and Stripes raised again. John McPherson’s hidden flag went back to the courthouse that day. [S448][S443] Southern Bradley County became a no man’s land between the armies, where soldiers and guerrillas looted farms. In February 1864 an elderly Unionist, Joseph Lusk II, fought off rebels trying to steal his mules, and his house was burned in revenge. [S449] The camps emptied in early May 1864 when the Atlanta Campaign began. [S448]
Union troops then built Fort McPherson and Fort Sedgwick on the high ground overlooking the depot, at today’s Hillcrest Memorial Gardens and Fort Hill Cemetery. [S444][S447] When Wheeler’s cavalry came back in August 1864 and asked whether the Union commander meant to make him shell the town, Col. Horatio G. Gibson replied, "I have no objections to your shelling the town." The forts opened fire and the Confederates withdrew that night. [S447] One Civil War Trails marker dates the raid to August 17, 1864; another gives August 22. [S444][S447] The Union army also used the Masonic Female Institute building during 1864. When Blunt came back as a captain in the 1st East Tennessee Cavalry to reopen the school, he found it "sadly abused." [S442]
The war’s memory stayed divided. The United Daughters of the Confederacy put up a Confederate monument on North Ocoee Street in 1910. [S452] On May 30, 1914, the Grand Army of the Republic post dedicated a monument at Fort Hill Cemetery to Bradley County’s "Boys in Blue," one of only three G.A.R. monuments in Tennessee. [S451][S447]
Bradley County’s postwar fortune was cast iron. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says Christopher Hardwick, a merchant ruined by his support of the Confederacy, began casting stoves in his Cleveland backyard in the 1870s with his sons Joseph and John. [S403] A library marker says Joseph H. Hardwick was president of the stove works from its founding in 1879 until his death in 1926. [S453] By the late 1880s the Cleveland Stove Works had 15 workers making 12 stoves a day, and the workforce tripled by 1894. [S403] Christopher Hardwick also started Cleveland Woolen Mills in 1880, later Hardwick Woolen Mills. [S403] The family’s interests spread into a foundry, banking and stores, part of what historians call the New South. [S453]
The Hardwick Stove Company passed from Joseph to his son C. L. Hardwick, who spent 63 years with the firm. From 1942 to 1945 it made aircraft parts instead of stoves, including wing flaps for C-46 transport planes. [S403][S453] In the 1950s it added electric ranges, and later continuous-cleaning ovens. Maytag bought it in 1981, and over more than a century Hardwick made over 9.75 million stoves. [S403] The Tennessee Encyclopedia names Magic Chef, Hardwick and Brown Stove as the county’s big three stove makers until Maytag took over local production. [S400] The Hardwick Woolen Mills complex was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. [S403][S400]
Downtown Cleveland grew with the factories. Joseph Hardwick finished his Victorian house on Ocoee Street in 1883. [S453] Pleasant Craigmiles came through the war and in 1866 built the Italianate Craigmiles House at 833 North Ocoee Street. It was given to the city in 1923 and listed in the National Register in 1975. [S454][S450] John Philip Sousa’s band played the Craigmiles Opera House on January 30, 1906. [S455] The Bohemia Theatre opened the same year. [S456] The Fillauer brothers’ building at First Street went up in 1911. [S457] St. Luke’s Episcopal Church was built in 1872–73. [S469] On North Ocoee, the Boys Monument remembers three young men, among them Jno. M. Hardwick, killed in a railroad wreck near Thaxton, Virginia, on July 2, 1889, while on their way to Europe, according to its inscription. [S458] The courthouse’s 1,200-pound bell, cast in 1893, hung in its tower until 1960. MainStreet Cleveland brought it back in 1992 for the city’s 150th anniversary. [S459]
Charleston kept a smaller industrial role. When the Tennessee Encyclopedia entry was written, the town was home to a large Bowater paper mill and an Olin chemical plant. [S400]
Cleveland’s other great export was a church. The Church of God began in 1886 as the Christian Union at Barney Creek in Monroe County, under the Baptist preacher Richard G. Spurling Sr. It moved to Camp Creek in North Carolina in 1896 and lived through a Pentecostal revival there. It also survived persecution: a dynamite attack on its log church, then a mob that tore the building down and burned it. [S402] In 1906 the leaders of its four churches chose the name Church of God. In 1907 Ambrose J. Tomlinson, pastor of the church in Cleveland and an Indiana native who had come to the area selling Bibles, became general overseer. [S402]
Tomlinson led the church for fifteen years. He started a publishing house and an orphanage, and membership grew from one thousand to twenty-one thousand. [S402] The first Church of God Evangel came out on March 1, 1910. In 1913 Tomlinson put up a small building on Grant Street to print it. [S460] The church’s publishing house, now Pathway Press, became one of the world’s largest publishers of shape-note music. [S460] In 1922 church leaders charged Tomlinson with misusing funds. He left, and the congregations that followed him became the Church of God of Prophecy, also based in Cleveland. [S402] The Tennessee Encyclopedia notes that three denominations keep their headquarters in the county: the Church of God, the Church of God of Prophecy and the Church of God Jerusalem Acres. [S400]
The church opened its Bible Training School in Cleveland in 1918. The state marker gives the date as January 1, 1918, on Caut Avenue. [S402][S461] The school moved to Sevierville, in 1937 according to the Tennessee Encyclopedia or 1938 according to the marker. [S402][S461] It came back to Cleveland on the North Ocoee Street campus vacated by Bob Jones College. The marker says it returned in 1947. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the church bought the buildings in 1948 and reopened the school in 1949 as Lee College, named for early church leader Flavius J. Lee. [S461][S402] Today it is Lee University. [S402] The church’s Theological Seminary opened next door in 1975 as the School of Theology. [S402]
After emancipation, freed people in Bradley County built their own schools and churches. [S233] In 1883 the first local school building for African American children went up on the College Hill site in Cleveland, and in 1890 it awarded its first four diplomas. A brick school replaced the wooden one in 1925. The state marker says that in 1933 College Hill was the only school in the city with teachers who held college degrees. It drew Black students from several counties until desegregation closed it in 1966. [S462] The Julius Rosenwald Fund helped build College Hill, the Charleston School and the St. Elmo school. [S233] In Charleston the Watson Chapel AME Zion congregation dates to the 1880s and still meets at Wool and Market streets. [S233]
Bradley Central High School opened on North Ocoee Street in 1916 and held classes there until 1972; the school complex that followed is on South Lee Highway. [S464] East Side School, built in 1910, became Allen Grammar School. A marker put up by its former students says integration came easily there in 1969, because the neighborhood was diverse and the children had long been friends. [S463] The Tennessee Encyclopedia counts six high schools and fifty-three elementary schools in the county in 1920. [S400]
Bradley County’s war memorials stand together at the courthouse on North Ocoee Street. The World War I memorial lists nineteen men who died in the service. [S466] The World War II memorial, dedicated November 11, 1948, lists more than a hundred. [S465] A veterans memorial on Second Street SE adds names from Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War. [S471]
The county’s best-known soldier was Paul B. Huff, born in Cleveland in 1918. [S416] On February 8, 1944, near Carano, Italy, Cpl. Huff of the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion led a six-man patrol under fire. He crossed a minefield alone, crawled up to a German machine-gun nest and destroyed it. The intelligence he brought back let a larger patrol rout an enemy company of 125 men. [S416] Lt. Gen. Mark Clark presented his Medal of Honor in Rome that June. Huff later rose to command sergeant major, and he is buried in Cleveland. [S416][S400]
The Hardwick plant built aircraft parts during the war and went back to stoves afterward, with the quality-control system it had learned. [S403] Under Maytag, Cleveland’s stove plants were combined into Maytag Cleveland Cooking Products, which employed 2,700 people in 2001. [S403] Cleveland State Community College, a two-year school under the Tennessee Board of Regents, joined Lee in educating the county. [S400] The public library grew around two historic Ocoee Street houses. The Hardwick–Jarnagin House was given to the city and county in 1984, and the Craigmiles House–Carmichael Annex followed in 2005. [S453][S450] Its building grew with additions in 1987, 2002 and 2009. [S470] The library’s History Branch keeps a collection on the Cherokees. [S400]
Red Clay became a Tennessee state historic park. It covers about 260 acres: the National Park Service says 260 and Tennessee State Parks says 263. [S411][S414] The park has reconstructions of a council house, a Cherokee farmhouse, barn and corncrib, and three sleeping huts, plus the James F. Corn Interpretive Center. [S411][S414] It is listed in the National Register and is a certified site on the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail. [S401][S411]
The Cherokees left Red Clay with embers from the council fire. According to the park’s Eternal Flame panel, the fire keeper split them into four pots, and they were carried west on the Trail of Tears. [S425] In 1951, Eastern Band leaders retracing the trail brought some of that fire back to North Carolina. On April 6, 1984, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and the Cherokee Nation met in council at Red Clay for the first time since the removal. Seven runners carried the flame by torch from Cherokee, North Carolina, to light the Eternal Flame. [S425][S401] The removal divided the Cherokees into three tribes, all federally recognized today: the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and the Eastern Band in Cherokee, North Carolina. [S426]
Charleston tells its part of the story too. The Hiwassee River Heritage Center, owned by the Charleston-Calhoun Hiwassee Historical Society, opened in May 2013. It is a certified Trail of Tears site, with a "Voices from the Past" trail of panels quoting soldiers, officials, missionaries and Cherokees. [S409][S430] The Henegar House stands on the site of Fort Cass (of Winfield Scott’s headquarters, says the Civil War Trails marker; of the military barracks, says the Park Service) and is on the National Register. Henry Benton Henegar had gone west with the Cherokees as wagonmaster and secretary to John Ross. [S410][S446] The Park Service dates the house to 1849, and the Civil War Trails marker says it was finished in 1852. It is a private home that can be seen only from the street. [S410][S446] In Cleveland, the Museum Center at 5ive Points, which the county established in 1999–2000, tells the story of the Ocoee Region. [S400][S415]
Bradley County had 108,620 people in 2020, up from 98,963 in 2010. [S406] Cleveland is by far its largest city. Charleston, on the Hiwassee across from Calhoun, is the only other one; it is incorporated under the state’s manager-commission charter law, with an incorporation date of 1956. [S406][S408] The Census also counts communities including South Cleveland, East Cleveland, Hopewell, Wildwood Lake and McDonald. [S117] The Tennessee Encyclopedia names many older communities, among them Black Fox, Blue Springs, Chatata Valley, Eureka, Flint Springs, Georgetown, Prospect, Tasso and White Oak. [S400]
The county still lives with the history in its streets. Lee University’s campus on North Ocoee holds markers to the Bible school’s past and the old Pathway Press. [S461][S460] The Craigmiles and Hardwick houses are part of the public library. [S450][S453] Red Clay’s council fire still burns on the Georgia line. [S425] For the guide to visiting today, see our Bradley County guide.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1540 | De Soto’s expedition follows the Great War and Trading Path past present-day McDonald, a state marker says [S467] |
| 1817–1819 | Cherokee Agency moves to present-day Charleston (by 1817 per the Heritage Center; 1819 per the Tennessee Encyclopedia) [S233][S400] |
| 1819 | Hiwassee Purchase; the Hiwassee becomes the U.S.–Cherokee line [S233] |
| 1825 | Cherokee Council lets American tradesmen set up shops in the Nation [S428] |
| 1832 | Cherokee national council moves to Red Clay [S421][S401] |
| 1834 | Camp Cass established at the agency; "Chief Jack" Walker killed; Candies Creek Baptist Church founded [S233][S438][S443] |
| 1835 | Red Clay council rejects a removal treaty in October; Treaty of New Echota signed in December [S420][S430] |
| 1836 | Bradley County created February 10; Senate ratifies the New Echota treaty by one vote [S404][S12] |
| 1837 | Last council at Red Clay; Oak Grove Male Academy chartered [S401][S441] |
| 1838 | Cleveland named county seat January 20; roundup begins in May; detachments leave Rattlesnake Springs, August–December [S440][S430][S413] |
| 1841–42 | Cleveland incorporated by act of the legislature [S407] |
| 1856 | Masonic Female Institute opens [S442] |
| 1861 | Unionists burn the Charleston railroad bridge, November 8 [S445] |
| 1863 | Cleveland’s copper-rolling mill burned; Sherman at the Henegar House, November 30; wagon-train fight at Charleston, December 28 [S444][S446][S445] |
| 1864 | Union flag raised again in Cleveland, February 10; Wheeler’s raid on the Cleveland forts in August [S448][S447] |
| 1870s–1879 | Hardwick stove works begins [S403][S453] |
| 1883 | College Hill school built for African American students [S462] |
| 1907 | A. J. Tomlinson, pastor at Cleveland, becomes Church of God general overseer [S402] |
| 1910 | First Church of God Evangel published [S460] |
| 1914 | G.A.R. monument dedicated at Fort Hill Cemetery [S451] |
| 1916 | Bradley Central High School opens [S464] |
| 1918 | Church of God Bible Training School opens in Cleveland [S402][S461] |
| 1922 | Church leaders bring charges against Tomlinson; his followers become the Church of God of Prophecy [S402] |
| 1942–1945 | Hardwick plant builds aircraft parts [S403] |
| 1944 | Cpl. Paul B. Huff earns the Medal of Honor near Carano, Italy [S416] |
| 1947–1949 | Bible school returns to Cleveland as Lee College [S461][S402] |
| 1966 | College Hill School closes with desegregation [S462] |
| 1981 | Maytag acquires Hardwick Stove [S403] |
| 1984 | Eastern and Western Cherokees meet again at Red Clay, April 6 [S425] |
| 2001 | Hardwick Woolen Mills listed in the National Register [S403] |
| 2013 | Hiwassee River Heritage Center opens in Charleston [S409] |
| 2020 | Census counts 108,620 people [S406] |
Start at Red Clay State Historic Park, 1140 Red Clay Park Road SW, south of Cleveland on the Georgia line. [S414][S411] Walk from the James F. Corn Interpretive Center to the council house, the sleeping huts, the Cherokee farmstead and the Blue Hole spring, and stop at the Eternal Flame. [S414][S425] The state’s Red Clay Council Ground marker is on Dalton Pike (Tennessee 60), about a mile east. [S429] Park hours change with the seasons, so check the park page before you go. [S414]
At midday head into Cleveland. The Civil War Trails marker "Cleveland During the Civil War" stands at the Museum Center at 5ive Points, at Inman Street East and Parker Street. [S444][S415] Walk up North Ocoee Street to the courthouse memorials and bell, then on to the Masonic Female Institute marker, the Craigmiles House and the public library’s historic houses near Eighth Street. [S459][S465][S442][S454][S453] The Fort Hill Cemetery marker, with the G.A.R. monument, is off 12th Street SW. [S447] Farther up North Ocoee is the Lee University campus with its markers. [S461][S460]
Finish in Charleston. The Hiwassee River Heritage Center is at 8746 Hiwassee Street (U.S. 11), with the "Voices from the Past" trail behind it. [S409][S430] The "Charleston on the Hiwassee" Civil War Trails marker is in the city park at Worth and Market streets. [S445] The Henegar House is a short walk up Market Street; view it from the street only. [S410][S446] If you have time, the Union IV Corps at Blue Springs marker is on Blue Springs Road southeast of Cleveland, and the "Chief Jack" Walker marker is on Keith Street (U.S. 11) at Stuart Road in north Cleveland. [S448][S438] Hours vary, so check before you go.
Visit: Red Clay State Historic Park and the Eternal Flame · Red Clay Council Ground marker, Dalton Pike · Museum Center at 5ive Points, Cleveland · North Ocoee Street markers and courthouse memorials · Fort Hill Cemetery · Lee University campus markers · Hiwassee River Heritage Center and the Voices from the Past trail, Charleston · Henegar House (from the street) · Blue Springs Civil War Trails marker
Every bracketed number on this page links here. Written by My East TN in our own words and checked against each source on 2026-10-31 (ET). Where sources disagree (for example, whether Col. Edward Bradley was a Revolutionary War veteran, when the Cherokee Agency settled at present-day Charleston, how many acres Red Clay State Historic Park covers, whether Georgia’s ban on Cherokee meetings dates from 1828–1830 or 1832, whether the Henegar House stands on the site of Scott’s headquarters or of the Fort Cass barracks and whether it was finished in 1849 or 1852, whether the Confederate raid on Cleveland’s forts came on August 17 or August 22, 1864, who founded the Hardwick stove works and in what year, and when the Church of God’s Bible school moved to Sevierville and back to Cleveland), we give both or leave the exact figure out. We don’t republish encyclopedia, museum or marker text — follow the links for the full articles.
Hero image: the reconstructed council house at Red Clay State Historic Park, the same image as our Bradley County guide. Corrections: [email protected].