East Tennessee History · County by county
Tennessee’s northern gateway on the Kentucky line: a fertile valley settled before statehood was a generation old, a county seat laid out by act of the legislature, a Unionist county that sent its men north through the mountain gaps, coal camps and a railroad town on the state line, an Indiana engineer’s iron town at Big Creek Gap, a New Deal lake and park, and elk back on the old strip mines.
Campbell County lies on Tennessee’s northern border, in the Cumberland Mountains and the valley of the Powell River, with Kentucky across the state line. [S340][S342] The General Assembly created it on September 11, 1806, from parts of Anderson and Claiborne counties. It was the state’s twenty-sixth county, and it was named for Col. Arthur Campbell, a Virginia officer of the Revolution. [S340][S341][S342] The same act ordered a county seat called Jacksboro, which was founded in 1807. [S340][S341]
Farmers came first, to the wide, fertile Powell’s Valley. Coal, iron and timber in the mountains drew notice early in the 1800s, but it took the railroads, late in the century, to turn the county into coal country. [S340][S353] Campbell County voted overwhelmingly against secession in 1861, and its mountain gaps saw marching armies in 1862. [S343][S344][S345] Two railroad towns grew up after the war: Jellico, on the Kentucky line, and LaFollette, the planned iron town that replaced the old settlement of Big Creek Gap. [S340][S346][S349] In the 1930s the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Norris Lake flooded the southern valleys, and the Civilian Conservation Corps built Cove Lake State Park at Caryville. [S340][S355][S359] Coal faded for good in the early 1980s, and since 2000 elk have roamed the old mining country of the North Cumberland Wildlife Management Area. [S340][S360][S361]
The county counted 39,272 people in the 2020 Census. [S369] It has five incorporated places: Jacksboro, the county seat; LaFollette, the largest; Jellico; Caryville; and Rocky Top, which it shares with Anderson County. [S369][S117] Most residents live in the country rather than in those towns, and two of the oldest settlements, Fincastle and Speedwell, are still unincorporated communities. [S340]
People lived in the valleys here long before Tennessee existed. When TVA prepared the Cove Lake area near Caryville in the 1930s, it found evidence of a Mississippian-period town from about AD 1000 to 1200, and University of Tennessee archaeologists dug its mounds and house sites. The Tennessee Encyclopedia dates that excavation to 1937; a marker on the park’s walking trail says 1934. [S355][S357] The marker describes three temple mounds and says the artifacts went to the McClung Museum on the UT campus in Knoxville. A remnant of one site can still be seen at the park’s Duck Island. [S357][S355]
The first white settlers came for Powell’s Valley, which the Tennessee Encyclopedia describes as wide and fertile, watered by navigable rivers and many tributaries. Most early families stayed in the valley; only a few went up into the mountains, and the towns still follow that pattern. [S340] Two of the oldest settlements, Fincastle and Speedwell, remain unincorporated communities today. [S340] Farming came first, but by the early 1800s settlers had noticed the coal and iron in the hills, and timber cutting gave the local economy an early boost. [S340]
By 1806, settlers in the northern parts of Anderson and Claiborne counties had a long way to travel. The act that created Campbell County said the size of those counties made it "grievous and burthensome" to attend courts, militia musters, elections and other public meetings. [S341] The General Assembly passed it on September 11, 1806 (Acts of 1806, Second Session, Chapter 21). [S341][S340] It drew the new county’s lines from a point eleven miles from the Anderson County town of Burrville to the Kentucky line, across Powell’s Valley near "the house where James Davis formerly lived," and down the Clinch River. [S341]
The act named the county Campbell. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says it honored Col. Arthur Campbell, a Revolutionary War soldier and Indian fighter. [S340] The state marker at Jellico is more careful: the county was "reportedly" named for him. The marker says Campbell sat in the Virginia House of Burgesses, commanded the 70th Regiment of Virginia militia in the Revolution, and served as a commissioner for Indian treaty talks in 1781. [S342]
The 1806 act named seven commissioners, among them James Grant, William Hancock and Richard Linville, to choose a site for a courthouse, a prison and stocks. They could buy up to forty acres, lay off a town with streets and alleys, keep one acre near the center for the public buildings, and sell the lots, advertising in the Knoxville newspapers. The act said the town "shall be known by the name of Jacksboro." [S341] Until a courthouse went up, the county court was to meet at Richard Linville’s house, four times a year. [S341] A special tax paid for the buildings: twelve and a half cents on every hundred acres of land, and twenty-five cents on each town lot, each enslaved person between twelve and fifty, and each white man between twenty-one and fifty. [S341]
Jacksboro was founded in 1807 and has been the center of county government ever since. [S340] Its courthouse burned in 1883 and again in 1926. [S341] Even so, the State Library and Archives lists county wills and a deed index that go back to 1806, marriages from 1838 and county court minutes from 1839. [S341] The county’s historical records office, run by its archivists, is now at 235 East Central Avenue in LaFollette. [S375] Jacksboro is still a small town; it works today under a general-law charter dated 1967. [S372]
Few Campbell County families owned slaves, and when Tennessee voted on secession in June 1861 the county voted against it, 1,094 to 60. [S343] On August 1–2, 1861, local men met at the courthouse in Jacksboro and formed what became Companies A and B of the 1st Tennessee Infantry (US). [S343] That summer the 19th Tennessee Infantry (CS) and other units stood watch at Big Creek Gap to guard the state line and keep local men from slipping north to join the Union army in Kentucky. Later in the year Confederate forces occupied the mountain country to hold its gaps and block a Union advance. [S344][S343]
Big Creek Gap is one of the few natural passes through the Cumberland Mountains in the area, about thirty miles southwest of Cumberland Gap. [S344] Unionists told Federal commanders they could get around the Confederate works at Cumberland Gap by coming through Big Creek Gap. In March 1862 a Union detachment, including a company of Campbell County men under Capt. Joseph A. Cooper, pushed through the narrow pass and routed the Confederate cavalry posted nearby. [S344] The Civil War Trails marker says the Federals won a fight at Jacksboro, raised the U.S. flag over the courthouse, and went north to destroy a saltpeter works, along with its kettles, 11,000 pounds of bacon and twenty sacks of flour. Saltpeter was needed to make gunpowder. [S343] In June a larger Union force under Gen. George W. Morgan forced the Confederates to leave Cumberland Gap without a fight. [S344]
The gaps changed hands more than once after that. Later in 1862, during Kirby Smith’s invasion of Kentucky, Heth’s Confederate division and the army’s artillery and supply trains crossed into Kentucky through Walker’s and Big Creek gaps on the way to the Confederate victory at Richmond, Kentucky, on August 30. [S345] On a knoll above U.S. 25W at LaFollette, remnants of the earthworks that guarded Big Creek Gap still survive. The marker there calls them the only known Civil War fortifications in Campbell County. [S344] Joseph Cooper, a Campbell County native, finished the war as a general. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says he commanded the Sixth Tennessee Regiment (US). [S340][S344]
Coal mining began in Tennessee on a small scale in the 1840s, and in the years around the Civil War Campbell was one of six counties where the state’s coal output was concentrated. [S353] The big change came with the railroads. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says railroad building turned Campbell County from subsistence farming to coal mining and lumber, and that, apart from short slumps, coal ruled the local economy for about seventy-five years. [S340] In the 1880s Tennessee’s coal output grew fivefold, and five large mines worked the Jellico coal field, which ran south from Kentucky into Campbell, Anderson and Scott counties. [S353] Beginning in the 1870s, northern investors bought up huge tracts of mineral land across Appalachia, and by the early 1900s they controlled most of the best coal districts. [S353]
Jellico grew up on the Kentucky line. A downtown marker says the railroad arrived in 1883, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia dates the town’s founding to 1885. [S349][S340] One man who arrived that year was Hiram K. Tramell, who came with less than ten dollars, the marker says, and went into real estate, coal, lumber and banking. He founded the town’s first national bank, put up its first two-story building, opened its first drugstore, and was Jellico’s first elected mayor. [S349] The Baptist congregation left the Good Hope Baptist Church at Oswego and built a new church on South Main Street to be closer to the growing town. [S349] Jellico was incorporated under a 1903 private act. [S371] The Cumberland Mountains separate the town from the rest of Campbell County. [S340]
Jellico’s best-known daughter was the soprano Grace Moore. Born in Cocke County, she grew up in Jellico and sang in the First Baptist Church choir. A local marker says she captained the Jellico High School girls’ basketball team in 1916. [S351][S352] She went on to Broadway, starring in Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revue, made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Mimì in La Bohème in 1928, and brought grand opera to the movies with One Night of Love in 1934. [S350][S352] She was killed in a plane crash after leaving Copenhagen on January 26, 1947. [S352] Sources disagree on her birth: the Tennessee Encyclopedia gives December 6, 1901, in Slabtown, while the Jellico markers give 1898, one of them December 5. [S352][S351][S350] A state marker on Fifth Street marks the site of her childhood home. [S350]
The county’s largest town began as an investment. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says that in 1893 Harvey LaFollette, an Indiana educator and engineer, bought the mountain land around Big Creek Gap for its iron and coal. [S340] The city’s own history, written by Campbell County Historian Greg Miller, says Harvey and his brother Grant arrived about 1890, bought more than 37,000 acres and formed the LaFollette Coal, Iron and Railway Company. [S346] The brothers wanted a planned town. The city history says Harvey hired John Fox Jr., later a famous writer, to lay it out, with a main street a hundred feet wide. [S346] The town was organized and incorporated in 1897, the same year a rail link to the Southern Railway was built. [S340][S370]
LaFollette boomed. The city history says its population went from about 300 in 1900 to more than 3,000 by 1920, and that its blast furnace was one of the largest in the South. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the furnace employed up to 1,500 workers. [S346][S340] Workers came from many places. A marker at the Historic Stone Chapel says Italian, Bavarian and English Catholic families came at LaFollette’s call to build the railroad, dig coal and run coke ovens. Harvey LaFollette gave the land for their chapel, which was finished in December 1909 from limestone donated by the L&N railroad and designed by Fr. Emmanuel Francis Callahan of Knoxville. [S348] Around 1900–01 LaFollette built Glen Oaks, a 27-room high-Victorian house designed by the architect George Barber, on Indiana Avenue, which was named for the family’s home state. [S347][S346]
The company did not last. The furnace closed in 1926, and the city history says the business failed "at the height of the roaring twenties." [S340][S346] By then LaFollette was the county’s largest town, and it kept growing on coal mining, small factories and, later, Norris Lake and U.S. 25W, the old Dixie Highway. [S346] Two members of Congress, John J. Jennings and J. Will Taylor, were born and raised in LaFollette. [S340]
LaFollette’s Furnace Hill neighborhood also produced one of the great American string-band musicians. Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong was born in Dayton, Tennessee, on March 4, 1909, and grew up in LaFollette from age three. His father worked at the furnace and made him a fiddle. [S366][S368] By ten he was playing in a string band with his brothers. In 1930 he recorded in Knoxville for Brunswick, and he went on to play the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair and record for Bluebird. [S366][S368] He played in many languages for immigrant audiences, received a National Heritage Fellowship in 1990, was the subject of the 1985 documentary Louie Bluie, and died in 2003. [S368][S366][S367] LaFollette has two markers in his honor. [S366][S367]
By the mid-1930s, the Tennessee Encyclopedia says, Campbell County men worked in the coal mines and women in a growing textile industry. [S340] Bituminous coal was still Tennessee’s leading mineral industry at the end of the decade. [S353]
The railroads that hauled the coal also carried troops. At 9:05 p.m. on July 6, 1944, a southbound L&N troop train with about a thousand soldiers aboard left the tracks at Highcliff, near Jellico, and crashed into the Clear Fork River. Thirty-three soldiers were killed and ninety-eight injured. The engineer, J. Rollins, died at the throttle. [S354] Local rescuers and Army units from nearby Oak Ridge rushed to the scene. A state marker on U.S. 25W, titled with the fireman’s words "She Jumped the Tracks," tells the story. [S354]
The New Deal reached every corner of the county. The Public Works Administration built a school in Caryville, the Works Progress Administration added a post office in LaFollette, and the Civilian Conservation Corps developed Cove Lake State Park. The Tennessee Encyclopedia calls TVA’s Norris Lake the most important New Deal change of all. [S340] Norris Dam itself is in Anderson County, on the Clinch River. It was TVA’s first dam, begun in October 1933 and finished in March 1936. [S22][S359] Its lake reaches 73 miles up the Clinch and 56 miles up the Powell, deep into Campbell County. [S359][S340] (Our Anderson County history covers the dam, the town of Norris and Coal Creek, now Rocky Top.)
The lake changed the map. A state marker near Caryville says Joel E. Stone’s dam, grist mill and sawmill on Cove Creek, a community center and whistle-stop on the Southern Railway, ran until 1934, "when Norris Lake was raised." [S358] To spare Caryville the worst of the reservoir, TVA built a smaller dam there, the Caryville Dam. Even so, the Tennessee Encyclopedia says, TVA condemned, demolished or moved more than seventy buildings in the town, including the public school and the First Baptist Church, and rerouted two highways. [S355]
Behind the Caryville Dam, the CCC built a park. A marker in the park traces the camp’s history. It began as a Forest Service camp, and in October 1934 the National Park Service took it over to work on Norris Park. In August 1935 men from Tennessee replaced the original New York and New Jersey enrollees, as Company 4493. On July 1, 1937, the camp became SP-9 and began a new park on Norris Lake at Caryville. It was first called Fork Mountain Park and later renamed Cove Lake State Park. [S356] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the 667-acre park was the third joint demonstration park by TVA, the CCC and the National Park Service. The CCC built water lines, roads, a boat dock, picnic shelters, stone walls, sixteen stone cabins, a restaurant and a stone park office. [S355] TVA says its 1930s demonstration parks at Cove Lake, Big Ridge and Norris Dam became the core of Tennessee’s state park system. [S359] Cove Lake was deeded to the state in 1950. Only a few CCC structures remain: stone walls, a powder house, the park office and parts of the restaurant. [S355] Caryville itself did not incorporate until 1968. [S373]
How much of Norris Lake belongs to Campbell County depends on whom you ask. TVA counts 809 miles of shoreline on the whole reservoir, the Tennessee Encyclopedia credits the county with the attraction of "750 miles of Norris Lake shoreline," and LaFollette’s city history speaks of "Campbell County’s 600 miles of shoreline." [S359][S340][S346]
Coal left its mark on the land, and much of that land is now public. TWRA says 48 percent of Campbell County is public property, much of it in the North Cumberland Wildlife Management Area, about 205,000 acres of mountains in Campbell, Anderson, Claiborne, Morgan and Scott counties. [S360][S361] The agency still warns visitors about hazards left by deep and strip mines, and notes that golden-winged warblers now nest on grassy, regrowing strip-mine land. [S361] At Jellico, Indian Mountain State Park was built on an old coal mine. Its Ballard Lake fills a former strip-mine pit. [S363]
Elk had been gone from Tennessee for well over a century; TWRA’s last record is one killed in Obion County in 1865. [S360] On December 19, 2000, TWRA released fifty elk from Elk Island National Park in Alberta onto Horsebone Ridge in what is now the North Cumberland WMA. By March 2008 it had released 201 in all, into a restoration zone in five counties, Campbell among them. [S360] The herd grew enough for Tennessee to hold its first elk hunt in almost 150 years in 2009. [S360] Local groups, including the Campbell County Outdoor Recreation Association, helped make it happen. [S360]
The best place to see the elk is the viewing tower on Hatfield Knob, in the WMA’s Sundquist Unit north of LaFollette. It was first built in 2005, rebuilt in 2022 to be wheelchair-accessible, and named for Terry and Jane Lewis, the local couple who led both projects. A University of Tennessee study counted about 16,000 visitors a year. [S360][S361]
The mountains also carry a long trail. Cumberland Trail State Park, established in June 1998 as Tennessee’s first linear park, is planned to run 230 miles from Cumberland Gap to Signal Mountain. By 2001 its Cumberland Mountain segments in Campbell County were already open, and today the park covers more than 40,000 acres. [S365][S364] At LaFollette, the Big Creek Gap Civil War marker stands at a Cumberland Trail trailhead. [S344]
Interstate 75 changed the county again. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the highway brought tourists, boaters, fishermen and retirees, along with easier access for new industry, just as "King Coal" made its final decline in the early 1980s. [S340] Campbell County also counts a four-star general among its natives: Carl W. Stiner, who grew up on a Powell Valley farm and commanded U.S. forces in Operation Just Cause, the 1989 invasion of Panama. His brother, Col. Tom Stiner, served as county executive. [S340] The county airport is the Colonel Tommy C. Stiner Airfield. [S376] Others the Tennessee Encyclopedia names include Capt. Winston Baird of the Spanish-American War and Harry Stonecipher, later the chief executive of an aerospace company. [S340]
The past is easy to find. Jellico keeps its Grace Moore and Tramell markers, LaFollette its stone chapel, Glen Oaks and Howard Armstrong markers, and Big Creek Gap its Civil War earthworks. [S349][S350][S348][S347][S366][S344] Cove Lake keeps its CCC stonework and its mound site. [S355][S357] For towns, parks and local news, see our Campbell County guide and our Jacksboro guide.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 1000–1200 | Mississippian town with temple mounds at the Cove Lake site [S355][S357] |
| 1806 | Campbell County created from Anderson and Claiborne counties, September 11 [S341][S340] |
| 1807 | Jacksboro founded as the county seat [S340] |
| 1861 | County votes 1,094 to 60 against secession (June); Union companies form at Jacksboro (August 1–2) [S343] |
| 1862 | Union troops force Big Creek Gap and take Jacksboro (March); Heth’s Confederates pass into Kentucky on the way to Richmond, Ky. [S344][S343][S345] |
| 1883 | Railroad reaches Jellico [S349] |
| 1883 | Courthouse fire [S341] |
| 1885 | Jellico founded [S340] |
| c. 1890–93 | LaFollette brothers buy land at Big Creek Gap [S346][S340] |
| 1897 | LaFollette incorporated; rail link to the Southern Railway [S370][S340] |
| c. 1900–01 | Glen Oaks built for Harvey LaFollette [S347] |
| 1903 | Jellico incorporated [S371] |
| 1909 | Stone chapel finished in LaFollette (December) [S348] |
| 1926 | LaFollette furnace closes; second courthouse fire [S340][S341] |
| 1928 | Grace Moore’s Metropolitan Opera debut [S352] |
| 1930 | Howard Armstrong records in Knoxville, April 3 [S366] |
| 1933–36 | TVA builds Norris Dam in Anderson County [S22][S359] |
| 1934 or 1937 | Cove Lake mounds excavated [S357][S355] |
| 1937 | CCC begins Cove Lake (Fork Mountain) park, July 1 [S356][S355] |
| 1944 | Troop train wreck at Highcliff kills 33 soldiers, July 6 [S354] |
| 1947 | Grace Moore killed in a plane crash, January 26 [S352] |
| 1950 | Cove Lake deeded to the state [S355] |
| 1967 | Jacksboro’s current charter [S372] |
| 1968 | Caryville incorporated [S373] |
| early 1980s | Final decline of "King Coal" [S340] |
| 1990 | Howard Armstrong named a National Heritage Fellow [S368] |
| 1998 | Cumberland Trail State Park established (June) [S365] |
| 2000 | First elk released on Horsebone Ridge, December 19 [S360] |
| 2005 | Hatfield Knob elk viewing tower built [S360] |
| 2009 | First Tennessee elk hunt in almost 150 years [S360] |
| 2020 | Census counts 39,272 people [S369] |
| 2022 | Elk viewing tower rebuilt [S360] |
Start at Cove Lake State Park in Caryville (110 Cove Lake Lane). [S362] The CCC marker is on Cove Lake Lane, the Indian Mounds marker is on a walking trail in the park, and the Stone Mill state marker is close by at U.S. 25W and Park Road. [S356][S357][S358] Then drive on to Jacksboro and the Campbell County War Memorial on Main Street. [S377]
Go on to LaFollette. The Big Creek Gap marker and earthworks are at the Cumberland Trail trailhead at North Tennessee Avenue and North Indiana Avenue (U.S. 25W). [S344] Glen Oaks is at 203 South Indiana Avenue, the Historic Stone Chapel marker is at 103 South Sixth Street, and the Howard Armstrong markers are in Freeman Park at West Central Avenue and First Street North and at East Central Avenue and Armstrong Lane. [S347][S348][S366][S367] For the elk, TWRA’s directions run north from LaFollette on U.S. 25W about seven miles to the top of the mountain, then about four and a half miles on gravel roads to the Hatfield Knob parking area. Elk are most active in the mornings and evenings, and the bulls bugle from late September into October. [S361][S360]
Finish in Jellico, off I-75 at Exit 160 (Jellico/U.S. 25W). [S361] The state marker for Campbell County and Kentucky is at U.S. 25 and State Street, and the Kirby Smith marker is at U.S. 25 and First Street. [S342][S345] The Tramell Building marker is at 104 North Main Street, the local Grace Moore marker at 260 North Main, and the state Grace Moore marker at 268 Fifth Street. [S349][S351][S350] Indian Mountain State Park (143 State Park Circle) has the "Conflict in Campbell County" Civil War Trails marker. [S363][S343] The Highcliff troop-train marker is on U.S. 25W east of Highcliff Road. [S354] Hours and road conditions change with the seasons, so check before you go.
Visit: Cove Lake State Park (CCC, mounds and Stone Mill markers) · Campbell County War Memorial, Jacksboro · Big Creek Gap earthworks and Cumberland Trail trailhead, LaFollette · Glen Oaks, the Historic Stone Chapel and the Howard Armstrong markers, LaFollette · Hatfield Knob elk viewing tower · Grace Moore, Tramell and Kirby Smith markers, Jellico · Indian Mountain State Park · Highcliff troop-train marker
Every bracketed number on this page links here. Written by My East TN in our own words and checked against each source on 2026-10-30 (ET). Where sources disagree (for example, whether the Cove Lake mounds were excavated in 1934 or 1937, whether Grace Moore was born on December 5, 1898, or December 6, 1901, whether the LaFollette brothers arrived about 1890 or Harvey LaFollette first bought land in 1893, how many miles of Norris Lake shoreline lie in Campbell County, and whether the Stone Mill closed in 1934 when Norris Lake was raised even though the dam was finished in 1936), 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 photo: Norris Lake at dusk (the same image as our Campbell County guide). Corrections: [email protected].