East Tennessee History · County by county
Where Tennessee’s first settlers governed themselves: old Indian fields along the Watauga, a compact signed at the shoals, a fort that held in 1776, a muster that marched to Kings Mountain, the oldest frame house in the state, iron forges and a Federal mansion, a county split by war, two brothers who ran against each other for governor, a covered bridge and a narrow-gauge railroad, a hotel on the state line atop Roan Mountain, German rayon mills and the women who struck them, a TVA dam and the floods of 1998 and 2024.
Carter County sits in Tennessee’s northeast corner, where the Watauga and Doe rivers come down out of the Blue Ridge. The legislature of the new state created it from Washington County in 1796 and named it for Landon Carter, a militia officer and treasurer of North Carolina’s Washington and Hamilton districts who had been speaker of the State of Franklin’s senate and its secretary of state. [S1102][S38][S1103][S1104] Elizabethton is the county seat. [S1103] The county’s 348 square miles take in mountains, river valleys, much of the Cherokee National Forest and a stretch of the Appalachian Trail, with Roan Mountain State Park on the North Carolina line. [S1102] In 2020 the county counted 56,356 people. [S1105]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia calls Carter County extremely significant in the state’s settlement history, and the reason is a few acres of river flats at Elizabethton’s western edge. [S1102] At Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga, settlers formed the Watauga Association in 1772, Richard Henderson bought a vast tract from Cherokee leaders in 1775, a fort held out against a Cherokee attack in 1776, and the Overmountain Men gathered in 1780 before marching to Kings Mountain. [S1106][S1107] After that come iron forges and a Federal mansion, a county split by the Civil War, the Taylor brothers’ "War of the Roses," a narrow-gauge railroad and a covered bridge, a hotel on the state line atop Roan Mountain, German-owned rayon mills and the 1929 strikes led by women who worked in them, a TVA dam, and two great floods on the Doe River.
The shoals were a crossing place long before the settlers came. An ETSU trail panel near the river explains that the shallow rapids and the sycamores along the banks gave the place its name, that the natural ford made it a meeting place since ancient times, and that during the late Mississippian period the area became part of Cherokee territory. [S1108] Archaeologists at nearby Sabine Hill have found projectile points dating to 6500–6000 B.C. and pottery from around 1000 B.C., signs of people on that ground for thousands of years. [S1109]
When settlers reached this stretch of the Watauga in the 1770s, the state park’s exhibit says, they found fields that Indians had cleared and farmed years earlier and then abandoned. These "Watauga Old Fields" ran about six miles from the mouth of Stony Creek to the mouth of Buffalo Creek, and the earlier farmers left stone tools, broken pottery, middens and cemeteries behind. [S1110] Buffalo once ranged the valley too; an ETSU panel notes that the herds left trails and fords that later became roads, and that Buffalo Creek, which runs from Buffalo Mountain to the Watauga, takes its name from them. [S1111]
Families from Virginia and North Carolina began arriving in the late 1760s. The Tennessee Encyclopedia names William Bean as one of the earliest, with a farm about eight miles west of Sycamore Shoals; James Robertson, who farmed in the valley from 1770 until he left for the Cumberland in 1779; and Valentine Sevier Sr., the father of John Sevier, who lived near the shoals. [S1102] The park’s exhibit dates Bean’s cabin on Boone’s Creek to 1768 and has Robertson bringing his family from the North Carolina Piedmont in 1771, after scouting the flats the year before. [S1110] By 1774, it says, about four hundred families, mostly English and Scots-Irish, had settled in the region, and the shoals were their gathering place for races and musters. [S1110]
John Carter, a merchant from Amherst, Virginia, came west in 1770 and first kept a trading post with William Parker on the Holston in what became Hawkins County. After a robbery by Indians in 1772, he moved his family to the Watauga Old Fields, and in 1775 he gained title to 640 acres where Elizabethton now stands. [S1112] His store was so busy that the settlement around the flats was sometimes simply called "Carter’s." [S1110] Jeremiah Dungan built a mill at the mouth of Brush Creek in 1779; a state marker says it ran continuously from then on and that pioneers of the Watauga settlement put up a stone fort nearby. [S1113]
The settlers had a problem. By 1772 about seventy farms lay along the Watauga, outside any colonial government and inside land that Britain recognized as Cherokee. The settlers negotiated a ten-year lease from the Cherokees and, that same year, organized the Watauga Association to govern themselves. [S5] The state park’s exhibit says they had thought they were living in Virginia and formed their own government when they learned they were in fact beyond the Indian treaty line, under North Carolina’s royal authority. [S1107]
What the association was is still argued over. The Tennessee Encyclopedia describes a written "constitution" built on Virginia’s laws, with five elected magistrates who ran the courts and handled government business; it says John Carter was probably the first chairman and that the other members can only be guessed. [S5] A 1923 tablet from the Tennessee Daughters of the American Revolution instead lists thirteen commissioners, from Charles and James Robertson to John Sevier, William Bean and John Carter, and calls the place the first west of the Alleghenies where men joined in a written compact for civil government. [S1114] The park’s exhibit calls the association independent of the British Crown in practice, more than four years before the Declaration of Independence. [S1107] The encyclopedia disagrees: the lease was for ten years, and the settlers’ own 1776 petition made no claim to have declared independence in 1772. [S5] A Daughters of the American Revolution marker in Elizabethton calls the Watauga court probably the first English-speaking court west of the Alleghenies, and a city walking-tour marker says the association was formed under an old sycamore on the bank of the Doe River, a tree that was cut down in 1987. [S1115][S1116]
In March 1775 the shoals hosted one of the largest land deals in American history. A state marker says that on March 17, 1775, the Transylvania Company of Richard Henderson, John Williams and Nathaniel Hart bought from the Cherokees, led by Oconostota, all the land between the Kentucky and Cumberland rivers, more than 20 million acres, for 2,000 pounds sterling and goods worth 8,000 pounds. [S1117] The park’s exhibit adds a "Path Deed" for land between the Holston and the Cumberland Mountains, says more than 1,000 Indians and at least 600 Wataugans attended, and notes the purchase was illegal under British and colonial law. [S1107] The Tennessee Encyclopedia counts about twelve hundred Native Americans at the talks. [S1106] On March 19, a second marker says, the Watauga settlers, with Charles Robertson as trustee, bought the lands they had been leasing along the Watauga, Holston and New rivers for 2,000 pounds. [S1118] The DAR’s 1909 obelisk gives March 19 for the Transylvania treaty itself. [S1119]
Not every Cherokee leader agreed. Dragging Canoe denounced the sale as unfair and unwise, and the park quotes his warning that the buyers would make Kentucky "a dark and bloody ground." [S1106][S1107] An ETSU trail panel notes that both purchases defied the British Proclamation of 1763. [S1108]
War came the next year. According to the park’s exhibit, Cherokee leaders in May 1776, alarmed by the spread of settlement onto their land, gave the Wataugans twenty days to leave. The settlers asked for more time and built Fort Watauga, also called Fort Caswell, near a spring about half a mile northeast of the mouth of Gap Creek. Nancy Ward, a Cherokee married to a white man, sent warning that an attack was coming, and families from the Watauga and Nolichucky settlements crowded into the fort. [S1120]
At daybreak on July 21, 1776, warriors led by Old Abram of Chilhowee struck the fort, surprising women who were outside milking. All made it inside; John Sevier pulled one of them, Catherine Sherrill, over the wall. Captain James Robertson’s garrison of about 75 "men, boys, and Negroes fit to bear arms," the exhibit says, had only six pounds of powder but drove off the attack after three hours. [S1120][S1121] The Cherokees then settled into a loose siege. When Anne Robertson poured boiling water on warriors trying to burn the fort, the attempt failed, and in early August, after word came that Dragging Canoe had been beaten at Long Island Flats, the besiegers withdrew. [S1120] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the siege lasted about two weeks. [S1106] The ETSU panel names Dragging Canoe’s warriors as the besiegers; the state marker, the park and the encyclopedia all name Old Abram. [S1108][S1121][S1106] The state marker calls her "Bonny Kate" Sherrell; she became John Sevier’s wife, and Elizabethton’s Bonnie Kate Theater is named for her. [S1121][S1122]
According to the Sevier Family Association’s 1999 marker, a second fort was afterward built on Valentine Sevier’s land beside the shoals. [S1123] The park’s exhibit says the attack began a war with the Cherokees that did not end until 1794. [S1120] John Carter commanded the fort that year, according to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, and North Carolina made him a colonel in 1777. [S1112]
Before the next crisis, the Watauga country got a gunpowder mill. An ETSU panel tells how Mary McKeehan Patton, who was born in England and apprenticed to a gunpowder maker as a girl, settled in the valley with her husband John and began making powder on Powder Branch in 1777. [S1124] A state marker stands where her mill stood, a hundred yards up the branch at a falls. [S1125]
In 1780, after the British took Charleston, Lord Cornwallis sent Major Patrick Ferguson’s Loyalist regiment to the foot of the Blue Ridge, and Ferguson warned the over-mountain settlers that he would cross the mountains, hang their leaders and lay waste their country. [S1126] Instead, the Watauga leaders called their militia to Sycamore Shoals. The park’s exhibit says 1,100 militiamen from western North Carolina and Virginia gathered on September 25, 1780; the next day, leaving about 200 behind to guard against the Cherokees, the rest marched up Gap Creek, through Yellow Mountain Gap and over the Blue Ridge. [S1126] The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s county entry also counts about eleven hundred men, though its park entry says the muster involved about one hundred, apparently a slip. [S1102][S1106] An ETSU panel puts it at more than 800 and credits Mary Patton with supplying at least 500 pounds of powder. [S1124] William Campbell of Virginia, John Sevier and Isaac Shelby led them. [S1127]
A state marker says the Reverend Samuel Doak held a service for the men before they set out on September 26. [S1128] A 1910 DAR marker marks their first night’s camp on that date. [S1129] The 1909 DAR obelisk at the park remembers the patriots who "assembled here September 25, 1780"; an ETSU panel quoting the same obelisk gives the date as September 26. [S1119][S1127] On October 7 the frontiersmen surrounded and defeated Ferguson’s army at Kings Mountain in about 65 minutes, and Ferguson was killed. [S1126] An ETSU panel recalls that Thomas Jefferson called the battle the "turn of the tide of success" in the Revolution, and notes the Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail that follows the route. [S1127] Her great-grandson T. Y. Patton placed a tablet in her memory on the 1912 soldiers’ monument in Elizabethton. [S1130]
Visit: Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park in Elizabethton preserves the muster ground, the shoals, a reconstructed Fort Watauga and the Carter Mansion, and the fort is the backdrop for Liberty! The Saga of Sycamore Shoals, Tennessee’s official outdoor drama. [S1102][S1131][S1106]
John Carter did not live to see the county named for his son. He served North Carolina as a senator from the Washington District in 1778 and 1781, gathered more than 2,000 acres beyond his first section, and died of smallpox in 1781. [S1112] Landon Carter, who managed his estate, inherited the 640-acre home place. [S1132] A memorial tablet at the house lists the son’s long record: captain in the Revolution, entry-taker and auditor, member of the North Carolina legislature, speaker of the first State of Franklin senate and its secretary of state, treasurer of the Washington and Hamilton districts, trustee of Martin’s Academy and Greeneville College, and, it says, builder of the first iron forge in Tennessee. [S1133] He married Elizabeth Maclin in 1784, and Elizabethton is named for her. [S1133][S1134]
The Carter Mansion still stands by the Watauga. A state marker says John Carter and his son built it before 1780. [S1134] The Tennessee Encyclopedia is more careful: local tradition credits John Carter, but documents do not mention such a large house until the 1790s, so Landon may have built it before his death in 1800; its 1780s style fits either man. Andre Michaux visited the Carters in 1796 and Governor John Sevier in 1800. [S1132] The two-story frame house has a Pennsylvania-style plan, floor-to-ceiling paneling, faux-marble and wood-grain painting, and an overmantel painting of a stag hunt. It stayed in the family until 1882, and the state bought it in 1973. [S1132] Tennessee State Parks calls it the oldest frame house in Tennessee and says its tours now cover the family’s dealings with Native Americans and with the people they enslaved. [S1131]
The act creating Carter County in 1796 drew a line from the North Carolina border over Buffalo Mountain to Jeremiah Dungan’s ford on the Watauga and north to Sullivan County, named Landon Carter among the commissioners who would choose a site for the courthouse, and ordered the first court held at the house of Samuel Tipton. [S1103] An ETSU panel notes that the line ran near Charles Robertson’s farm on Catbird Creek, where Washington County’s first court had met in 1778. [S1135]
Tipton owned the land on which Elizabethton grew. A plaque from Elizabethton High School’s class of 1950 calls him the town’s founder; his Green Hill plantation once covered nearly a thousand acres, he was a slaveholder and a member of Sinking Creek Baptist Church, and the county court met at his house several times before the courthouse was built. [S1136] A state marker says the Tiptons owned nearly 3,000 acres in what became Carter County by 1779, and that Samuel and Thomas Tipton set up an iron works in Elizabethton. [S1137] Samuel and Susannah Tipton are buried in the family’s Green Hill Cemetery. [S1138]
When the town began is a matter of which record you count. A walking-tour marker says the original 77 lots were laid out in 1796 and the town was incorporated in 1799. [S1139] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says Elizabethton was established in 1797; the city gives 1799 as its founding and 1905 as its incorporation. [S1102][S1140] Carter County was later cut down twice. Johnson County was created from it in 1836, and Unicoi County in 1875 from parts of Carter and Washington. [S38]
Duffield Academy was the town’s leading school before the Civil War, the Tennessee Encyclopedia says, giving 1809 as its founding. [S1102] A state marker built from the stones of its foundation dates the academy to September 13, 1806, with Major George Duffield as chairman, and its first brick building to about 1809; a walking-tour marker says the original brick building went up in 1838. [S1141][S1142] In 1839 William G. "Parson" Brownlow started a newspaper in Elizabethton. [S1102] Walking-tour markers downtown date a Greek Revival former Presbyterian church, now a wedding chapel and probably the oldest church in the city, to 1836, and say the building of the Southern Methodist church that is now St. Thomas Episcopal was begun in 1861 and finished in 1867. [S1143][S1144]
Iron mattered here. A state marker near Valley Forge on the Doe River says William B. Carter built an iron furnace there in 1820. James, John and Joseph O’Brien and William Gott bought it in 1824, and on 9,000 acres they ran the furnace, the Valley Forge, two bloomeries and a water-driven hammer, making pig and bar iron with slave labor until they sold out to Nathaniel G. Taylor in 1861. [S1145]
In Happy Valley, General Nathaniel Taylor began a large house after serving under Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812. He had been the county’s first sheriff and a state senator, and he died in 1816 before it was done. His widow, Mary "Polly" Patton Taylor, finished it about 1818 and ran the family’s grist mill, sawmill, ironworks and 3,000-acre estate. [S1146][S1147][S1148] A Tennessee Historical Commission panel at the house says Nathaniel Taylor enslaved many people who worked his plantations and ironworks, more than twenty of whom are listed in his 1826 inventory; in her will Mary Taylor let two elderly people, Sam and Lear, stay where they were and support themselves. [S1146] The house is Sabine Hill. In 2007 it was threatened with demolition for apartments, until citizens and Taylor descendants fought the rezoning. [S1149] The Historical Commission bought it in 2008 and restored it. [S1150] It is now a state historic site with period wallpaper and restored faux marbling and wood graining, toured through Sycamore Shoals. [S1148]
How divided Carter County was in the Civil War depends on the source. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the town and county were equally divided between the Union and the Confederacy. [S1102] A Civil War Trails marker in Elizabethton says Carter County’s voters rejected secession 1,343 to 86. [S1151] Another Civil War Trails marker says residents were divided, raids were common, and the area around Roan Mountain suffered especially from occupation. [S1152]
The county’s best-known soldier was Samuel P. Carter, born in 1819; a Civil War Trails marker names the Carter Mansion as his birthplace. [S1152] A Naval Academy graduate, he was serving at sea when the war began. Senator Andrew Johnson had him detailed to Tennessee to recruit Union troops, and he became a brigadier general of volunteers in May 1862. [S1153][S1151][S1102] A state marker and the Tennessee Encyclopedia place his cavalry raid into East Tennessee late in 1862. [S1153][S1102] A Civil War Trails marker says his raiders burned bridges at Blountville, on the Holston and on the "Wautauga" in December 1862 and January 1863, while a second Trails marker places his raid before the end of 1861. [S1152][S1151] He later returned to the Navy. A state marker says he retired as a commodore in 1881 and was named a rear admiral on the retired list in 1882, and Civil War Trails calls him the only American officer to hold two stars in both the Army and the Navy. [S1153][S1151] His brother William Blount Carter, a Presbyterian minister, helped lead the Unionist plot to burn East Tennessee’s railroad bridges in November 1861, and another brother, James, commanded the 2nd Tennessee Volunteers. [S1152]
Daniel Ellis, "the Old Red Fox," was a Mexican War veteran who gathered men at Valley Forge and guided them over hidden mountain trails to Union regiments in Kentucky while Confederates held East Tennessee. He later became a captain in the 13th Tennessee Cavalry (U.S.) and died in 1907. [S1154]
Andrew Johnson died in Carter County. A state marker says the former president died in 1875 at the home of his daughter Mary Johnson Stover, about a mile southwest of the marker. [S1155] A walking-tour marker in Elizabethton repeats a story that he had his last drink that year in a tavern on the site of the later Riverview Building, and died of a stroke that night. [S1156]
Black churches and schools grew up after emancipation. In 1867 the Reverend Horace Leftwich, who had been enslaved, founded the Elizabethton Colored Baptist Church. In 1868 it helped found the Watauga Baptist Association, and in 1869 it took the name Phillippi Missionary Baptist Church. It met in the county courthouse until the 1901 flood and moved into its own building in 1907. [S1157] Cedar Grove Cemetery, begun in the early nineteenth century as a "colored cemetery" on rocky ground along Gap Creek Road, holds early African American families, veterans and church leaders. It is also the grave of Josephine "Aunt Jo" Taylor, remembered as the county’s last known slave, who had been held by Nat Taylor, father of the governors Alf and Bob Taylor. [S1158] Out in the county, Range School, which began before 1843 in a log sheep barn given by Jonathan Range, was still teaching children when its state marker went up in 1998. [S1159]
Beside Buffalo Creek a church school grew into a university. Milligan University traces itself to an academy founded in 1866 in what is now Hopwood Memorial Christian Church, a private secondary school called the Buffalo Male and Female Institute. [S1160] Joshua Williams gave the land, according to a state marker at his house. [S1161] The Tennessee Encyclopedia gives 1866 for the institute; the state marker at the college gives 1867, credits its founding to the Reverend W. G. Barker (the Williams marker calls him Col. W. G. Baker) and spells the next leader’s name "Hopgood." [S1162][S1163][S1161] That leader was Josephus Hopwood. In 1881, the university says, he laid the cornerstone for a larger building and announced the new collegiate rank and the name Milligan College, after Robert Milligan, his former professor at Kentucky University. [S1160] The encyclopedia and the state marker date the change to 1882. [S1162][S1163]
Milligan gave its whole campus to a Navy V-12 program from July 1943 to June 1945; the university says it was the only college in the country turned over entirely to the Navy. [S1160] The Tennessee Encyclopedia describes near-bankruptcy and lost accreditation after the war, a recovery under Dean E. Walker from 1950, and renewed accreditation in 1960. [S1162] In June 2020 Milligan College became Milligan University. [S1160]
Carter County’s most famous political family came from Happy Valley. Alfred A. Taylor was born there in 1848, the son of Nathaniel Green Taylor, a farmer and Methodist minister who served twice in Congress and as commissioner of Indian Affairs under Andrew Johnson. [S1164] Alf became a Republican; his younger brother Robert L. Taylor became a Democrat. [S1164] Both were great-grandsons of Nathaniel and Mary Taylor of Sabine Hill. [S1147]
In 1886 Republicans nominated Alf, probably to push Bob out of the governor’s race. Bob stayed in, and the brothers campaigned together, opening at Madisonville on September 9. A Memphis paper had already compared them to the houses of York and Lancaster, and Bob turned the image around, speaking of the red rose and the white rose blooming together; within days supporters were wearing roses. [S1165] The Tennessee Encyclopedia warns that some favorite stories are myths. The brothers were storytellers and fiddlers, but the idea that they fiddled from the platform probably came from a newspaper illustration. [S1165] Bob won with 53 percent of the vote. [S1165] He served as governor from 1887 to 1891 and again from 1897 to 1899. [S1102] Alf went to Congress for three terms, toured with Bob giving lectures titled "Yankee Doodle" and "Dixie," and at seventy-two won the governorship in 1920 with 55.2 percent, in the first Tennessee governor’s race in which women voted. [S1164] In 1908 he bought the Williams house near Milligan, which a state marker says was long the home of U.S. District Judge Robert L. Taylor, the judge who in 1956 ordered the desegregation of Clinton High School. [S1161] Milligan renovated the historic Alf Taylor house in 2003 as the Taylor/Phillips House, a guest house and reception center. [S1160]
In 1882 Carter County spent $3,000 on a bridge over the Doe River in Elizabethton and $300 more for its approaches. Dr. E. E. Hunter was the contractor. [S1166] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the bridge opened the way for the town to grow, and a walking-tour marker says it is believed to be the oldest such bridge in the state still in use. [S1102][S1167] The city’s Covered Bridge Park and its Covered Bridge Days festival grew up around it. [S1140]
The railroad came the same year. The East Tennessee and Western North Carolina was built to carry iron ore from the Cranberry mine in North Carolina to Johnson City. It was chartered in 1866, but the line to Cranberry was not finished until 1882; it climbed nearly 2,000 feet and needed five tunnels. [S1168] A marker at Hampton says construction began on a five-foot gauge in 1868 and stopped at Doe River Cove, now Hampton, when money ran out in 1870. New owners resumed work in 1879 on a three-foot gauge, and a Philadelphia firm built the wooden Howe truss bridges between Elizabethton and Cranberry in 1881–82. [S1169] Iron ore went down the line to the Cranberry Furnace in Johnson City. [S1170] The state’s train-history marker dates the "Tweetsie" from 1881 to 1951, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia says the railroad reached the county in the late 1880s. [S1171][S1102] The line became known as "the Railway with a Heart" for stopping to give farmers a lift or deliver groceries, and in 1938 a Universal travel short, The Tennessee Tweetsie, featured the conductor Cy Crumley. [S1172] Many of the ETSU panels quoted on this page stand along today’s Tweetsie Trail. [S1108][S1173]
Industry followed. The county’s first major industry, Line and Twine, arrived in 1892, according to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, though the depression of 1893–94 slowed growth. [S1102] Then came the flood. On May 24, 1901, the "May Tide" washed out most of the railroad’s wooden bridges and spared only the two at Hampton. [S1169] In Elizabethton it destroyed twenty-three houses and every bridge but the covered one, and the courthouse, already damaged by a windstorm that March, came through. [S1174] The county’s courthouse also burned in 1933, which matters to anyone searching old records. [S1103]
At the county’s southern edge rises Roan Mountain. The Forest Service describes it as a ridge about five miles long, from 5,500 feet at Carver’s Gap to 6,286 feet at Roan High Knob; the Tennessee Encyclopedia gives 6,285 feet. [S1175][S1176] American Indians lived at its base and crossed its gaps. Botanists including Andre Michaux, John Fraser and Asa Gray later studied its rare plants and described Fraser fir, Catawba rhododendron and Gray’s lily. [S1175] No one knows where the name came from. Some say it is the roan color of the slopes when the rhododendron blooms, others that it was Daniel Boone’s roan horse. [S1175]
Around 1870 the Union general John T. Wilder bought 7,000 acres along the mountain’s top and sides, built the road to Carver’s Gap, and in 1877 put up a 20-room log inn near the summit, the Forest Service says. He later replaced it with the Cloudland Hotel. [S1175] The Mitchell County Historical Society, on the North Carolina side, dates the 166-room hotel to 1885. It sat on the state line, and by local legend a white line ran down the dining room floor because alcohol was legal on the Tennessee side and not in North Carolina. The society says the hotel was abandoned in 1910 and falling down by 1915. [S1177] Little of it remains. [S1175]
Roan Mountain State Park lies at the foot of the massif along the Doe River. The Tennessee Encyclopedia gives it 2,006 acres; Tennessee State Parks says 2,156. [S1176][S1178] The encyclopedia describes the mountain’s 600-acre spread of crimson Catawba rhododendrons and its grassy balds, and notes the late-nineteenth-century Daniel Miller homestead preserved in the park, a typical mountain farm with its outbuildings. [S1176] The state now presents the Miller Farmstead, which is on the National Register, as the story of early-twentieth-century Appalachian subsistence farmers. [S1178]
By the early 1900s Elizabethton was putting its rivers to work. A mill race off the Doe River turned waterwheels that powered the Line and Twine factory, the Lynnwood Hotel and a few homes, and the Horseshoe Dam, built in 1912 and now called Wilbur Dam, was one of the first hydroelectric plants in Tennessee. It sent power lines as far as Bristol and earned Elizabethton the name "the City of Power." [S1179]
The big change came in the mid-1920s. American Bemberg began making rayon, then called "artificial silk," at a new Elizabethton plant in October 1926. Its German parent, J. P. Bemberg, was an affiliate of Vereinigte Glanzstoff Fabriken, which opened a second plant, American Glanzstoff, in August 1928. By the end of 1928 the two plants employed more than 3,000 people. [S1180] Local officials, the Tennessee Encyclopedia says, offered the companies tax and water concessions and promised them plenty of cheap, nonunion labor. [S1180] The county entry adds that the plants drew hundreds of Appalachian families into industrial work. [S1102] The railroad opened Bemberg Station to serve both plants in 1929, starting with a boxcar set on blocks. [S1173]
The workers proved anything but docile. On March 12, 1929, Margaret Bowen led 523 women out of the Glanzstoff plant. Other shifts joined the next day, the plant closed on March 14, and four days later Bemberg workers walked out in sympathy. [S1181] They objected to low wages, unfair promotions, petty rules applied only to women, and pressure to rent houses at high rates from the Watauga Development Corporation. Women at Glanzstoff worked the same fifty-six-hour week as men for much lower pay. [S1181] A settlement reopened the plants on March 26, but management refused to rehire union members. In early April a group of prominent Elizabethton businessmen kidnapped the American Federation of Labor’s Edward F. McGrady and the hosiery union official Alfred Hoffman, drove them across the state line and warned them not to come back. When they returned, 4,000 workers rallied. [S1181]
A second strike began on April 15. When the plants reopened in May, Governor Henry Horton sent 800 National Guardsmen. Troops used tear gas, more than 300 strikers were arrested in three days, two houses were dynamited, and on May 16 someone blew up a water main into town. [S1181] On May 25, 2,500 workers grudgingly accepted an agreement that promised rehiring without discrimination but gave the union no recognition. A personnel manager brought in from New Jersey later said he blacklisted 200 to 300 workers, and most were never rehired. [S1181] The county entry quotes a description of the strike as the "first concrete sign of Southern disenchantment" with an exploitative textile industry, though it failed. [S1102] Historians still debate how far Elizabethton set off the wave of strikes that swept the Piedmont mills in 1929 and 1930. [S1181]
The plants kept running through the Depression, and employment rose to 4,500 by 1939. [S1180] In World War II Bemberg made parachute cloth, and in early 1942 the federal Office of Alien Property took over management of the plants, which were partly enemy-owned, though the company entry says it never actually seized their assets. [S1180] The county entry says simply that the government seized control of the German-owned factories. [S1102] The county entry says Judge Ben Allen, a World War I veteran and circuit judge, resigned from the bench in 1942 to manage the plants for the government because of his reputation for honesty, and stayed until 1956. [S1102] Most of the wartime workers were women, and with gasoline rationed, the Tweetsie ran three daily round trips for them from August 1942 to 1945; the station was renamed Port Rayon. [S1173] The government sold the plants to Beaunit Mills in December 1948. [S1180]
The Tennessee Valley Authority started Watauga Dam early in 1942, stopped later that year for other wartime projects, resumed in 1946 and finished in 1948. [S1182] The earth-filled dam is 318 feet high and its lake covers about 6,430 acres; TVA says the reservoir, at more than 1,900 feet above sea level, is the highest in the Tennessee River system. [S1182][S1102]
Rayon’s decline was slow. Employment fell from 6,000 in 1949 to 3,550 by 1967. Bemberg dumped toxic wastes into the Watauga and could not meet federal cleanup orders and still make money. It filed for bankruptcy on February 16, 1974. [S1180] North American Rayon carried on, became employee-owned in 1985, and made carbonized rayon for the space shuttle’s booster nozzles. A huge fire broke out at the plant on February 25, 2000, the plant closed, and it was torn down in February 2001. [S1180] An ETSU panel instead says American Bemberg shut down in 1974 and North American Rayon ran until 1997. [S1173] A state marker stands beside an exhibit of an original Tweetsie boxcar, a Southern caboose and the North American Rayon steam engine, which ran from 1936 to 1992 and was believed to be the last active steam locomotive in commercial use in the United States. [S1171]
The Elizabethton Blue Grays were a semi-professional Black baseball team that barnstormed through the Jim Crow era, the Depression and two world wars. Because of segregation they were limited to the Negro leagues. They played the Asheville Blues of the Negro Southern League, and some of their players also played for the Indianapolis Zulu Clowns, the Alabama Black Barons and the Nashville Cubs. Their state marker lists dozens of their names. [S1183] Elizabethton’s soldiers’ monument, built in 1912 and dedicated in 1913, honors county soldiers from the Revolution forward. [S1184][S1130] Out in the national forest, Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees helped keep up The Laurels picnic area, built in the 1930s, until the early 1940s. [S1185]
Ben Allen also helped found the Watauga Historical Association after he retired, and that group’s work led to the Sycamore Shoals park. [S1102] The park’s exhibit notes that the shoals were designated a National Historic Landmark in 1975. [S1107]
The Doe River has flooded more than once. In January 1998, the Elizabethton Star recalled, a winter storm flooded the upper Doe and killed seven people. It struck Roan Mountain, Hampton and Valley Forge, destroying more than 200 mobile homes and 15 houses. [S1186] On September 27, 2024, the remnants of Hurricane Helene brought comparisons to that flood. A siren at the Roan Mountain fire station called on residents to evacuate the village at about 8 a.m., the rescue squad helped people out of homes cut off by water on Heaton Creek, and schools were opened as shelters. [S1186] Carter was among the counties in the expedited Major Disaster Declaration Governor Bill Lee announced on October 3. [S1101] On the Elk River, both Poga bridges, built in 1957, were washed away. In February 2025 the state and FEMA approved $10.77 million for emergency work and replacements. [S1187] As of February 2026, Roan Mountain State Park remained open with significant closures after the storm. [S1178]
Visit: Our Carter County guide has towns, parks and local news.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 6500 B.C. | Earliest projectile points found at Sabine Hill [S1109] |
| 1768 | William Bean builds a cabin on Boone’s Creek on the lower Watauga [S1110] |
| 1770–72 | John Carter trades on the Holston, then moves to Watauga Old Fields [S1112] |
| 1772 | Settlers lease Watauga lands from the Cherokees and form the Watauga Association [S5] |
| 1775 | Transylvania Purchase (March 17) and Watauga Purchase (March 19) at Sycamore Shoals [S1117][S1118] |
| 1776 | Old Abram’s warriors attack Fort Watauga on July 21 [S1121] |
| 1777 | Mary Patton begins making gunpowder on Powder Branch [S1124] |
| 1779 | Jeremiah Dungan builds his mill at the mouth of Brush Creek [S1113] |
| 1780 | Overmountain Men muster at Sycamore Shoals on September 25, win at Kings Mountain October 7 [S1126] |
| 1781 | John Carter dies of smallpox; Landon Carter inherits the home place [S1112][S1132] |
| 1796 | Carter County created from Washington County; first court at Samuel Tipton’s house [S1103] |
| 1806 | Duffield Academy established [S1141] |
| c. 1818 | Mary Patton Taylor finishes Sabine Hill [S1147] |
| 1820 | William B. Carter builds an iron furnace near Valley Forge [S1145] |
| 1836 | Johnson County created from Carter County [S38] |
| 1839 | William G. "Parson" Brownlow starts a newspaper in Elizabethton [S1102] |
| 1862 | Samuel P. Carter becomes a Union brigadier general and leads a cavalry raid [S1102] |
| 1866 | Buffalo Male and Female Institute founded on Buffalo Creek [S1160] |
| 1867 | Rev. Horace Leftwich founds the church that becomes Phillippi Missionary Baptist [S1157] |
| 1875 | Andrew Johnson dies at his daughter’s home; Unicoi County formed partly from Carter [S1155][S38] |
| 1877 | John T. Wilder opens a 20-room log inn atop Roan Mountain [S1175] |
| 1881–82 | Milligan College named; the ET&WNC reaches Cranberry; the Doe River covered bridge is built [S1160][S1168][S1166] |
| 1885 | Cloudland Hotel built on the state line [S1177] |
| 1886 | Bob and Alf Taylor run against each other in the "War of the Roses" [S1165] |
| 1901 | The "May Tide" flood of May 24 [S1169] |
| 1912 | Horseshoe (Wilbur) Dam built on the Watauga [S1179] |
| 1920 | Alf Taylor elected governor [S1164] |
| 1926–28 | Bemberg and Glanzstoff rayon plants open [S1180] |
| 1929 | Rayon workers strike in March and again from April 15 to May 25 [S1181] |
| 1933 | Fire at the Carter County courthouse [S1103] |
| 1942 | Office of Alien Property takes over the rayon plants; work on Watauga Dam begins [S1180][S1182] |
| 1943–45 | Milligan given over entirely to a Navy V-12 program [S1160] |
| 1948 | Watauga Dam completed [S1182] |
| 1973 | State buys the Carter Mansion [S1132] |
| 1974 | Bemberg files for bankruptcy [S1180] |
| 1975 | Sycamore Shoals designated a National Historic Landmark [S1107] |
| 1998 | January flood on the upper Doe River kills seven [S1186] |
| 2000–01 | Fire closes North American Rayon; the plant is demolished [S1180] |
| 2008 | Tennessee Historical Commission acquires Sabine Hill [S1150] |
| 2020 | Milligan College becomes Milligan University [S1160] |
| 2024 | Helene floods Roan Mountain and the Elk River valley [S1186][S1187] |
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, we say so on the page and give each version: whether the Watauga Association’s court had five magistrates (Tennessee Encyclopedia) or thirteen commissioners (a 1923 DAR tablet), and whether it was in practice independent of the Crown (the state park’s exhibit) or never meant as a break with Britain (the encyclopedia); whether the Transylvania Purchase was signed on March 17, 1775 (state markers and the park exhibit) or March 19 (the 1909 DAR obelisk, which gives March 19 to the treaty that the state’s Watauga Purchase marker assigns to the settlers’ own purchase); whether the Cherokee who besieged Fort Watauga in 1776 were led by Old Abram (the encyclopedia, a state marker and the park exhibit) or Dragging Canoe (an ETSU trail panel); whether the 1780 muster brought about 1,100 men (the county entry and the park exhibit), more than 800 (an ETSU panel) or about one hundred (the encyclopedia’s park entry, apparently a slip), and whether the muster day was September 25 (the park exhibit, the encyclopedia and the 1909 obelisk) or September 26 (as an ETSU panel quotes the obelisk; the 1910 DAR marker puts the first night’s camp on the 26th); whether John Carter or his son Landon built the Carter Mansion (state marker and local tradition versus the encyclopedia’s reading of the documents); whether Elizabethton dates from 1796 (lots laid out), 1797 (the encyclopedia) or 1799 (the city, which also gives 1905 for incorporation, while a walking-tour marker says incorporated 1799); whether Duffield Academy was founded in 1806 (state marker) or 1809 (the county entry), and whether its first brick building rose about 1809 (state marker) or in 1838 (walking-tour marker); whether the government seized the German-owned rayon plants in 1942 (the county entry) or only took over their management without seizing the assets (the company entry), and whether North American Rayon ran until 1997 (an ETSU panel) or until the fire of February 2000 (the encyclopedia); whether the Buffalo Institute opened in 1866 (the encyclopedia, the university and two markers) or 1867 (state marker), whether it became Milligan College in 1881 (the university and ETSU panels) or 1882 (the encyclopedia and state marker), whether it was founded by the Reverend W. G. Barker (one state marker) or Col. W. G. Baker (another), and whether its founder was Josephus Hopwood (the encyclopedia and the university) or ’Hopgood’ (the state marker’s spelling); whether Carter County was evenly divided in the Civil War (the encyclopedia) or voted against secession 1,343 to 86 (Civil War Trails); whether Samuel P. Carter’s first raid came before the end of 1861 (Civil War Trails) or late in 1862 (state marker and encyclopedia), and whether he retired in 1881 or 1882; whether the ET&WNC dates its life from 1881 (state marker) or reached Cranberry in 1882 (trail panels), against the county entry’s ’late 1880s’; whether the Cloudland Hotel was abandoned in 1910 or closed about 1915 (the historical society gives both stages); and whether Roan Mountain State Park covers 2,006 acres (encyclopedia) or 2,156 (Tennessee State Parks), with Roan High Knob at 6,285 or 6,286 feet. We don’t republish encyclopedia, museum or marker text — follow the links for the full articles.
Hero art: our illustrative map of historic East Tennessee counties, reused from the site’s county guides. It is a drawn map, not to scale, showing where Carter County sits in the far northeast; it is not a photograph of Carter County, and no endorsement by any agency or source is implied. Reused source numbers (S5, S38, S1101) match the same sources on our other history pages. Corrections: [email protected].