East Tennessee History · County by county
Tennessee’s corner of the Cumberland Gap: an ancient path through the mountain, the road that carried a nation west, frontier churches and a courthouse town in the Powell Valley, a pass that four armies held in turn, a Gilded Age resort that went bust and became a university for the mountains, railroad towns and a killer flood, a national park, Norris Lake, and a tunnel that gave the Gap back to people on foot.
Claiborne County sits on Tennessee’s northern line, where the state meets Kentucky and Virginia. Its most famous feature is the Cumberland Gap, a notch in Cumberland Mountain that Native people used for centuries, that Dr. Thomas Walker documented in 1750, and that Daniel Boone’s road ran through in 1775. [S420][S426][S433] The General Assembly created the county on October 29, 1801, from parts of Grainger and Hawkins counties, and the same act ordered a county seat called Tazewell. [S421][S420] It was named for William C. C. Claiborne, a young Tennessee judge and congressman who went on to govern the Mississippi Territory and become the first governor of Louisiana. [S420][S424][S425]
Settlers came first to the Powell Valley, the long valley under the mountain, and to the creeks between the Powell and the Clinch rivers. [S420][S435] In the Civil War the Gap was a prize both sides wanted, and it changed hands four times; Tazewell lost its courthouse to fire in November 1862. [S420][S428][S433] After the war a British-financed boom built a grand resort hotel at Harrogate, and when the boom collapsed its grounds became Lincoln Memorial University, chartered on Lincoln’s birthday in 1897. [S450][S423][S442] The twentieth century brought railroad towns, a deadly flood, TVA’s Norris Lake on the county’s southern rivers, a national park at the Gap, and in 1996 a highway tunnel that let the old pass go back to the woods. [S455][S445][S461][S422][S431]
The county counted 32,043 people in the 2020 Census. [S456] It has four incorporated towns: Tazewell, the county seat; New Tazewell, its railroad-era neighbor; Harrogate, home of LMU and the largest; and Cumberland Gap, the old town at the foot of the pass. [S456][S457][S458][S459]
The Cumberland Gap is a low place in a long, steep mountain wall. The National Park Service explains it as the work of a stream: Yellow Creek cut a notch while Cumberland Mountain was rising, until the mountain rose faster than the creek could wear it down and the creek turned aside, leaving the notch dry. [S426] Sources give different heights for it. The Tennessee Encyclopedia puts the gap at about 1,500 feet above sea level, and the Federal Highway Administration at 1,304 feet. [S422][S432]
Animals found it first. The park service says bison wore a trail through the gap on their way north to salt licks, and people followed them. People lived in the area as early as about 8,000 years ago, and Mississippian people later built mounds just across the line in Lee County, Virginia, around 1200 CE. [S426] The Cherokee to the south and the Shawnee to the north both hunted in what became Kentucky, and both used the trail through the gap; the Shawnee called it Athiamiowee. English speakers began calling it the Warrior’s Path in the 1750s. [S427][S420] The Tennessee Encyclopedia notes that the two nations prized the hunting grounds beyond the gap, and that settlers later followed the same trail, first worn by animals and then widened by Native travelers. [S422]
The first European known to have written about crossing the gap was Dr. Thomas Walker, sent west in 1750 by Virginia’s Loyal Land Company to find a pass. [S426][S433] Who and what he named is told three ways. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says he named the gap itself for William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, a son of King George II. The National Park Service says he named the mountain for the duke. The Federal Highway Administration says Walker called the pass "Cave Gap" and gave the duke’s name to the river beyond it. [S420][S426][S432] Walker’s journal noted a strong spring flowing out of a cave at the gap, which he said was big enough to turn a mill. [S430]
The state marker at the gap says long hunters used it until 1760 and that Daniel Boone came through in 1769. [S433] In 1775 the land speculator Richard Henderson hired Boone to mark a road for settlers, and Boone and about thirty men cut the trail through the gap into Kentucky. [S426][S420] It became the Wilderness Road. The state marker says the road proper was built in 1796, though "hosts of pioneers" had already followed the trace. [S433] Estimates of the traffic vary: the Tennessee Encyclopedia says more than 300,000 people crossed between 1760 and 1850, the park service says roughly 200,000 to 300,000, and the Federal Highway Administration says as many as 200,000 had passed by 1796. [S422][S426][S432] Among them, a stone monument at Lincoln Memorial University says, were Abraham Lincoln’s family, who passed through in 1780 on their way to Kentucky. [S444][S432]
The gap also marks where three states meet. A state marker explains that Walker and Col. Richard Henderson surveyed the first Virginia-North Carolina line here in 1779; the present line and corner were set by compromise after a dispute in 1802, and the U.S. Supreme Court finally approved the location in 1903. The corner stone stands on Tri-State Peak, about a mile and a half from the marker. [S434]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the first settlement in what became Claiborne County was in the Powell Valley, followed by settlements at Sycamore Creek and Fort Butler. [S420] Those early families were living on contested ground. A state marker near Speedwell explains that the 1791 Treaty of Holston kept settlers out of Cherokee land in the Powell Valley, but Tennesseans holding North Carolina land grants moved in anyway. President Washington ordered them out, and in February 1797 Captains Richard Sparks and John Wade read the order to the settlers at Yoakum’s Station. The Treaty of Tellico in 1798 settled the matter. [S435]
The settlers organized churches before they had a county. To serve the families around Yoakum Station, nineteen signers petitioned to form a Primitive Baptist church, and ninety people joined it on October 1, 1797. The state marker says Davis Creek Primitive Baptist Church at Speedwell is believed to be the oldest Primitive Baptist congregation in Tennessee; its present building dates to 1850. [S436] Nearer Tazewell, the Tennessee Encyclopedia credits Drew Harrell and the Rev. Tidence Lane with building a frontier church at Springdale on Little Sycamore Creek around 1796. [S420] A 1947 memorial at Big Spring Church tells the same story with more detail: Harrell hewed the logs and the two men raised the church house in the winter of 1795-96. Harrell was buried there in 1840. [S437] The state archives list Big Spring Primitive Baptist Church records going back to 1795. [S421]
The act that created the county passed on October 29, 1801, and took effect on December 6 (Acts of 1801, Chapter 46). [S421] It drew the new county’s southern line along the north bank of the Clinch River and ran its northern line along the Kentucky and Virginia borders. It named seven commissioners, among them George Reel, John Vanbebber and Silas Williams, to find a central site, buy land and lay off a town of forty lots to be called Tazewell, with a courthouse, a prison and stocks. [S421] Until a courthouse was built, the county’s first court was to meet at the house of John Owens. [S421] The University of Tennessee’s municipal advisory service still lists that 1801 act as the town of Tazewell’s incorporation act. [S457]
The county was named for William Charles Cole Claiborne. The U.S. House historian’s biography sketches his career: born in Virginia in 1775, he practiced law in Sullivan County, sat in Tennessee’s 1796 constitutional convention, and was appointed a judge of the state’s superior court that year. He served in the U.S. House from 1797 to 1801, starting while he was still younger than the Constitution’s minimum age of twenty-five. [S424] In 1801 he became governor of the Mississippi Territory. He was one of the commissioners who took possession of Louisiana from France in 1803, governed the Territory of Orleans from 1804 to 1812, and was elected the first governor of the state of Louisiana. He died in New Orleans in 1817, soon after being elected to the U.S. Senate. [S424][S425]
Tazewell was laid out in 1801 and got a post office in 1804, with James Graham as postmaster. [S420] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the court met three times in the homes of John Hunt and Elisha Walling before a small frame courthouse went up in 1804 on land belonging to John Hunt Sr., who was probably the first settler in the area and was the county’s first sheriff. [S420] A jail was built at the same time, and a second one in 1819. [S420] A marker on the Old Jail gives the same dates: built in 1819 to replace one of about 1804. [S440]
The first lawyer was Luke Bower, and the first merchant was William Graham, an Irishman with large land holdings. [S420] His stone house, now called the Graham-Kivett house or Greystone, is one of the oldest buildings in town, though its date is uncertain. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says Graham finished it around 1800, and the marker in front says it was built about 1810. The marker adds that it was later home to Dr. James Fulkerson and attorney James P. Kivett, and that Federal troops used it during the Civil War. [S420][S438] Graham is also credited with the Graham-Parkey house, about 1816, which its marker calls a focal point on the Kentucky Road and a center of local politics. [S439][S420]
Churches and schools came slowly. Tazewell had no church building until 1815, when Graham, a Presbyterian, built one that all denominations probably used; Baptists and Methodists built their own in 1844. [S420] A school opened at Yoakum’s Station in the Powell Valley in 1820, and Walter Evans opened a small school in Tazewell in 1822. A boys’ academy followed in 1835 near the town spring, the Tazewell Female Academy in 1854, and in 1856 the academy was raised to a college. [S420]
The spring Walker had noticed at the gap was put to work. In 1819 a blast furnace of local sandstone, lined with fire brick, was built on the stream below Gap Cave. The park service says it burned charcoal from about 52 trees a day, along with iron ore and limestone, to make about three tons of iron, and that water from the stream drove its bellows and a hammer mill. Known as Newlee’s Iron Furnace, it ran through the 1800s; some of its pig iron went down the Powell River toward Chattanooga. [S430] The furnace is still one of the sights of the town of Cumberland Gap. [S454]
The state marker at the gap says mail service began there in 1795 and a post office opened in 1803, and the town gives 1803 as its start as a postal town. [S433][S454] After 1840, the Tennessee Encyclopedia says, a weekly stagecoach carried freight, mail and passengers through the gap, giving the area a prosperous, commercial look. [S422] Near Tazewell, travelers crossed the Powell River by a ferry built before the Civil War; a marker says it ran as a toll crossing until a wooden-floored bridge replaced it in 1905. [S447]
When the Civil War began, the Cumberland Gap became, in the words of a Civil War Trails marker, the main passage between the war’s eastern and western theaters in the Upper South, and whoever held the high ground held the gap. [S441] On October 1, 1861, President Lincoln wrote that he wanted a movement made to seize it. [S428] Confederate Gen. Felix K. Zollicoffer got there first in 1861, pushing aside local home guards and starting the earthworks on the mountain. [S428][S441] A Confederate soldier wrote that they meant to "stick the mountain full of cannon." [S441] The park service says Fort McCook, on the north side, saw the heaviest fighting of the war at the gap, in March 1862. [S429]
In June 1862 Confederate troops were pulled away and Union Gen. George W. Morgan took the gap, the "American Gibraltar," as it was known. [S422][S428] Sources differ by a day. The Tennessee Encyclopedia and the park’s current Civil War brochure date the Union occupation from June 18, while a 1965 park service brochure says the gap was captured on June 17. [S422][S428][S465] Morgan’s men foraged into the county, and on August 6, 1862, Confederates attacked a Union foraging force near Tazewell, in what the Official Records list as a skirmish; the fight is remembered locally as the Battle of Tazewell. [S448][S449] In September, as Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith invaded Kentucky, Morgan abandoned the gap and the Confederates moved back in. Bragg’s army later retreated into Tennessee through it after the Battle of Perryville. [S428]
The fourth and last change came on September 9, 1863. With Union forces closing in from both sides, Confederate Gen. John Frazer surrendered the gap when Gen. Ambrose Burnside arrived from newly captured Knoxville. [S428][S422] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the gap was not seriously threatened again. [S422] The war’s mark is still on the mountain: forts named Lyon, McCook, Foote and Farragut, rifle pits, and traces of the military road. [S429][S420]
Tazewell paid a price. No major battles were fought in the county, but there were several bloody skirmishes, and on November 11, 1862, a fire burned about twenty buildings in Tazewell, including the courthouse, a large hotel and several brick stores. [S420][S449] A regional Civil War history says the fire was discovered after Confederate troops stationed in the town had left. [S449] The Parkey house, used as a hospital during the war, survived. [S420]
After the war, investors saw coal and iron in the mountains. Alexander A. Arthur, a Scot, came to survey the area for a railroad in 1886. In 1887 British investors formed the American Association, Ltd., to back his plans, and the boom town of Middlesborough, Kentucky, rose on the far side of the mountain. [S464][S450] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says Arthur had the first railroad tunnel from Cumberland Gap to Middlesboro finished by 1888. [S422] On the Tennessee side he developed Harrogate as a resort. The Four Seasons Hotel, with 700 rooms, and a 200-bed sanatorium opened with a grand ball on April 12, 1892. [S450][S452]
It did not last a year. The failure of London’s Baring Brothers bank and the Panic of 1893 brought down the American Association, and the hotel was torn down in 1895. Only its stone foundation walls and the sanatorium were left; the sanatorium became Grant-Lee Hall at the university that followed. [S450][S451][S441]
That university began with a smaller school. The Rev. A. A. Myers and his wife, Ellen, came to Cumberland Gap with support from the American Missionary Association, built a Congregational church and opened the Harrow School. [S423][S443] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says they arrived in 1888; the state marker says the school was founded in 1890. Classes began in the church basement and later moved to Harrow Hall. [S423][S443] Myers invited Gen. Oliver Otis Howard, the Union general and former head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, to speak at a commencement, then showed him the abandoned hotel grounds and described a larger school there. The Tennessee Encyclopedia and a Civil War Trails marker date Howard’s visit to 1895, while the university’s own account says 1896. [S423][S441][S452]
Howard remembered a conversation with Lincoln. A Civil War Trails marker says that in April 1863 Lincoln put his finger on the gap on a wall map and asked Howard whether he could seize Knoxville that way, and spoke of his concern for the Unionists of East Tennessee. [S441] The state marker on campus quotes Lincoln asking Howard to "do something for all those mountain people." [S442] Howard set out to build a living memorial to Lincoln, and Lincoln Memorial University was chartered by the state on February 12, 1897, Lincoln’s birthday. [S420][S423][S442] Students who could not pay tuition could work their way through on the college farm. [S420] Harrow School ran as a division of LMU until Harrow Hall burned in 1907. [S443]
Gifts of Lincoln and Civil War items from Howard and his friends became the core of what is now the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum on the campus. [S423] In 1920 the university bought the gap itself, along with the tourist attraction Cudjo’s Cave. [S432] In 1937 it built a stone cairn for the Lincoln Tercentenary, marking 300 years since Samuel Lincoln landed in Boston. [S444]
The railroad reshaped the county seat. In the late 1880s a line was built from Knoxville toward Kentucky through the Cumberland Gap. The town of New Tazewell says the tracks swung about two miles west of Tazewell, whether because the company could not get a right of way through town or because of the lay of the land, and a depot went up there. [S455] Stores and houses grew around it on a plat first called "Cowan City," and people took to calling Tazewell "old town" and the depot settlement "new town." [S455] The town’s own history says New Tazewell first incorporated in the 1920s, gave up its charter about fifteen years later, and incorporated again in 1954 with about 350 people. The state’s municipal advisory service lists a different, earlier date: an act of 1887. [S455][S460] The town of Cumberland Gap was incorporated in 1907. [S459][S454]
Mines and logging drove the county’s growth. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the population grew from 13,373 in 1880 to 23,286 by 1920 because of mining and logging. [S420] Roads were changing too. In 1908 the federal Bureau of Public Roads built a demonstration "Object Lesson Road" of crushed limestone over the mountain between Middlesboro and Cumberland Gap. [S431][S432] In 1916 the three states linked it to the Dixie Highway, and by 1926 the eastern branch of U.S. 25 ran through the gap. [S432]
The worst day in the county’s history came on August 3, 1916. A state marker in New Tazewell says record rain broke Thompson’s Mill Dam on Barren Creek. The wall of water destroyed five more dams downstream and killed 24 people, including three entire families. Hundreds of homes and businesses were destroyed, and losses topped $750,000. The marker calls it the deadliest and costliest disaster in Claiborne County history and the worst dam failure in Tennessee. [S445] One of the mills it wrecked, the Johnson Mill, was later restored by the family that ran it. [S446]
The state library also notes a fire at the Claiborne County courthouse in 1932. [S421] By 1950 the population had reached 24,788. Then, the Tennessee Encyclopedia says, people left for factory jobs in the Midwest, and by 1960 the count had fallen to 19,067. It climbed slowly after that and boomed in the 1980s and 1990s. [S420]
The idea of a park at the gap came from across the line. On May 30, 1922, business leaders from Middlesboro meeting in Cincinnati proposed a Lincoln National Park. [S422] In 1938 the National Park Service agreed to support a park if the land was donated. Congress authorized Cumberland Gap National Historical Park in 1940. Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia bought the land and deeded it to the federal government in July 1955, and the park was dedicated on July 4, 1959. [S422][S431] The Tennessee Encyclopedia gives its size as 20,184 acres. [S422]
The 1930s also brought TVA. Norris Dam, downstream on the Clinch River, was the agency’s first dam, started in 1933 and finished in 1936. Its reservoir backs up 73 miles of the Clinch and 56 miles of the Powell. [S359] Those two rivers frame Claiborne County. The 1801 act ran the county’s southern line along the Clinch, and the Powell, which rises in southwest Virginia, winds through the county before it meets the Clinch in Norris Lake. [S421][S461] The state archives’ Claiborne County bibliography lists TVA’s 1936 study of land purchases in the Norris Reservoir counties, and a 1986 book on the families of the Norris Reservoir area. [S421] Today the county’s economic partnership lists marinas and campgrounds on the lake, among them Lone Mountain Marina. [S462]
Above the lake, the Powell River is still free-flowing. The county tourism commission’s Powell River Blueway project has added public access points for paddlers and anglers. It describes the Powell as one of Tennessee’s two largest undammed rivers, home to about 100 species of fish and many freshwater mussels. [S461]
For most of the twentieth century, U.S. 25E climbed through the gap on a narrow, winding road. The park service says the stretch became known as "Massacre Mountain," and the Federal Highway Administration estimates it caused about five deaths a year. [S431][S432] A 1973 law directed the park service to build tunnels through Cumberland Mountain so the highway could be taken out of the gap. Design work began in 1979, and a pilot tunnel was started in 1985. It took two years to drill and ran into springs, clay-filled voids, caverns up to 85 feet tall and an underground lake. [S431]
The Cumberland Gap Tunnel, a 4,600-foot, four-lane, twin-bore tunnel, opened on October 18, 1996. [S431][S432] The sources give different costs: the park service says $265 million, and the Federal Highway Administration says $280 million, more than twice the estimate. [S431][S432] The old road was torn out, and the gap was replanted and regraded to look as it did in pioneer days. The park service describes the target as the gap’s appearance between 1780 and 1810, while the Tennessee Encyclopedia says 1750. [S431][S422] In place of 18,000 vehicles a day, the gap now has a narrow foot trail. [S431] The town of Cumberland Gap says the tunnel also sent U.S. 25E traffic around its business district. [S454]
The county had 32,043 people in the 2020 Census. [S456] Harrogate, the old resort town that became LMU’s home, did not incorporate as a city until 1992, yet it is now the largest town, with about 4,400 people. New Tazewell has about 3,000, Tazewell about 2,200 and Cumberland Gap fewer than 500. [S456][S458][S459][S457]
When the Tennessee Encyclopedia surveyed the economy, farmers grew tobacco and vegetables, furniture makers led local industry, and DeRoyal Industries, a medical supply maker, was a major employer. [S420] New Tazewell still lists DeRoyal and furniture plants among its employers. [S455] Lincoln Memorial University now runs from a kindergarten at its J. Frank White Academy to professional degrees. In 2022 it reported more than 5,000 students and programs from Corbin, Kentucky, to Tampa, Florida. [S452][S423]
History is close to the surface here. Most of downtown Cumberland Gap is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Cumberland Gap Historic District. [S454] The national park counts about 85 miles of trails, where visitors can stand in three states at once. [S463] The Lincoln museum calls its holdings one of the largest private collections of Lincoln and Civil War artifacts in the nation. [S453]
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 1200 CE | Mississippian people build mounds near the gap in Lee County, Virginia [S426] |
| 1750 | Dr. Thomas Walker documents the gap for the Loyal Land Company [S426][S433] |
| 1769 | Daniel Boone first passes through the gap [S433] |
| 1775 | Boone and about thirty men mark the road through the gap for Richard Henderson [S426][S420] |
| 1779 | Walker and Henderson survey the first Virginia-North Carolina line at the gap [S434] |
| 1780 | Abraham Lincoln’s family passes through on the way to Kentucky [S444] |
| 1795-96 | Drew Harrell and Rev. Tidence Lane build the Big Spring church house [S437][S420] |
| 1797 | Federal order read to settlers at Yoakum’s Station; Davis Creek church constituted [S435][S436] |
| 1801 | General Assembly creates Claiborne County (Oct. 29) and orders the town of Tazewell [S421] |
| 1804 | First courthouse and jail at Tazewell; post office opens [S420] |
| 1819 | Newlee’s iron furnace built below Gap Cave; second Tazewell jail [S430][S440] |
| 1856 | Tazewell Academy raised to a college [S420] |
| 1861 | Confederates under Zollicoffer fortify the gap [S428][S441] |
| 1862 | Union takes the gap in June; skirmish near Tazewell (Aug. 6); Confederates return in Sept.; Tazewell fire (Nov. 11) [S428][S448][S420] |
| 1863 | Confederates surrender the gap to Burnside (Sept. 9) [S428] |
| 1888 | First railroad tunnel from Cumberland Gap to Middlesboro finished [S422] |
| 1892 | Four Seasons Hotel opens at Harrogate (Apr. 12) [S450] |
| 1895 | Four Seasons torn down after the boom collapses [S450][S451] |
| 1897 | Lincoln Memorial University chartered (Feb. 12) [S420][S442] |
| 1907 | Town of Cumberland Gap incorporated; Harrow Hall burns [S459][S443] |
| 1908 | "Object Lesson Road" built through the gap [S431][S432] |
| 1916 | Barren Creek dam failures kill 24 (Aug. 3) [S445] |
| 1932 | Fire at the county courthouse [S421] |
| 1936 | Norris Dam finished; Norris Lake fills the lower Powell and Clinch [S359] |
| 1940 | Congress authorizes Cumberland Gap National Historical Park [S422][S431] |
| 1954 | New Tazewell incorporates for the second time [S455] |
| 1959 | National park dedicated (July 4) [S422] |
| 1992 | Harrogate incorporated [S458] |
| 1996 | Cumberland Gap Tunnel opens (Oct. 18) [S431] |
| 2020 | Census counts 32,043 people [S456] |
Start in the town of Cumberland Gap, at the foot of the pass. Walk the historic district and find the stone stack of Newlee’s Iron Furnace below Gap Cave. [S454][S430] The state markers for the gap and for the Harrow School stand in town. [S433][S443] From there, park trails climb to the gap itself, now a quiet footpath on the line of the Wilderness Road, and up toward Tri-State Peak, where Fort Foote’s earthworks lie along the trail. [S431][S429][S434] The park visitor center, on the Kentucky side at Middlesboro, has maps and directions; ask there about Gap Cave and Hensley Settlement tours, and check the park’s alerts for road and trail closures before you go. [S463]
Visit: Cumberland Gap National Historical Park, mailing address 91 Bartlett Park Rd., Middlesboro, KY · (606) 248-2817 [S463]
Next, drive a few minutes south to Harrogate and the campus of Lincoln Memorial University. Look for the Civil War Trails marker on Lincoln and the gap, the stone wall left from the Four Seasons Hotel, the Lincoln Cairn, and the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum. [S441][S444][S453] The museum’s website lists seasonal hours, shorter on weekends, and closures on Easter and Thanksgiving weekends and university holidays, so check before you go. [S453]
Visit: Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum, 120 Mars-DeBusk Pkwy., Harrogate · (423) 869-6235 [S453]
In the afternoon, head to Tazewell. Look for the 1819 Old Jail and the Graham-Kivett and Graham-Parkey houses. [S440][S438][S439] Then drive out to the Big Spring Church memorial, and on to Speedwell for the Davis Creek church and the Yoakum Station marker in the Powell Valley. [S437][S436][S435] Finish at New Tazewell’s Barren Creek flood marker, or at the water: the Powell River Blueway access points and the Norris Lake marinas on the county’s southern side. [S445][S461][S462]
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 Thomas Walker named the gap, the mountain or the river for the Duke of Cumberland, how high the gap stands, how many people crossed it, whether the Union took it on June 17 or June 18, 1862, whether the Graham-Kivett house dates to about 1800 or about 1810, whether the Myerses’ school began in 1888 or 1890, whether General Howard first visited in 1895 or 1896, when New Tazewell was incorporated, what the tunnel project cost, and which era the restored Gap was made to look like), 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: a frosted lane and ridge in Cumberland Mountain country, from our own photo library (a regional scene, not a specific Claiborne County landmark). Corrections: [email protected].