East Tennessee History · County by county
The broad top of the Cumberland Plateau: a hunting ground crossed by the Walton Road and its inns, the cliff at Crab Orchard where Bigfoot Spencer died, a county formed in the 1850s around a crossroads called Crossville, neighbors split by guerrilla war, a mission academy and a doctor on horseback at Pleasant Hill, a railroad and a rose-colored sandstone, the largest New Deal homestead community in the nation, a stone dam built by the CCC, a camp for German and Italian officers, a pilot’s kitchen-table magazine, a Broadway family’s theater, and the resort towns that made the plateau one of Tennessee’s fastest-growing places.
Cumberland County covers 679 square miles on top of the Cumberland Plateau. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the land climbs from about 800 feet to 3,000 feet and averages about 2,000 feet, and that the county is still about 75 percent forest. [S1265] The General Assembly formed it in the 1850s from parts of the counties around it and named it for the Cumberland Mountains, which explorer Thomas Walker may have named for the Duke of Cumberland around 1748. [S38] Crossville, near the middle of the county, is the seat. Crab Orchard and Pleasant Hill are the other incorporated towns, and the county counted 61,145 people in 2020. [S1266]
So many travelers crossed this high plateau on their way somewhere else that Helen Krechniak, author of Cumberland County’s First Hundred Years, called the county "The Road to Somewhere Else." [S1265] This page follows the county from a hunting ground and its stagecoach inns, through a new county and a hard Civil War, a mission school and a country doctor, a railroad and a quarry stone, the largest New Deal homestead colony in the country, a state park built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, a World War II prison camp, a homegrown publishing business and a professional theater, to the resort and retirement towns that changed the plateau after Interstate 40 arrived.
When Tennessee became a state in 1796, the Tennessee Encyclopedia says, the land that is now Cumberland County was still an Indian hunting ground. [S1265] Poor soil kept much of the plateau thinly settled. Writing about the Obed Wild and Scenic River country of the Cumberland Plateau, the National Park Service says the river looks much as it did when the first white settlers walked its banks in the late 1700s, and that it was sparsely populated because of poor farming soil, though trappers and pioneers found good hunting and fishing there. [S1267]
The plateau’s limestone hollows have their own geology. Grassy Cove, a sunken valley off Tennessee 68 east of Crossville, is full of caves and underground drainage. The National Park Service made the Grassy Cove Karst Area a National Natural Landmark in 1973, calling it one of the nation’s best illustrations of karst development and underground drainage. The landmark covers 7,283 acres, and the land is privately owned. [S1268] On Black Mountain above the cove, the Cumberland Trail passes Windlass Cave, where three streams come together and disappear underground, and overlooks look south and east over Grassy Cove. [S1269]
Pioneer families bound from Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas for the Cumberland River settlements crossed the plateau on toll roads. They rested at inns, or "stands," whose names the encyclopedia lists: Kemmer’s Stand, Mammy, Burke, Genesis, Lowery’s Stand and Grimes (Graham’s) Stand. Some roads were little more than trails kept up between toll gates. The best of them was the Walton Road, served by the Crab Orchard Inn, Kemmer’s Stand and Johnson’s Stand at Mayland. Interstate 40 now follows much of its route across the county. [S1265]
The Walton Road ran from Southwest Point, now Kingston, to Carthage on the Cumberland River. The encyclopedia says William Walton of Carthage, one of its surveyors and builders, opened a first stretch in 1795. In 1799 the General Assembly named Walton, William Martin and Robert Kyle to build a new east-west road. Finished in 1801 and officially called the Cumberland Turnpike, it ran more than 100 miles through the wilderness. It was fifteen feet wide and cleared of stumps, with mile markers every three miles and tollgates and stands along the way. [S1270] A state marker at the Interstate 40 rest area near exit 327 gives the date as 1800 and calls the road the first federal road across the plateau. It says John Kemmer bought land there in 1817 and built Kemmer Stand, a two-story inn, where the road met the Burke Road. [S1271]
The steepest part of the road was at Crab Orchard. The encyclopedia calls Spencer’s Mountain, named for the pioneer Thomas "Bigfoot" Spencer, the most dangerous and most talked-about point on the whole road. Building I-40 cut away the side of the mountain, but Spencer’s Rock still marks the old path up. [S1270] A state marker on U.S. 70 near Crab Orchard says Spencer had been the first white man to clear land, build a cabin and raise corn in Middle Tennessee, in 1778, and spent one winter living in a hollow sycamore. Indians ambushed and killed him near Crab Orchard in 1794. [S1272]
By the 1850s the scattered plateau communities were a long way from their county seats. The Blue Book says the General Assembly created Cumberland County in 1855 from White, Bledsoe, Rhea, Morgan, Fentress and Putnam counties. [S38] The Tennessee State Library and Archives gives the same six counties and cites the act as Chapter 6 of the Acts of 1855–56. [S1273] UT’s County Technical Assistance Service also lists 1855. [S1266] The Tennessee Encyclopedia gives 1856 and lists eight parent counties, adding Roane and Overton. [S1265] The courthouse National Register nomination may explain part of the gap: it says the county was established in 1855 and its county court was organized in 1856, when Crossville was laid out as the seat "within five miles of the centre of said county." [S1274] A Civil War Trails marker south of Crossville adds that Eldridge Myatt, a member of the legislature, introduced the bill that formed the county. [S1275]
Crossville began as Scott’s Crossroads, near the center of the new county. The encyclopedia notes that it was chosen as the seat even though Crab Orchard, Grassy Cove, Mayland and Pleasant Hill were all larger. [S1265] The first courthouse, built in 1857, was "a one story frame building of three apartments," according to the National Register nomination. [S1274]
The Civil War stopped most development on the plateau. No major battle was fought in Cumberland County, but the encyclopedia says Confederate and Union forces, and guerrilla bands claiming to be soldiers of either side, pillaged the county. The population was evenly split over slavery, and brothers and sons went to opposite armies. [S1265] A Civil War Trails marker says the county’s Confederate and Union enlistments were about equal. Confederates joined Hamilton’s Tennessee Cavalry Battalion and the 28th Tennessee Infantry, and many Unionists joined Capt. Robert C. Swan’s company of the 2nd Tennessee Infantry, U.S.A. Union recruits trained at Camp Dick Robinson in Kentucky. Azariah Dorton took a 200-mile route through the mountains to dodge Confederate pickets, and the trip took him sixteen days. [S1275]
A second Civil War Trails marker, in front of the old courthouse in Crossville, says Cumberland was the only Tennessee county that reported no vote for or against secession. Eldridge Myatt, the county’s founder, joined the Confederates, was captured at Lookout Mountain and died in the federal prison at Rock Island, Illinois. Unionists John E. Brewer and John R. Swan died in the Confederate prison at Andersonville. Raiders on both sides took cattle, horses, mules and food. Union men "Tinker Dave" Beaty and local resident Harve Shillin raided for the North. Confederate partisan Champ Ferguson and Col. John M. Hughes stole hundreds of federal horses. In July 1864 a Union major declared the citizens "aiders and abettors" of the raiders and seized their property. Andrew Kemmer built a false wall to hide his corn, but a neighbor told the Union soldiers, who broke it down. [S1276]
The marker also names Polly Hand and Richard "Red Fox" Flynn, who guided Unionists through the mountains to Union units in Kentucky. [S1276] A state marker near Lake Tansi says Flynn and his wife ran an Underground Railroad stop on Big Laurel Creek. They helped Unionist refugees, people escaping slavery, and soldiers, including Andrews’ Raiders, making their way from Chattanooga to Kentucky. The marker says he earned his nickname by slipping through the area as quietly as a fox. [S1277]
The only fight between regular armies in the county came on December 9, 1863, on a farm at Pleasant Hill. A Civil War Trails marker says companies of the 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry, pushed out of Sparta and headed over the plateau to join General Burnside at Knoxville, camped on the Lewis Whitaker farm. That evening Champ Ferguson’s guerrillas and a detachment of Col. John M. Hughes’s 25th Tennessee Infantry, about 450 men in all, attacked them. The Federals suffered eight casualties, the regiment’s sutler was killed, and the Confederates looted the supply wagons before pulling back. [S1278] Ferguson surrendered in May 1865, expecting to be paroled like other soldiers. Instead he was tried in Nashville for war crimes, including 53 murders, and hanged on October 20, 1865. [S1279]
After the war, the encyclopedia says, investors from Chicago, Boston and New York took an interest in the county’s coal and timber, and its fruits, vegetables and grasses built a reputation. [S1265] The portrait painter John Wood Dodge, who had painted Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay from life, bought a large orchard at Pomona in 1845. He spent more and more time at his "fruit ranch" after 1850. Dodge was a Unionist and left Tennessee in 1861. He returned to Pomona in 1889 and died there in 1893 at age eighty-six. [S1280] On Main Street in Crossville, a small marker stands beside the county’s first steam engine, which Samuel Cline brought from Indiana about 1872 to run a sawmill and gristmill at Northville. [S1281]
In 1886, the National Register nomination says, the county built a second courthouse of coursed Crab Orchard stone, designed by J. F. Bowman of Knoxville. It cost $5,200, and the county sold the old frame courthouse for $25. Fire destroyed the interior and roof in February 1905. The building was repaired and housed the first Cumberland County High School and a normal school from 1908 to 1929. [S1274] The state library also notes the 1905 fire, and its list of the county’s earliest surviving records starts with wills from 1904 and marriages and county court minutes from 1905. [S1273] The Military Memorial Museum, which now fills the old building, dates it to 1885. It says the building later served as a school and library, a wrestling and USO hall in the 1940s, and government offices, until the museum opened there in 2002. [S1282]
The present courthouse across Main Street was finished in 1905 for $23,000. W. Chamberlin and Company of Birmingham designed it, and it was built of Bedford limestone on a sandstone foundation, with a domed four-faced clock on its tower. The nomination covers both buildings, which were listed together on the National Register. [S1274] Charles Edward Snodgrass opened a law practice in Crossville in 1888, probably in a small building that the county bought in 1989 and that has housed its veterans service office since 2008. He went on to serve two terms in Congress and sat on the state Court of Appeals from 1925 to 1934. [S1283]
Pleasant Hill grew up around a school. A state marker says the American Missionary Association of the Congregational churches founded Pleasant Hill Academy in 1884 to educate the young people of the plateau. The town was incorporated in 1903, and the academy closed in 1947 as public schools improved. [S1284] UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service dates the incorporation act to 1903. [S1285] The academy’s bell has its own history. A marker at the Pioneer Hall Museum says it was cast by Revere and Sons of Boston in 1817 and hung in two Marblehead, Massachusetts, churches before a donor bought it for Pleasant Hill in 1886. By 1922 it was broken and set on the site of Dodge Hall, which had burned. It later hung in the community church’s tower, and in 2011 it went to the Pleasant Hill Historical Society’s Pioneer Hall Museum. [S1286]
In 1917 Edwin Wharton came to run the academy, bringing his wife, Dr. May Cravath Wharton, a Michigan-trained physician. The encyclopedia says she taught health, served as the school doctor, and during the 1919 flu epidemic treated as many plateau families as she could reach by horseback and buggy. After her husband died in 1920 she stayed on as the community doctor. With art teacher Elizabeth Fletcher and nurse Alice Adshead she opened a three-room hospital, and by 1922 she had raised enough money to build Uplands Sanatorium. A general hospital followed in 1935, later renamed Cumberland General. After World War II she led the drive for Cumberland Medical Center in Crossville, which opened with fifty beds in March 1950. Her last project, a nursing home begun in 1957, grew into the Uplands retirement village. She died in 1959. [S1287] The Civil War marker on the Whitaker farm notes that the old battlefield later became the place where the "Doctor Woman of the Cumberlands" began her work. [S1278]
Another church school grew up north of Crossville. A marker says the Rev. Robert Hershey Hall walked an eight-church circuit and spoke up for young people who were being denied an education. In 1921 the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, opened Cumberland Mountain School, which served more than 650 students in seventeen years. Six of its buildings remain, and the campus is on the National Register. [S1288]
The Tennessee Central Railroad reached the county in 1900. The encyclopedia says it made the county easier for new settlers to reach and opened the Nashville and Knoxville markets to local farmers and stock raisers. [S1265] The City of Crossville says the first train arrived in September 1900. The depot wasn’t finished, so a boxcar served as the station. The depot burned on Valentine’s Day 1925 and was rebuilt across the tracks the next year. Dr. Wharton, Alvin C. York and Eleanor Roosevelt all came through it. The trains stopped in the early 1980s and the tracks were pulled up. Volunteers led by Bob Patton and the county’s Rotary clubs began restoring the depot in 1996, and the city now runs it as a small welcome center with a caboose museum. [S1289] In much of the county the railroad followed the old Walton Road, the encyclopedia says, and its abandoned bed is one way to trace the road today. [S1270] Crossville itself was incorporated in 1901. [S1290]
The plateau’s best-known product is a stone. The encyclopedia describes Crab Orchard stone as a rare sandstone from Crab Orchard Mountain, mostly rose-colored and streaked with browns. Until the late 1800s it was used locally for chimneys and foundations. Then county officials built a courthouse with it and laid stone curbs and sidewalks in Crossville. In the mid-1920s architect Henry Hibbs chose it for Scarritt College in Nashville, which gave the stone a statewide and then national reputation. It has since been used as far away as the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. The greatest concentration of Crab Orchard stone buildings is still in Cumberland County, including the courthouse, the old post office, churches, schools, many houses and the Palace Theatre. [S1291] The town of Crab Orchard, incorporated in 1921, still calls the sandstone the thing it is best known for. [S1292][S1293]
In World War I the county raised a company of volunteers that served as Company G, 119th Infantry, 30th Division. [S1265] A marker on the old Crossville post office, now a courthouse annex named for him, says Sgt. Milo Lemert destroyed three German machine-gun nests on the Hindenburg Line and was killed attacking a fourth on September 29, 1918. He received the Medal of Honor. [S1294] The encyclopedia adds that Sgt. Litton T. Thurman received the Distinguished Service Cross for the same action. Sgt. Alvin C. York came home through the Tennessee Central depot in Crossville, where friends from Pall Mall in Fentress County met him. In 1940 York came to the Hotel Taylor in Crossville to sign the contract for the film Sergeant York. [S1265] Lemert had married Nellie Snodgrass, daughter of the Crossville lawyer and congressman. [S1283]
In the 1920s new highways linked Crossville to Pikeville, Sparta, Spring City and Jamestown. [S1265] The biggest was the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway, the state’s first priority after the State Highway Department was created in 1915. It was numbered State Route 1, and in 1926 about two-thirds of it became U.S. 70. It stayed the state’s main east-west road until Interstate 40 was finished in the late 1960s. [S1295] After the Memphis-to-Bristol Highway was built in 1927, Dr. Wharton and her staff used it to run outreach programs and small clinics in nearby communities. [S1287]
The Great Depression hit the plateau hard. In 1980 the magazine Southern Exposure recorded homesteaders’ memories of men cutting railroad ties for 50 cents a day, hosiery-mill strikers from Harriman, and coal miners from the bitter 1933 strike at Wilder. Under the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, the Interior Department’s new Division of Subsistence Homesteads set out to resettle "stranded" industrial workers on small farms. In January 1934 the nineteenth such project opened its office in Crossville as Cumberland Homesteads. [S1296] The Tennessee Conservationist dates the project’s start to 1933 and says it moved under the Resettlement Administration in 1935. About 4,000 families applied. [S1297]
The encyclopedia says Civil Works Administration crews and would-be homesteaders began clearing land in 1934. Pennsylvania architect William Macy Stanton, who had worked on house designs at Norris, laid out the roads, farms and buildings. The plan called for 351 farms of 10 to 160 acres, averaging 16 acres. Unemployed miners and timber workers from nearby counties built the houses. Most are one and a half stories, with walls of Crab Orchard sandstone, woodwork cut from the surrounding land, and hinges made in the community blacksmith shop. Families usually lived in their barns while their houses went up. [S1298] Southern Exposure describes the first weeks: crews set up a sawmill, built a barn, moved into it, built the first house, and moved the project offices there from Crossville. [S1296]
The houses were controversial. The encyclopedia says Sen. Harry F. Byrd of Virginia ridiculed the cost of electricity, refrigerators and indoor privies for country people. Sen. Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee complained that relief workers were getting stone mansions better than his own house. [S1298] Eleanor Roosevelt visited in 1934, and the Tower’s curator says she pushed for indoor plumbing, bathrooms and closets. [S1297] Southern Exposure says the homesteaders also fought project managers over who made decisions and how they would pay for their places. They formed a union, wrote to their congressmen and to Mrs. Roosevelt, and eventually won a straight five-to-fifteen-year purchase contract. [S1296]
The encyclopedia says the community held its completion celebration on July 28, 1938. Of the units first planned, 251 were finished, making Cumberland Homesteads the largest community the Division of Subsistence Homesteads built anywhere in the country. [S1298] The state marker also counts 251 families. [S1299] Elsewhere the encyclopedia’s county entry says 250, [S1265] and the Homesteads Tower Association says 252 farmsteads can be seen from the tower. [S1300] The encyclopedia says TVA power reached the homes in December 1937, [S1298] while the Conservationist dates electricity to 1939. [S1297]
The cooperative ventures did not last. The encyclopedia says the cooperatives and the hosiery mill failed, and the farms proved too small and the soil too poor to support families. Many men took jobs in Detroit, Akron and Dayton or at TVA’s Douglas and Watts Bar dams and sent money home to pay for their homesteads. By 1941 only forty-four families had left. The historic district is on the National Register, and the community is now inside the Crossville city limits. [S1298] About 212 of the houses still stand as homes. [S1297]
The project’s best-known building is the Homesteads Tower, built in 1937–38 where U.S. 127 meets Tennessee 68. It was built for the project’s government offices. Its octagonal stone shaft holds a water tank and a winding stairway to a lookout, and the four rooms at its base now hold the museum. [S1300] The state marker says the tower held the project offices until 1947. [S1299] The tower association says the building opened as a museum in 1984. [S1300] The Conservationist says the association had managed the museum since 1980. In 2025, after bad weather cancelled its Apple Festival fundraiser, the association asked the county to give the tower and museum to Tennessee State Parks, and by late 2025 the state owned and ran them. [S1297] In March 2026 the park manager told UCNow, a Cookeville radio news site, that the tower would reopen on April 1 with free admission, living-history tours and a version of the Apple Festival. [S1301]
The homesteads needed a place for recreation. From 1935 to 1938, the encyclopedia says, CCC Company 3464 built a stone dam and bridge of Crab Orchard stone across Byrd Creek to form Byrd Lake. At 347 feet it was the largest masonry structure the CCC built anywhere in the country. In 1938 the Farm Security Administration deeded 1,427 acres to the state, and Cumberland Mountain State Park was born. The CCC companies kept building cabins, trails, a boathouse and a bathhouse until 1941, and many of those buildings remain. [S1302] The state marker at the bridge gives different numbers: built between 1935 and 1940, with a concrete core faced in Crab Orchard stone, a 319-foot span and seven spillways. [S1303]
The encyclopedia names Alvin C. York as park superintendent. [S1302] Tennessee State Parks says York was the first project superintendent over the CCC company and ran it by military rules, even while he was away watching Hollywood film his life story. It dates the start of construction to 1938 and says the park opened to the public on July 18, 1940. [S1304] The encyclopedia’s park entry puts the park at 1,720 acres, [S1302] while its Homesteads entry gives 1,300. [S1298]
World War II brought jobs. The encyclopedia says the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge and a new prisoner-of-war camp near Pomona kept employment high. [S1265] A state marker says Camp Crossville opened in November 1942, nine miles west of Crossville on the site of the CCC camp, as one of the first POW camps of the war. It held more than 1,500 German and Italian officers, including Gen. Pietro Gazzeri, one of Italy’s highest-ranking officers, and officers of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. It closed in December 1945. [S1305] The encyclopedia says local people called it the "Jap Camp," though it never held Japanese prisoners, and that New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia made a "secret" visit to talk with the Italian generals. [S1265] The Military Memorial Museum in the old courthouse has a section on the camp, including the memoir Behind Barbed Wire by former prisoner Gerhard Hennes. [S1282]
Some of the county’s best-known businesses grew from one man’s hobby. In a 2012 company release, Trade-A-Plane said Crossville’s Cosby Harrison built a glider in his living room in the 1920s and bought a 1929 Laird Swallow biplane, Crossville’s first airplane, with $995 borrowed against his father’s advice. He crashed it in 1935 and couldn’t find parts, so he and his wife Margaret started a buy-and-sell paper at their kitchen table. The first issue, with 76 ads, went to 9,000 registered transport pilots on October 5, 1937. [S1306] The Upper Cumberland Business Journal says the crash was near Rockwood. Harrison started Rock & Dirt, for heavy-equipment buyers and sellers, in 1950 when he finished building Lake Harrison and needed to sell his surplus machinery. [S1307] The encyclopedia counts Trade-A-Plane, Rock and Dirt, Boats and Harbors and Tradequip among the Crossville publications with national readerships. [S1265]
The Lake Tansi property owners’ history tells the lake story differently. It says Harrison crashed near Harriman and founded the company with his wife Alice. In the early 1950s he bought leftover federal homestead land, began the lake and dam in 1956, and finished the dam in 1959, creating a 550-acre lake. He and his wife opened the Lake Harrison resort on April 28, 1961. In 1963 Cumberland Plateau Resorts bought the property and renamed it Lake Tansi. That history also says the Harrison company was sold in 2020 and its local offices closed in 2021. [S1308]
In 1963 Paul and Mary Crabtree came to Crossville for a break. He was a Broadway actor and director who had taken over the role of Will Parker in the original Oklahoma!, and she had family in town. The Playhouse’s own history says community leaders asked Crabtree to stage a show for local children. That December his The Perils of Pinocchio, with a cast, crew and orchestra of 200 young people, was staged at Crossville Junior High School. When people asked how to keep that kind of thing going, he told them they would have to build a theater, and a town of 5,000 did. [S1309] The Cumberland County Playhouse was founded in 1965 and was run by two generations of Crabtrees. The Upper Cumberland Business Journal says it is the only rural "major cultural institution" designated by the Tennessee Arts Commission. [S1310] The Playhouse says it is one of the ten largest professional theaters in rural America and serves more than 145,000 visitors a year. [S1309]
Downtown, the Palace Theatre opened as a movie house in 1938 and closed in 1978. The City of Crossville says it was slated for demolition in late 1999 before one city council member changed their mind, and it was restored as a community auditorium. It now shows movies again and hosts live events. [S1311] The encyclopedia notes that the Palace is listed on the National Register and built of Crab Orchard stone. [S1291] Crossville singer Mandy Barnett has her own Tennessee Music Pathways marker. As a girl she sang the national anthem at the county fair, and at 18 she starred as Patsy Cline in Always … Patsy Cline at the Ryman Auditorium when it reopened in 1994. [S1312]
Ozone Falls, a 110-foot waterfall near the village of Ozone, had long been a landmark on U.S. 70, part of the original Memphis-to-Bristol Highway, the encyclopedia says. It became a fourteen-acre state natural area in the early 1970s and was expanded in 1996. [S1313] The state Division of Natural Areas now lists it at 43 acres, with Fall Creek plunging over a sandstone cap rock. It says grist and sawmills once stood above the falls until a spring flood in 1900 washed the last one over the edge, and that local legend credits the name to the "stimulating quality of the air" from the mist. The falls appeared in a Jungle Book film. [S1314] The Cumberland Trail Conservancy says the falls were called McNair Falls in the 1860s, dates the natural area to 1973, and identifies the film as the 2016 live-action The Jungle Book. [S1315]
The encyclopedia says the county grew fastest after World War II, and that building Interstate 40 through it was the biggest single factor in the growth of farming, industry and tourism. Retirement and resort communities brought thousands of people to visit, build and retire, among them Fairfield Glade, Lake Tansi, Renegade Mountain (now Cumberland Gardens) and Pleasant Hill. [S1265] Southern Exposure’s 1980 report said Fairfield Communities bought 10,000 acres of remote woodland in January 1970 for $150 an acre and sold the first Fairfield Glade lot nine months later. By 1980 tourism was already overtaking farming as the county’s biggest industry. [S1296] Today the Chamber of Commerce and visitors bureau markets Crossville as the "Golf Capital of Tennessee." [S1316]
The encyclopedia called Cumberland one of the fastest-growing counties in the state. It counted 46,802 people in 2000, almost 35 percent more than in 1990, [S1265] and the 2020 census counted 61,145. [S1266] Crossville grew from 10,795 people in 2010 to an estimated 13,113 in 2026. [S1290] Ozone Falls, Grassy Cove and Black Mountain are now linked by sections of the Cumberland Trail. [S1315][S1269]
Most of Cumberland County’s history sites are within half an hour of Crossville. A day might include:
Visit: Our Cumberland County guide has towns, parks and local news.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1794 | Thomas "Bigfoot" Spencer killed near Crab Orchard [S1272] |
| 1796 | Plateau still an Indian hunting ground at statehood [S1265] |
| 1801 | Walton Road (Cumberland Turnpike) completed [S1270] |
| 1817 | John Kemmer builds Kemmer Stand [S1271] |
| 1845 | John Wood Dodge buys an orchard at Pomona [S1280] |
| 1855–56 | Cumberland County created; county court organized and Crossville laid out [S38][S1274] |
| 1857 | First frame courthouse built [S1274] |
| 1863 | Fight on the Whitaker farm at Pleasant Hill, December 9 [S1278] |
| 1884 | Pleasant Hill Academy founded [S1284] |
| 1886 | Stone courthouse completed [S1274] |
| 1900 | Tennessee Central reaches Crossville, September [S1289] |
| 1901 | Crossville incorporated [S1290] |
| 1903 | Pleasant Hill incorporated [S1284] |
| 1905 | Courthouse fire; present courthouse built [S1274] |
| 1917 | Dr. May Wharton arrives at Pleasant Hill [S1287] |
| 1918 | Sgt. Milo Lemert killed on the Hindenburg Line, September 29 [S1294] |
| 1921 | Cumberland Mountain School opens; Crab Orchard incorporated [S1288][S1292] |
| 1922 | Uplands Sanatorium built [S1287] |
| 1927 | Memphis-to-Bristol Highway built through the area [S1287] |
| 1934 | Cumberland Homesteads office opens in Crossville, January [S1296] |
| 1935 | CCC begins Byrd Lake dam and bridge [S1302] |
| 1937 | Trade-A-Plane’s first issue mailed, October 5 [S1306] |
| 1938 | Homesteads completed, July 28; Palace Theatre opens [S1298][S1311] |
| 1940 | Cumberland Mountain State Park opens, July 18 [S1304] |
| 1942 | Camp Crossville opens, November [S1305] |
| 1945 | Camp Crossville closes, December [S1305] |
| 1950 | Cumberland Medical Center opens in Crossville, March [S1287] |
| 1961 | Lake Harrison resort opens, April 28 [S1308] |
| 1963 | The Perils of Pinocchio staged in Crossville, December [S1309] |
| 1965 | Cumberland County Playhouse founded [S1310] |
| 1970 | Fairfield Communities buys the Fairfield Glade tract, January [S1296] |
| 1973 | Grassy Cove named a National Natural Landmark [S1268] |
| 1996 | Ozone Falls natural area expanded; Crossville Depot restoration begins [S1313][S1289] |
| 2002 | Military Memorial Museum opens in the old courthouse [S1282] |
| 2025 | Homesteads Tower transferred to Tennessee State Parks [S1297] |
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 county dates from 1855 (the Tennessee Blue Book, the state library, UT’s County Technical Assistance Service and the courthouse National Register nomination) or 1856 (the Tennessee Encyclopedia, which may be counting the year the county court first met); whether it was carved from six counties, White, Bledsoe, Rhea, Morgan, Fentress and Putnam (the Blue Book, the state library and the nomination), or eight, adding Roane and Overton (the encyclopedia); whether the Walton Road was built in 1800 as “the first federal road across the Plateau” (a state marker at Kemmer Stand) or authorized by the state General Assembly in 1799 and completed in 1801 as the Cumberland Turnpike (the encyclopedia); whether the second courthouse, now the Military Memorial Museum, was built in 1885 (the museum) or 1886 (the National Register nomination); whether the Cumberland Homesteads began in 1933 (the Tennessee Conservationist) or in January 1934, when the project office opened in Crossville and crews began clearing land (Southern Exposure and the encyclopedia); whether the project built homes for 250 families (the encyclopedia’s county entry, Southern Exposure and Tennessee State Parks), 251 (the encyclopedia’s Homesteads entry, the state marker and the Conservationist) or 252 farmsteads (the Homesteads Tower Association), out of 351 farms first planned; whether TVA power reached the homesteads in December 1937 (the encyclopedia) or in 1939 (the Conservationist); whether the Tower museum opened in 1984 (the tower association) or the association had run it since 1980 (the Conservationist); whether the CCC built the Byrd Lake dam and bridge from 1935 to 1938 (the encyclopedia), 1935 to 1940 (the state marker) or starting in 1938 (Tennessee State Parks), and whether it is 347 feet long (the encyclopedia) or a 319-foot span (the marker); whether Cumberland Mountain State Park covers 1,720 acres (the encyclopedia’s park entry) or 1,300 (the encyclopedia’s Homesteads entry); whether Ozone Falls became a state natural area in “the early 1970s” (the encyclopedia) or in 1973 (the Cumberland Trail Conservancy); whether Cosby Harrison crashed his plane near Rockwood (the Upper Cumberland Business Journal) or near Harriman (the Lake Tansi property owners’ history), and whether his wife and partner was Margaret (the company and the Business Journal) or Alice (the Lake Tansi history); and whether Harrison finished Lake Harrison by 1950 (the Business Journal) or began it in 1956 and finished the dam in 1959 (the Lake Tansi history). We also note that the encyclopedia places Camp Crossville near Pomona, the state marker nine miles west of Crossville, and that the camp, though locally nicknamed the “Jap Camp” and remembered by the military museum as “the German POW Camp,” held German and Italian prisoners. 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 Cumberland County sits on the Cumberland Plateau at the western edge of East Tennessee; it is not a photograph of Cumberland County, and no endorsement by any agency or source is implied. Reused source numbers (S38) match the same sources on our other history pages. Corrections: [email protected].