East Tennessee History · County by county
A county where the Pigeon meets the French Broad under the Smokies: frontier forts at the river fords, a county seat that moved to meet the railroad, a family cannery that grew into Stokely-Van Camp, a river darkened for eighty years by a mill in another state, an opera star, a mission school that became Christy, the Cosby side of the national park, and the flood of 2024.
Cocke County lies in upper East Tennessee against the Great Smoky Mountains, where the Pigeon River comes down out of North Carolina to meet the French Broad. [S788] The Tennessee General Assembly created it from Jefferson County in 1797 and named it for William Cocke, a Revolutionary War veteran, State of Franklin partisan and one of Tennessee’s first two U.S. senators. [S788][S38][S789] Its county seat is Newport; its only other incorporated town is Parrottsville, one of the oldest communities in the state. [S790][S788]
The county’s story runs along its rivers. Frontier forts stood at the Pigeon’s fords; Newport moved to the railroad on the French Broad bluffs after 1867; a family cannery that started on the French Broad grew into Stokely-Van Camp; and for most of the twentieth century a paper mill upstream in Canton, North Carolina, turned the Pigeon dark through Hartford and Newport. [S791][S788][S792][S793] The mountains gave the county the Cosby side of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a reputation for moonshine, the real mission school behind the novel Christy, and in 2024 the worst flood on record. [S794][S795][S796][S797]
Sources disagree on many of the details, and where they do, we say so.
Two rivers cross Cocke County: the French Broad, which runs past Newport toward Douglas Lake, and the Pigeon (the encyclopedia calls it the Big Pigeon), which flows in from North Carolina through Hartford and joins the French Broad just below Newport. [S788][S793]
Before settlers came, the river fords were crossings on Native trails. A small marker on River Street in Newport says the Great War Path of the Cherokees forded the river just west of that spot, linking the Watauga and Chickamauga settlements. [S798] A state marker for the War Ford placed a strategic Cherokee crossing on the Big Pigeon and says that in August 1782 Gen. Charles McDowell of Burke County, North Carolina, brought about 500 mounted militia over the mountains to join Col. John Sevier’s men against Cherokees who sided with the British. In that three-month campaign, the marker says, one of the last skirmishes of the Revolutionary War was fought at the ford. [S799] The War Ford marker is now listed as missing. [S799]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia names John Gilliland as the first white settler: in 1783 he planted a corn crop at the mouth of the Pigeon River to claim the land. [S788] The same year, according to a state marker, William Whitson Jr. built a fort on the east bank of the Pigeon about two miles northeast of the marker, south of the mouth of Cosby Creek. It was an important outpost because there was a ford there, and the west bank was still Indian territory. [S791]
The encyclopedia says Cocke County settlers had few violent encounters with Native Americans, but most of them settled near one of several forts: Whitson’s, Abraham McKay’s, Wood’s or John Huff’s. [S788] Near Parrottsville, a state marker describes Swaggerty Fort, built about 1787 by James Swaggerty on his uncle Abraham’s land. It is a three-level cantilevered blockhouse built over a stream for water, and the marker calls it one of only two known remaining blockhouses in Tennessee. [S800]
Churches came early. The first in the county, the Big Pigeon (Primitive) Baptist Church, was organized in the home of James English in 1787 and built a meetinghouse seven years later. [S788] Methodist preacher John Adam Granade preached in the courthouse in 1800, and the Methodists set up a campground north of the French Broad. [S788]
Parrottsville grew from a group of German immigrants who settled there in the 1780s, and the encyclopedia notes that their descendants still live in the county. [S788]
William Cocke, the man the county is named for, had a career that crossed half a dozen governments. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says he was a captain of Virginia militia in the Revolution and moved to Renfroe’s Creek in present Sullivan County in 1779. In the State of Franklin fight he was a firm partisan, and he is credited with helping persuade John Sevier to serve as Franklin’s first governor. [S789] He sat in the 1796 state constitutional convention, and the legislature chose him as one of Tennessee’s first two U.S. senators. [S789]
The years of his Senate service depend on the source. The encyclopedia gives 1797 to 1798 and 1799 to 1805. [S789] Two state markers, one at the Jefferson–Cocke line near Newport and one on the North Carolina line at Del Rio, say "1796, 1797, 1799 to 1805." [S801][S802] His later life was turbulent: in 1812 he became the first Tennessee judge to be impeached and removed from office, and he died in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1828. [S789]
The General Assembly created Cocke County from Jefferson County in 1797. [S788][S38] CTAS also lists 1797 as the year the county was created. [S790] The encyclopedia says the new county gave local people easier access to courts, musters and elections. The first county court met in the home of Daniel Adams. [S788]
After what the encyclopedia calls "some controversy," the county seat was placed on fifty acres beside the French Broad given by John Gilliland’s son, also named John. The town was called New Port, and a log courthouse went up right away; a brick one followed in 1828. [S788] MTAS, the state’s municipal service, lists Newport’s incorporation act as Acts of 1799 and its incorporation date as February 1, 1799. [S803]
Schools came slowly. In 1814, Anderson Academy became the county’s first school, but for most children a few months a year in a one-room school was all the education they got. [S788] The same year, according to the encyclopedia, Abel Gilliland built a brick Federal-style house, now known as the O’Dell House. It is listed on the National Register. [S788]
Travelers passed through. A 2025 state marker says Maj. William Wilson built a tavern in 1800, 100 yards south of the marker, and that Presidents Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson stopped there, along with Henry Clay, Sam Houston and Gov. James C. Jones. Wilson’s Tavern burned in 1951. [S804] Presbyterians came briefly in 1809 and to stay in 1823, and Lutherans organized in 1845. [S788] When the Methodists split over slavery in the 1840s, Cocke County kept congregations on both sides. [S788]
Slavery was part of county life before the Civil War. A Civil War Trails marker in Parrottsville says that in 1842, Andrew Johnson, then a state senator living in neighboring Greene County, bought his first enslaved person there: a fourteen-year-old girl named Dolly. He later bought her half-brother Sam, and in 1857 a thirteen-year-old boy named Henry. [S805]
Johnson freed his own slaves on August 8, 1863, the marker says, and after their freedom Dolly and Sam took the Johnson surname. Dolly lived with her son William in Johnson’s old tailor shop in Greeneville, where they baked and sold pies; in 1937 William met President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who gave him a silver-headed cane. Beginning in 1875, African Americans in the area observed August 8 as Emancipation Day. [S805]
When Tennesseans voted on June 8, 1861, on leaving the Union, Cocke County voted 1,185 to 518 against "separation," about 70 percent against. [S752] A Civil War Trails panel at the Tennessee Welcome Center on I-40 near Hartford says most mountain people were Unionist, but after the state seceded the region stayed under Confederate control until later in the war. [S806]
Some of the bitterest stories are local. A Civil War Trails marker in Parrottsville tells how, early in the war, about 400 Unionists camped in nearby St. Tide Hollow, threw up earthworks and made a crude cannon from a hollow log bound with metal bands. Confederate Col. Danville Leadbetter’s troops attacked, captured a hundred men and held them in a schoolhouse above today’s town hall. [S807] According to local tradition, the marker says, the prisoners were mistreated; when Hamilton Yett, a leading local Confederate, came to "look at the animals," a prisoner named Peter Reece threw a brick that fractured Yett’s skull. Leadbetter’s soldiers hanged Reece from a tree and ordered that no one cut him down; after three days his wife, Emily, and two daughters took down the body and buried him at Harned Chapel. [S807] Separately, the encyclopedia names a Hamilton Yett, son of one of Parrottsville’s original German settlers, as the builder of the National Register-listed Ellison House in 1857. [S788]
The war came closest in the winter of 1863–64. The I-40 panel says both armies passed through Newport often that winter and nearly stripped the French Broad valley of livestock and grain; nearby, Confederates under Gen. James Longstreet drove Union foragers back from Dandridge in January 1864. [S806]
On Cosby Creek, two markers tell of a fight at Shultz Mill (also spelled Shults). Confederate Gen. Robert B. Vance, brother of North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance, had raided into Sevier County and taken a Union wagon train loaded with supplies. [S808][S809] A state marker says the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry attacked Vance’s force near Jacob Shults Mill on January 15, 1864, and captured him; he stayed a prisoner until President Lincoln pardoned him on March 14, 1865. [S808] A 2016 marker placed by a Sons of Confederate Veterans camp puts the fight on the afternoon of January 14, in a field on the west bank of Cosby Creek, and quotes a Union account that Col. William J. Palmer’s men took the general, two staff officers, a lieutenant, fifty men and 150 horses and recaptured the whole wagon train. [S809] Vance spent the rest of the war in Union prisons; afterward he served five terms in Congress from North Carolina. [S809]
A companion marker from the same camp describes lawlessness in the mountains during the war: deserters and outlaws, including a band called the "White Hats," robbing families on both sides, and a Bogard community woman who hid a handmade quilt in a hollow stump to keep marauders from taking it. [S810]
The county seat question did not end with the war. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says Cocke County, along with Obion County, was singled out in the Constitution of 1870 so that a simple majority of voters could decide where county government would sit. [S788]
The railroad changed the map. In 1867 the Cincinnati, Cumberland Gap and Charleston Railroad reached the county, and under pressure from railroad officials and investors the seat moved to a new site on the bluffs above the French Broad. The new town kept the name Newport, and the old one became Oldtown. [S788] A plaque at Newport City Hall says the town of Newport "was organized in 1867" and the county seat "was established here in 1884." MTAS, by contrast, lists Newport’s incorporation date as 1799. We could not reconcile the two, so we give both. [S811][S803]
The encyclopedia says fire destroyed the new courthouse and most of the county records in 1876, sending government back to Oldtown until 1884, when a new brick courthouse was built. [S788] A plaque at Main Street and Court Avenue gives a different date. It says the "first court house erected on this site" was built by Judge J. H. Randolph in 1886 and "burned – 1930." [S812] The encyclopedia says the present Colonial Revival courthouse was built in 1930 and is on the National Register. [S788] A plaque placed by American Legion Post 41 marks the Cocke County Memorial Building, dated 1930, as listed on the National Register. [S813]
The encyclopedia ties Newport’s final win to outside money. A group of British, American and Canadian investors led by A. A. Arthur formed the Scottish Carolina Timber and Land Company, and the Western North Carolina Railroad, completed in 1882, linked the county to both Knoxville and Asheville. [S788] The new courthouse was not put at the center of downtown; that spot went to the railroad depot, which the encyclopedia calls "an unmistakable sign of the power of the new capitalists." [S788]
Newport’s growth shows in its schools. A 1986 plaque says Newport Grammar School opened in 1898 in an eight-room building and grew to a forty-one-room complex; the plaque calls it the oldest building in continuous operation as a school in Tennessee. [S814] In Parrottsville, the Parrottsville Academy opened in 1875 in the Robert Roadman mansion; the Methodists bought it in 1890 and ran it until a new Parrottsville School was built in 1924. [S788]
In the mountains, Southern Baptists built Cosby Academy, a boarding school, in 1912–13 and sold it to the county board of education in 1936. The first Cocke County High School went up in 1917. [S788] New congregations kept coming: Roman Catholics in 1913, the Christian Church in 1923 and the Episcopal Church in 1967. [S788]
Cocke County’s best-known business began on a farm just over the Jefferson County line. Anna Rorex Stokely was born in 1852 on a French Broad farm in Cocke County, married John Burnett Stokely in 1872, and was left a widow with eight children. [S792] On January 1, 1898, according to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, Stokely Brothers & Company was formed: Anna Stokely and a neighbor, A. R. Swann, put in $1,300 each, and her sons James R. and John M. Stokely $650 each. [S792] The encyclopedia’s county entry puts the cannery in Jefferson County and says the first canned tomatoes went down the French Broad to Chattanooga. [S788]
Other accounts differ in the details. A 2021 "Page from the Past" column in the Newport Plain Talk gives the same $3,900 total but names W. B. and James R. Stokely as the two sons who invested, and says the first tomatoes went by boat to Knoxville. [S815] The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis says Anna Stokely invested $3,000. [S816] The Jefferson County side of the story is on our Jefferson County history page.
The Plain Talk column says the cannery moved to Newport in 1905, mainly for the railroad, because the French Broad was sometimes too low for boats. It quotes the Knoxville Sentinel of August 18, 1905, announcing the new Newport cannery. [S815] In 1933 the Stokelys bought the Van Camp company of Indianapolis, and Stokely-Van Camp became a national firm. [S788][S816] Anna Stokely and her son George were killed in 1916 when their car stalled at a railroad crossing. [S792]
The company later produced Gatorade, which it acquired in 1967, according to both the Plain Talk column and the Indianapolis encyclopedia. [S815][S816] It was sold to Quaker; the Plain Talk says in 1983, while the Indianapolis encyclopedia puts the Quaker Oats purchase the year after 1983. [S815][S816] As of 2021, the Plain Talk column noted, a canning operation was still running on the same site on the east side of Newport. [S815]
For most of the twentieth century, Cocke County lived downstream of a problem it could not fix. In 1908, Champion Fibre opened a pulp mill at Canton, North Carolina, about 60 miles up the Pigeon. Historian Richard Bartlett writes that it was probably the largest pulp mill in the world, and that Cocke County had tried to land it: the Newport Plain Talk urged action in 1906, but the mill went to Canton. [S793]
What Cocke County got instead, Bartlett writes, was the effluent. The polluted river flowed through the heart of Newport, and people in the county called it the "Black River"; on hot summer days the smell was nearly unbearable, and the foam was sometimes two to three feet thick. [S793] Tennessee’s attorney general promised a suit in 1909 but did not file it for lack of money; Bartlett writes that Gov. Ben Hooper, who had been born in a cabin overlooking the Pigeon, also promised action without result. [S793] North Carolina’s wildlife agency says citizens’ groups in East Tennessee were asking North Carolina to act as early as 1911, and calls the river "for all practical purposes, biologically dead." [S817]
The fight came to a head in the 1980s. Tennessee mounted a strong legal case against Champion in 1983, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency stepped in with rules and a timetable. [S793][S817] In 1988 and 1989, after high dioxin levels were found in fish, both states told people not to eat fish from the Pigeon below the mill. [S817] A 1989 UPI report quoted Newport mayor Jeannie Wilson saying residents of Hartford blamed the river for a high cancer rate; a state study found no evidence that Hartford’s rate was higher than its neighbors’, though a health department spokeswoman said the data were limited. [S818] The same report said Gov. Ned McWherter had refused to ease Tennessee’s water standards for the mill. [S818]
After the mill modernized, the river’s color improved from "coffee" to "weak tea," fish advisories were mostly lifted, and by the late 1990s agencies were reintroducing native species. [S817]
Just over the state line, Carolina Power & Light built Walters Dam and its powerhouse in 1927–1930. A 6.2-mile tunnel through the mountain carries water from Waterville Lake to a brick powerhouse at the North Carolina–Tennessee border, with a drop of 861 feet that, according to an engineering guide, was the highest head east of the Rockies until World War II. [S819]
Water released from that plant made the Pigeon a whitewater river. Bartlett wrote in the mid-1990s that the utility had begun scheduling releases for paddlers and that, with the river cleaner, about a dozen rafting companies were taking more than 30,000 rafters and kayakers down the river each summer. [S793] The Forest Service describes the dam-controlled run today: an upper section of about five miles of Class III and III+ rapids from just below the Walters plant to Hartford, and a lower section of nearly five more miles of Class II and III water from Hartford to just before Denton. [S820]
Cocke County gave Tennessee a governor. Ben W. Hooper was born in Newport on October 13, 1870, as Bennie Walter Wade, the son of Sarah Wade and Dr. Lemuel Washington Hooper; after time in an orphanage in Knoxville, he was adopted by his father at nine and raised in Newport. [S821] He graduated from Carson-Newman in 1890, practiced law in Newport and served in the legislature. [S821]
In 1910, Republicans and prohibitionist Democrats joined to elect him governor. The encyclopedia says he was Tennessee’s only Republican governor between 1880 and 1920; the county entry calls him the first Republican governor in thirty years. [S821][S788] He won again in 1912, and his administrations passed a child labor law, a pure food and drug law and the "Jug Bill" against liquor shipments. [S821] A state marker gives his terms as 1911–15, which matches the encyclopedia; Bartlett’s article gives 1910–1914. [S822][S793]
Afterward, the encyclopedia says, President Harding appointed Hooper to the U.S. Railroad Labor Board in 1920; the state marker gives his service on the board as 1921–26. [S821][S822] Back in Newport he worked as a chief land purchasing agent for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He died in 1957 and is buried in Newport. [S821][S822]
Two Cocke County men were early heroes of World War I. A state marker in Newport says Kiffin Yates Rockwell was born in a house 500 yards away, joined the French Foreign Legion in August 1914, and after being wounded moved to the French air service, where he helped found the Lafayette Escadrille. The marker says he was the first American aviator to down an enemy plane, on May 18, 1916, and that he was killed in combat over Alsace on September 23, 1916. [S823]
In Del Rio, a state marker honors John Floyd Arrowood, born nearby in April 1891, who received France’s Croix de Guerre on November 14, 1917, for rescuing several of his men during a German trench raid. [S824]
The soprano Grace Moore was born in Cocke County in 1901 and grew up in Jellico. [S352] The Tennessee Encyclopedia gives her birth date as December 6 and her birthplace as Slabtown, Cocke County; the county entry says she was born near Del Rio. [S352][S788] A state marker on Route 107 in Del Rio says she was born on December 5, 1901, in a house that stood across the creek. [S825]
She sang on Broadway, made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1928 as Mimi in La Bohème, and became a film star with One Night of Love (1934). She was killed in a plane crash leaving Copenhagen on January 26, 1947. [S352][S825]
In December 1909, a 19-year-old teacher named Leonora Whitaker came to the Ebenezer Mission near Del Rio, walking the last seven miles through deep snow to the mission on Morgan Branch, according to a 2009 Newport Plain Talk report. [S796] She married the mission’s pastor, Rev. John Wood, in 1910, and they stayed until 1912. [S796]
Their daughter, Catherine Marshall, came back to Del Rio with her parents to research her mother’s story, helped by local people including county historian Mary Rowe Ruble. The result was the novel Christy, published in 1967. The Plain Talk says it spent 39 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and later became a film, a television series and a stage play. [S796]
The Cosby valley lies on the northeast edge of the Smokies. The state tourism department gives two theories for its name: an early trapper and distiller named Jonathan Cosby (or Cozby), or Dr. James Cozby, a Revolutionary War veteran and friend of John Sevier who claimed land there. It says the name appears as early as 1838. [S795]
Cosby families lived by farming and logging. The same state tourism page says the Great Depression and the creation of the national park hurt the logging business, and many people turned to making corn whiskey; Prohibition and wartime demand from workers at Oak Ridge raised demand further, and for the first half of the twentieth century Cosby was known as "the Moonshine Capital of the World." [S795] The park still invites former residents and "moonshine legends" to tell those stories at its summer "Celebrating Cosby" programs. [S826]
Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established in 1934. [S106] Its Cosby area, centered on Cosby Creek, is known for spring wildflowers, fall color, historic cemeteries and old-growth forest. [S794] Ben Hooper’s work buying land for the park is one of the county’s direct ties to its creation. [S821]
Congress authorized the Foothills Parkway on February 22, 1944, and more than eighty years later only three segments, totaling 22.5 miles, are open; the Park Service calls it the oldest unfinished highway project in Tennessee. [S136] The eastern section runs 5.6 miles from Cosby up Green Mountain to Interstate 40 at Exit 443, with four overlooks. [S827]
Interstate 40 through the Pigeon River Gorge opened in October 1968, and it has been fighting rockslides ever since. [S828] According to The Mountaineer of Waynesville, North Carolina, a slide blocked all four lanes in February 1969, and in March 1977 about 40,000 tons of rock fell onto the road about two miles inside the Tennessee line, closing it for two weeks. [S828]
On September 27, 2024, Helene sent the Pigeon River to the highest level ever measured at Newport. [S797][S829] The National Weather Service record in NOAA’s storm database says the Newport gauge crested at 29.57 feet that afternoon, more than six feet above a record that had stood for over 120 years. The flood wave destroyed parts of I-40 and a popular rafting venue, ruined structures and farmland near Edwina, damaged or destroyed many structures around Newport and flooded downtown. [S797] It also says that rumors that Walters Dam had failed were false, though the power station had to be evacuated. [S797]
The U.S. Geological Survey reported a preliminary peak of 30.55 feet the next morning, about nine feet above the previous record from 1902, while its crews were still verifying the reading. [S830] We give both numbers.
CTAS lists Cocke County’s 2020 population as 35,999, up from 35,662 in 2010, and its two incorporated towns as Newport and Parrottsville. [S790] MTAS lists Parrottsville’s incorporation date as February 1, 1923. [S831] The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s figure of 33,565 is from the 2000 census. [S788]
The county’s writers have told its story too. Wilma Dykeman, born in Asheville in 1920, married James R. Stokely Jr. of Newport in 1940, and they made their home in Newport. [S832][S833] Her books include The French Broad (1955) and Tennessee: A Bicentennial History (1976), and in 1981 Gov. Lamar Alexander named her state historian. [S832] She held that title until her death in 2006. Her husband belonged to the family behind the Stokely canning company, and the Hall of Fame says her novel Return the Innocent Earth (1973) is loosely based on that story. [S833] The dates of two of her books differ by source. The encyclopedia’s Cocke County entry dates Neither Black Nor White, written with her husband, to 1954, while its Dykeman entry and the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame give 1957. The encyclopedia dates her novel The Tall Woman to 1962, and the Hall of Fame gives 1966. [S788][S832][S833]
Visit: Cocke County Records & Archives posts its hours; the Great Smoky Mountains National Park Cosby Area page covers the park side; and the Cherokee National Forest Pigeon River area page covers the gorge.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1782 | Militia campaign against the Cherokee; a skirmish at the War Ford on the Big Pigeon, per the state marker [S799] |
| 1783 | John Gilliland plants corn at the mouth of the Pigeon; William Whitson Jr. builds a fort on the Pigeon [S788][S791] |
| 1780s | German families settle at Parrottsville [S788] |
| 1787 | Big Pigeon Baptist Church organized; Swaggerty Fort built about this year [S788][S800] |
| 1797 | Cocke County created from Jefferson County, named for William Cocke [S788][S38] |
| 1799 | Newport incorporated, per MTAS [S803] |
| 1800 | Wilson’s Tavern built [S804] |
| 1814 | Anderson Academy, the county’s first school; the O’Dell House built [S788] |
| 1828 | Brick courthouse at the first Newport [S788] |
| 1842 | Andrew Johnson buys Dolly at Parrottsville [S805] |
| 1861 | County votes 1,185–518 against separation (June 8) [S752] |
| 1864 | Fight at Shultz Mill on Cosby Creek; Gen. Robert B. Vance captured (Jan. 14 or 15) [S809][S808] |
| 1867 | Railroad arrives; the county seat moves to the new Newport [S788][S811] |
| 1876 | Fire destroys the courthouse and most county records [S788] |
| 1882 | Western North Carolina Railroad completed [S788] |
| 1884 or 1886 | New brick courthouse in Newport [S788][S812][S811] |
| 1898 | Stokely Brothers & Company formed; Newport Grammar School opens [S792][S814] |
| 1901 | Grace Moore born (Dec. 5 or 6) [S825][S352] |
| 1905 | Stokely cannery moves to Newport [S815] |
| 1908 | Champion’s Canton mill opens upstream on the Pigeon [S793] |
| 1909 | Leonora Whitaker arrives at the Ebenezer Mission [S796] |
| 1910 | Ben W. Hooper elected governor [S821] |
| 1912–13 | Cosby Academy built [S788] |
| 1916 | Kiffin Rockwell’s victory (May 18) and death (Sept. 23) [S823] |
| 1917 | John Arrowood awarded the Croix de Guerre [S824] |
| 1923 | Parrottsville incorporated [S831] |
| 1927–30 | Walters Dam and powerhouse built on the Pigeon [S819] |
| 1930 | Present courthouse and the Memorial Building built [S788][S813] |
| 1933 | Stokely buys Van Camp [S788] |
| 1934 | Great Smoky Mountains National Park established [S106] |
| 1944 | Foothills Parkway authorized [S136] |
| 1967 | Christy published; Stokely-Van Camp acquires Gatorade [S796][S816] |
| 1968 | I-40 opens through the Pigeon River Gorge [S828] |
| 1983 | Tennessee’s strong legal case against Champion [S793] |
| 1988–89 | Dioxin advisories on Pigeon River fish [S817][S818] |
| 2020 | Census counts 35,999 people [S790] |
| 2024 | Helene floods the Pigeon to a record at Newport (Sept. 27) [S797][S830] |
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: which years William Cocke served in the U.S. Senate (1797–98 and 1799–1805, per the Tennessee Encyclopedia, or ’1796, 1797, 1799 to 1805’ on the state markers); whether Newport dates from its 1799 incorporation (MTAS) or was ’organized in 1867’ (the city hall plaque); whether the courthouse that replaced the one lost in the 1876 fire went up in 1884 (Tennessee Encyclopedia, city hall plaque) or 1886 (the courthouse-lawn plaque), and what happened to it in 1930; whether the fight at Shultz Mill on Cosby Creek was January 14 (Sons of Confederate Veterans marker) or January 15, 1864 (state marker); whether Grace Moore was born December 5 (state marker) or December 6, 1901 (Tennessee Encyclopedia), and whether the place was Slabtown or ’near Del Rio’; how much money started the Stokely cannery ($3,900 or $3,000), which sons put in money, and whether its first tomatoes went to Chattanooga or Knoxville; whether Quaker bought Stokely-Van Camp in 1983 or 1984; when Ben Hooper joined the Railroad Labor Board (1920 or 1921) and which years he was governor in one account (1911–15 or 1910–14); when Neither Black Nor White (1954 or 1957) and The Tall Woman (1962 or 1966) were published; where Cosby got its name (Jonathan Cosby or Dr. James Cozby); and how high the Pigeon rose at Newport in 2024 (29.57 or about 30.55 feet) and by how much it beat the old record (more than 6 or about 9 feet). We don’t republish encyclopedia, museum or marker text — follow the links for the full articles.
Hero photo: Foothills Parkway East near Cosby, by the National Park Service (public domain), from the NPS page “Drive Foothills Parkway (Cosby to I-40)”; cropped and color-graded, with a distant communications mast removed. It is the same image as on our Cocke County guide and is not an endorsement by the Park Service. Reused source numbers (S38, S106, S136, S352, S752) match the same sources on our other history pages. Corrections: [email protected].