East Tennessee History · County by county
The northern Cumberland Plateau and the Wolf River valley: a hunting ground where Daniel Boone wintered, a county named for a House Speaker, a seat that began as Sand Springs, the Clemens family on their way to Missouri, saltpeter caves and a guerrilla war between Tinker Dave Beaty and Champ Ferguson, a German colony at Allardt, coal towns and a bitter strike at Wilder, a farm boy from Pall Mall who became the most famous American soldier of World War I and spent the rest of his life building a school, a Socialist woman who ran for governor, and the gorges of the Big South Fork.
Fentress County lies on the northern Cumberland Plateau, in what the Tennessee Encyclopedia calls northeast Middle Tennessee. The General Assembly created it on November 28, 1823, and named it for James Fentress, Speaker of the Tennessee House, who had helped pass the bill. [S1317] The Tennessee Blue Book adds that Fentress (1763–1843) had chaired the Montgomery County Court and served as a commissioner to choose the county seats of Haywood, Carroll, Gibson and Weakley counties. [S38] Jamestown is the seat, and Allardt is the only other incorporated town. The county counted 18,489 people in 2020. [S1318] UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service lists Jamestown in the Middle Tennessee grand division and on Central time. [S1319]
The county is best known as the home of Sgt. Alvin C. York, the Pall Mall farmer who became the most celebrated common soldier of World War I. [S1320] But its story is older and stranger than one man. This page follows it from a hunting ground where Daniel Boone wintered, through a new county and a seat called Sand Springs, the Clemens family’s brief stay, saltpeter caves and a vicious guerrilla war, a German colony at Allardt, the coal towns of Wilder and Davidson and their bloody strike, York’s war and his long fight for a school, a Socialist candidate for governor, and the gorges, waterfalls and parks that now draw visitors to the plateau.
The 1990 National Register study of the county’s historic resources describes two kinds of country. Most of the eastern part of the county is table land on the plateau, sandy-soiled, with coal, shale and clay underneath and native grasses good for cattle. The north is the Wolf River valley. Where three forks meet to form the river, the valley is about three miles wide at the Three Forks and widens to about ten miles farther down. Its red clay over limestone is the best farmland in the county, and it was the first part of the county to be settled. [S1321]
People used the plateau long before that. Below Northrup Falls, near Allardt, the state Division of Natural Areas says the rock houses, shallow cave-like shelters under the cliffs, were used by Woodland Indians more than 3,000 years ago, mostly during hunting season. [S1322] The encyclopedia’s entry on the Big South Fork, written by Sen. Howard Baker Jr., says about 4,000 such rock shelters lie inside the national river and recreation area, which takes in part of Fentress County. Hunters lived in them as long as 12,000 years ago. Between A.D. 900 and 1000 people left the plateau for farming towns along the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, and for centuries afterward they came back only to hunt. [S1323]
A state park marker at the Wolf River Cemetery says Daniel Boone and his brother Squire spent the winter of 1769 in a cave in Pall Mall and named a number of places in the Upper Cumberland. Many longhunters followed them. The first permanent settler of Pall Mall, around the time Tennessee became a state, was Conrad "Coonrod" Pile, a German ancestor of Alvin York. [S1324] A state marker at the cemetery, first known as Mt. Pleasant Burying Ground, says it holds about 600 graves, the oldest known that of Charles Paul in 1826. Pile is buried there in an unusual above-ground grave, and so is York, the first settler’s descendant. [S1325]
The National Park Service says longhunters were exploring the Big South Fork and its tributaries by 1780 and that several homesteads stood there by 1800. Settlers came mostly from Virginia and North Carolina, of English and Scotch-Irish descent, and kept to the creek and river bottoms where small pieces of good land could be found. [S1326] Their place names, Difficulty, Troublesome and No Business, show how hard the land was. [S1323]
By the early 1820s the plateau settlements were far from their county courts. The sources do not agree on what the new county was cut from. The encyclopedia says the General Assembly formed Fentress from parts of Overton and Morgan counties, [S1317] and so does the 1990 National Register study. [S1321] The Tennessee State Library and Archives says Morgan and White, citing the act as Chapter 302 of the Private Acts of 1823. [S1327] The Blue Book [S38] and the county government both list Morgan, Overton and White. [S1328]
The new county lost land twice. The National Register study says part of it went to form Scott County in 1849, when Fentress had about 4,454 people, and that more went to Pickett County in 1879. [S1321] A double state marker on U.S. 127 near Forbus gives the same year for Pickett and says Fentress had been named for a man who served four terms as Speaker. [S1329] The encyclopedia’s Pickett County entry also says 1879, from sections of Overton and Fentress, [S1330] but its Fentress County entry says 1881 and notes that until then Fentress formed the state line with Kentucky. [S1317]
The seat was first called Sand Springs, for the springs that bubbled up out of the sandy soil. The encyclopedia says Jamestown, also named for James Fentress, was established in 1828. [S1317] The City of Jamestown says it was established as the county seat in 1823. [S1331] The National Register study agrees on 1823 and says the first court met at the Three Forks of the Wolf River before a courthouse was built at Jamestown in 1828. It says the town was not incorporated until 1837. [S1321] UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service lists Jamestown’s incorporation act as Chapter 31 of the Private Acts of 1920, effective December 1, 1920, which may be a later reincorporation. [S1319]
Mark Twain never lived in Fentress County, but his parents did. The encyclopedia says John M. Clemens and his wife, Jane Lampton Clemens, came in the 1830s. He was a lawyer, circuit court clerk and county commissioner, and postmaster at Pall Mall from April 1832 to May 1835. The family then moved to Missouri, where their son Samuel was born later in 1835. They kept land in the county for years, and Samuel Clemens himself signed some of the deeds. [S1317] The Wolf River Valley marker credits John Marshall Clemens with naming Pall Mall for an elegant London neighborhood. It adds that his son later wrote about the area as the "Knobs of Obedstown" in his novel The Gilded Age. [S1324] The National Register study also counts John Clemens among the early settlers at Forbus, then known as Blue Rock and Gatewood. [S1321]
In Jamestown, the encyclopedia says, Mark Twain Park, named for the Clemens family who once carried water from it, surrounds the only one of the old springs that remains. [S1317] The city says the same spring is still in what is now Mark Twain City Park. [S1331]
Gunpowder needs saltpeter, and Fentress County’s caves had it. The county government says miners leached it from the earth of several caves. The largest operation was in York Cave, near the Wolf River post office, where 25 large leaching vats once stood. That cave was mined during the Civil War. Buffalo Cave near Jamestown had twelve vats, and Manson Saltpeter Cave in Big Indian Creek Valley had four. Any of them may also have been worked during the War of 1812, the county says. [S1328] Tennessee State Parks says York Cave, now inside the York state park, holds human remains as well as Civil War-era saltpeter mines. It is home to the endangered Indiana bat, and a permit is needed to enter. [S1332] The National Register study names a Saltpeter Cave four miles west of Allardt and puts Buffalo Cave a mile northeast of Helena. [S1321]
When Gov. Isham Harris asked the legislature to take Tennessee out of the Union, the county government says, Fentress County’s two legislators, Sen. Reese T. Hildreth and Rep. R. H. Bledsoe, both voted for secession in 1861. [S1328] Many of their neighbors did not agree. The encyclopedia says most people in the Big South Fork country, small farmers who did not grow cotton or rely much on slavery, stayed loyal to the Union and sent more men to the Union army than to the Confederacy. [S1323]
The Civil War in Fentress County was fought mostly by neighbors. The Wolf River Valley marker says Gov. Harris set up a training camp, Camp McGinnis, in Pall Mall near Rotten Fork, which held more than 10,000 soldiers, more people than the valley had ever seen at once. On September 29, 1861, the marker says, the first military action of the war in Tennessee took place at Travisville, five miles north. About 100 soldiers from the camp had raided into Kentucky, one of the first Confederate invasions of the North, and stolen gunpowder. Union troops caught them camped at the Travisville Methodist Church on Caney Creek, and four Confederates were killed. "Uncle Billy" Hull, father of the future Secretary of State Cordell Hull, was shot in the face and left for dead. He lived and, the marker says, tracked down and killed the men who had tried to murder him. [S1324]
The war’s two best-known local fighters were partisans. A Civil War Trails marker says David "Tinker Dave" Beaty, a Fentress County native, was the best-known Union partisan in the Upper Cumberland mountains. In 1862 he formed Beaty’s Company of Independent Tennessee Scouts. After the Federals took East Tennessee in 1863, Gen. Ambrose Burnside backed him. Beaty wrote that Burnside "wanted me to go out in the mountain forks and bushwhack the Rebels and keep the roads open." [S1333] The encyclopedia says Beaty was born in the county in 1823, served under Gen. George Thomas and General Burnside, protected the county from Confederate raids, and remained a leader through Reconstruction until his death in 1883. [S1317] The marker says he died in 1876 and is buried in Lynn Cemetery in Fentress County. That marker stood at an Interstate 40 rest area in Cumberland County and is now reported removed. [S1333]
His enemy was Samuel "Champ" Ferguson, whom a second Civil War Trails marker calls the most notorious Confederate guerrilla leader in the Upper Cumberland mountains. [S1279] The encyclopedia, which spells the Union man’s name Beatty, says Ferguson was born near Albany in Clinton County, Kentucky, and moved to White County, Tennessee, in the 1850s. The plateau’s mountains made regular military control almost impossible and made guerrilla raiding the preferred way to fight. Ferguson surrendered in May 1865, expecting to be paroled. Instead he was tried in Nashville on 53 counts of murder, with Beaty among the witnesses against him, and hanged on October 20, 1865. [S1334] The Beaty marker quotes Ferguson’s verdict on his rival: "Well, there are meaner men than Tinker Dave. He fought me bravely and gave me some heavy licks, but I always gave him as good as he sent." [S1333]
The killing did not end with the war. The Wolf River Valley marker says six of Ferguson’s men pulled Coonrod Pile’s grandson Rod out of his house, shot him 13 times and left him to die in the road. His mother, Rebecca, recognized them and swore revenge. Rod’s brothers hunted down and killed five of the six long after the war was over. [S1324]
After the war Fentress County stayed poor and hard to reach. The National Register study says the county had 4,717 people in 1870, fewer than ten to the square mile. In the 1880s farmers raised corn, wheat, oats, rye, tobacco, potatoes, pumpkins and buckwheat, and drove livestock on foot to Clinton, sixty miles away, or to Horse Cave, Kentucky, a hundred miles north. Steamboats could reach the mouths of the Wolf and Obey rivers only when the water was right. Land titles on the plateau were a tangle of overlapping grants from Tennessee, Kentucky and North Carolina, and the study credits Bruno Gernt of Allardt with a major role in settling them so the land could be sold. [S1321]
Gernt also founded Allardt. The encyclopedia says he laid out the town in 1881 for two Nebraska land speculators, Cyrus and James N. Clarke, and that it drew a steady stream of German immigrants. By 1886 it had three general stores, a hotel, a steam mill and a lumber mill. [S1317] The National Register study says the town was named for M. H. Allardt, a colonization commissioner for Michigan and Gernt’s partner. Planned as a model community on a geometric grid with Michigan Avenue as its baseline, it was sold through brochures and a land office in Cincinnati. In 1881 about 300,000 acres were offered at $4 an acre, and 9,000 acres sold the first year. A post office opened in 1883. By 1885, the Rugby Gazette reported, 75 families lived there. Allardt later held the county’s first school fair in 1918 and first county fair in 1923. Bruno Gernt’s house is on the National Register. [S1321] The town was incorporated in 1964, according to UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service, and had an estimated 606 people in 2026. [S1335]
The county also found oil. The National Register study says the first known oil and gas well was dug near Little Crab in 1896, and that in the early 1920s Fentress was the only county in Tennessee producing oil profitably for commercial use. [S1321] In Jamestown, the stone county jail was built in 1898 to replace a small log jail from 1827. Its National Register nomination calls it the oldest public building in the county and one of the earliest examples of the quarry-faced sandstone that became popular in Jamestown from the late 1890s to the late 1940s. It served as jail and sheriff’s home until 1979, and in 1982 it was rehabilitated to house an Alvin C. York museum and the Fentress County Chamber of Commerce. [S1336]
The courthouse is harder to date. The National Register study says a second courthouse was built in 1860 and a third in 1901, [S1321] and the jail’s nomination also dates the courthouse to 1901. [S1336] The state library records a fire at the courthouse in 1905, [S1327] and an act of 1905 authorized the county to sell up to $15,000 in bonds to build a courthouse. [S1337]
Railroads came late. The National Register study says the Tennessee Central built a branch into the southwest corner of the county around 1903 to serve the new coal mines, and the Oneida and Western Railroad, a logging line, arrived from Scott County in 1913 and reached Jamestown in 1930. [S1321] Northern capital bought up the forests. The encyclopedia says agents for Michigan timberman Justus S. Stearns had purchased the "Big Survey" by 1899, 30,000 acres in Scott, Pickett and Fentress counties and Wayne County, Kentucky. [S1338] The Gernt Brothers Lumber Mill ran from 1903 to 1945, and the study says the Gernts owned sixty percent of the county’s virgin timber. [S1321]
The National Park Service tells the story of one man who made his way in that world. George Hatcher, an African American, ran a logging camp near the Peter’s Mountain fire tower, bossing both white and black loggers, and later worked at a stave and handle mill at Sharp Place, east of Jamestown. He took half his pay in cash and half in land, and eventually owned more than 2,000 acres west of what is now the Big South Fork, along the south side of Highway 297. [S1339]
Coal brought the county’s first real industry. The encyclopedia says the five communities of the Wilder-Davidson complex, Wilder, Davidson, Twinton, Crawford and Highland Junction, grew up where Fentress, Overton and Putnam counties meet, and flourished from 1903 until the mid-1930s. Wilder alone had 2,000 people in the 1920s. [S1340] The National Register study says the Wilder mine, the first in the county, opened in 1903, and the town was named for the Union general and industrialist John T. Wilder. At its peak it had a school, a church, a company commissary, a post office, a hotel, a barber shop, an ice house, a doctor’s office and a depot. [S1321] The encyclopedia’s county entry says the Fentress Coal and Coke Company and the Davidson Mining Company ran Wilder and Davidson as virtual company towns, and that they were the county’s second- and third-largest communities in 1941. [S1317]
The strike that broke them began in 1932. The encyclopedia says a local union existed from 1919 to 1924, with short strikes in 1919 and 1924. In the depths of the Depression, United Mine Workers Local 4467 won a one-year contract at Wilder on July 8, 1931, only to see it canceled a year later to the day. The local struck on July 9, 1932. The strike spread through the complex and drew national attention through a year of violence, killings and an especially hard winter, as political and labor leaders, churches and relief groups came to help. On April 30, 1933, company guards Shorty Green and Doc Thompson killed the local union president, Barney Graham. His death effectively broke the union. [S1340] The National Register study, which dates the first local to 1918–19, says a railroad trestle was dynamited and state troopers were sent into Wilder, and that the governor later pulled them out after the bankrupt company refused to arbitrate. [S1321]
Relief came slowly. The study says the Tennessee Valley Authority, the state labor department and the U.S. Forest Service arranged jobs for some of the strikers. In 1933, sixty-one miners went to a Civilian Conservation Corps camp at LaFollette and some worked on the Cumberland Homesteads near Crossville, sending much of their $25 monthly pay home to 350 dependents. Three were hired at Norris Dam, and 150 miners’ families were still without work. [S1321] Coal mining never really recovered, the encyclopedia says, except for a short time during World War II. The last mine in the area, Horse Pound, closed on June 1, 1951. [S1340]
Alvin Cullum York was born in Pall Mall on December 13, 1887, one of eleven children of William and Mary York, according to a state park marker. [S1341] The encyclopedia says he grew up in a family of subsistence farmers, earned a reputation as a dead shot and a "hell raiser," and had never traveled more than fifty miles from home before he was drafted. After a close friend died, he experienced a religious conversion at a revival led by H. H. Russell of the Church of Christ in Christian Union, a strict sect that opposed drinking, dancing and war. The encyclopedia dates the conversion to 1914. [S1342] The state park marker [S1341] and the encyclopedia’s World War I entry both say 1915. [S1320]
York got his draft notice on June 5, 1917, from Rosier Pile, his friend, pastor and postmaster. Pile urged him to seek conscientious objector status, and York wrote on his draft card, "Dont want to fight," but review boards turned him down because they did not recognize his church. At Camp Gordon, Georgia, in Company G of the 328th Infantry, York’s company commander, George Edward Buxton, persuaded him that some wars were moral, and he agreed to fight. [S1342]
On October 8, 1918, during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Corporal York and sixteen other men under Sgt. Bernard Early were sent toward the Decauville railroad in the Chatel-Chehery sector. The encyclopedia says they misread their French map and ended up behind German lines. After a short fight a larger German force surrendered, and then German machine gunners on a hill above turned their guns on the scene, killing nine Americans, including York’s best friend, Murray Savage. Early was hit seventeen times, and the corporals left in command ordered York to silence the guns. When it was over nine Americans had captured 132 prisoners. [S1342] A state marker in Jamestown says York killed 25 of the enemy and captured 132 "single-handedly," and that he received the Medal of Honor and the Croix de Guerre. [S1343] The encyclopedia’s World War I entry says he "purportedly" killed 25 Germans and silenced 35 machine guns. [S1320] Tennessee State Parks also describes him attacking a machine-gun nest single-handedly. [S1332] The encyclopedia’s York entry is more careful: York never claimed he acted alone, but only Early and Cpl. William Cutting were recognized for their part, with Distinguished Service Crosses in 1927. [S1342] Gen. John J. Pershing, the marker at the York park says, called him "the greatest civilian soldier" of the war. [S1344]
York came home in 1919, [S1345] and he married Gracie Williams on June 7, 1919. Gov. A. H. Roberts of Overton County performed the ceremony, [S1346] on a hill above the spring near the York birthplace, according to the park. [S1341] The encyclopedia says the Nashville Rotary Club and other Tennessee clubs had planned to give the hero a house and farm. When donations fell short, they gave him an unfinished house with a large mortgage, and the club still held the deed in 1922. [S1342] A park marker says the Yorks got 400 acres, the unfinished house and a hefty mortgage they had no way to pay, and that the warranty deed is dated May 18, 1922. York turned down offers that could have made him rich and came back to Pall Mall. [S1347]
He went into business at home. A park marker says York farmed, ran a blacksmith shop and a general store, and drilled for oil; one of his wells near Moodyville blew out in the 1940s and poured several hundred barrels of oil into the Wolf River. Before the war he had worked on the road crew that built what became U.S. 127, which was later named for him. [S1348] The encyclopedia says he used his fame to win money for roads and jobs in the county. In 1932 he backed Herbert Hoover to protest Franklin Roosevelt’s promise to repeal Prohibition, but he later supported the New Deal, and in 1939 he was named superintendent of the Cumberland Homesteads near Crossville. [S1342]
York’s great cause was a school. The encyclopedia says the war made him painfully aware of how little schooling he had and convinced him that education was the key to getting ahead. His school opened as the York Industrial Institute, later the York Agricultural and Industrial Institute. In 1925 the General Assembly appropriated $50,000 toward it. York, a Democrat, fought the county’s Republican officials over where to put it, and in 1927 they threatened to evict the school from its site. He went to the legislature and the national press, and the law was amended to put the state Department of Education in charge. [S1345]
The sources give different starting dates. The county government says York established the institute in 1924. [S1328] The National Register study says he began raising money in 1926, that Jamestown got the school in 1928, and that the first classes met in the old county poor house across the street from the campus under construction. [S1321] The encyclopedia’s county entry says the school built its modern campus on the edge of Jamestown in 1928, [S1317] and its York Institute entry says the school opened in 1929. [S1345] A park marker says the building opened in 1929 and was replaced by a newer one in 1979. [S1349]
Opening it did not end the fight. The encyclopedia says county officials refused to support the school, so York twice mortgaged his home to pay the teachers and bought school buses with his own money. In 1933 the state investigated charges that he was incompetent and negligent and had hired relatives and outsiders. It found no corruption, but it decided the state would run the school, with York as president emeritus. [S1345] A park marker says that family friend Susie Williams saved the York home from foreclosure. [S1347] The education marker [S1349] and the National Register study both date the state takeover to 1937. [S1321] The York Institute is still the only state-owned and state-run high school in Tennessee, and the original building is on the National Register. [S1345] In 1989 it received a National School of Excellence award. [S1317]
York put money from the movie of his life into a second school, the York Bible School, an interdenominational school for song leaders, Sunday school teachers and lay ministers built of local wood and stone. It ran for about a year before closing at the outbreak of World War II, a park marker says. [S1349]
Hollywood producer Jesse L. Lasky had wanted to film York’s story since he watched the hero’s welcome parade in New York. The encyclopedia says York announced that the film would tell his life story but would not be a war picture. Sergeant York reached theaters in July 1941, won Gary Cooper the Academy Award for Best Actor, and, as war spread in Europe, helped make the case for American involvement. York himself came around to supporting the first peacetime draft. [S1342] The film was not shot in Tennessee. [S1350] A park marker notes that its ending, in which the state of Tennessee gives the Yorks a new house, is not true. [S1347]
During World War II Gov. Prentice Cooper put York in charge of the Fentress County draft board and named him to the Tennessee Preparedness Committee. The army turned him down when he tried to reenlist, so he toured the country for the Signal Corps on bond tours, recruiting drives and camp inspections. [S1342] A park marker adds that he spent fewer than eight weeks at home during the war, hosted a weekly radio show, "Tennessee Americans," on the Mutual network, sometimes broadcast from the York Institute auditorium, and wrote a syndicated column, "Sergeant York Says." [S1344]
The postwar years were hard. York had a stroke in 1954 that left him bedridden. In 1951 the Internal Revenue Service accused him of tax evasion on his movie earnings, and he spent ten years fighting the claim, nearly destitute, until House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Rep. Joe L. Evins set up a relief fund and President John F. Kennedy ordered the matter settled in 1961. York died on September 2, 1964, and was buried with full military honors at the Wolf River Methodist Church cemetery. [S1342]
Fentress County also produced a very different kind of public figure. The encyclopedia says Kate Bradford Stockton was born in Stockton, California, in 1880, a descendant of Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford. Her family moved to Fentress County in 1884 when her father took a railroad job. She earned a teaching certificate at Overton Academy in Livingston, kept teaching after she married Joe Kelly Stockton in 1904 and raised four daughters, and spoke out early for birth control and women’s rights. [S1351] A state marker in Clarkrange says her childhood home, a two-story log house, stood 1,200 yards west of the marker. [S1352]
By 1920 Kate and Joe Stockton had both become Socialists. The encyclopedia says the labor activist Myles Horton boarded with them in the early 1920s while working for the YMCA. When Horton decided to open a cooperative school, the Stocktons offered him several hundred acres. He filed the charter for the Highlander School in Fentress County, though after one summer the school moved to Grundy County. In 1936 Stockton became the Socialist Party’s candidate for governor, the first woman to run for governor of Tennessee. With no paved roads in the county, she rode a horse ten miles into Cumberland County to catch the train to her speeches. She got 3,786 of 410,814 votes. In 1938 she joined Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary McLeod Bethune, Horton and others in Birmingham to organize the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. She died in 1969 and is buried in the Stockton cemetery. [S1351] The marker gives her death date as August 19, 1969. [S1352]
The mill on the Wolf River is older than York’s fame. A Tennessee State Parks marker says James Conley and William Rankin built it in 1880 as a turbine-driven, water-powered mill for grinding corn, one of the most sophisticated in Middle Tennessee. Farmers brought wagonloads of corn from miles around. York bought it in 1942 and owned it until he died, though his brothers and sons did most of the work. In 1967 his widow, Gracie, sold the mill to the state, the start of the state park. [S1353]
Tennessee State Parks says the rest of the park was added in 1984, after Gracie York’s death. The York farm and gristmill were listed on the National Register in 1973 as part of the Sergeant York Historic Area, and the farm became a National Historic Landmark on May 11, 1976. [S1332] A park marker says Gracie York lived in the house until she died in 1984 at 84, and that she sold the home and farm to the state as her husband had wished. [S1347] The National Register study says York’s 1922 house is a National Historic Landmark. [S1321]
The plateau’s forests were cut hard, then slowly put back. The encyclopedia says the Civilian Conservation Corps began reforesting the state’s cutover land in the 1930s. Between 1935 and 1940 the CCC created Scott State Forest, 3,182 acres in Scott and Fentress counties, and in 1933 it established Pickett State Forest next door in Pickett County. [S1354] The encyclopedia says Pickett State Park, in eastern Pickett County, is one of the most complete surviving CCC-designed landscapes in the state, [S1330] and Pickett CCC Memorial State Park now manages Colditz Cove in Fentress County. [S1322]
The Big South Fork was nearly a reservoir. The encyclopedia says the Army Corps of Engineers first proposed damming the river in 1933, and the Senate authorized dams several times in the 1950s and 1960s, but the House never agreed. Instead Congress created the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area in 1974, one of only three national rivers in the country, covering parts of Scott, Fentress, Pickett and Morgan counties in Tennessee and Wayne and McCreary counties in Kentucky. The Corps planned and built it, and the National Park Service manages it. The encyclopedia puts the protected area at 106,000 acres. [S1323] The Park Service says Congress authorized the park on March 7, 1974, as the first unit of the National Park System to be both a national river and a national recreation area. Its legislative boundary allows for 125,000 acres, of which about 116,000 are now federally owned. [S46]
The state has protected other gorges. Colditz Cove State Natural Area, 165 acres two miles east of Allardt, was designated in 1984. Its centerpiece is Northrup Falls, which the Division of Natural Areas says plunges more than 60 feet over a rock ledge into a narrow gorge on Big Branch Creek. It is named for the family who ran a mill above the falls in the 1800s. [S1322] The 1990 National Register study gives the drop as 54 feet. [S1321] Pogue Creek Canyon, 3,000 acres beside Pickett State Forest, was bought by the Nature Conservancy to protect it from development and sold to the state in 2006, when it became a state natural area. Pogue Creek flows into the Wolf River. [S1355]
Some of the county’s best-known traditions are newer. The encyclopedia says Highland Manor Winery, Tennessee’s first licensed winery, opened near Jamestown in 1980 and has run continuously since, under several owners. [S1356] Allardt holds a pumpkin festival every October. [S1317] Its organizers say the 35th annual Allardt Great Pumpkin Festival and Weigh-off was held on October 3, 2026, and that the biggest pumpkin weighed 1,752.4 pounds. [S1357]
The encyclopedia counted 16,625 people in 2000. [S1317] The 2020 census counted 18,489. [S1318] Jamestown had 1,959 people at the 2010 census and an estimated 2,135 in 2026. [S1319] The encyclopedia says tourism has become a major part of the economy since the Big South Fork was created, and that the York State Historic Area, with the York home, mill and grave, draws a steady stream of visitors. [S1317]
Most of Fentress County’s history sites lie near U.S. 127, the highway York helped build and that was later named for him. [S1348] A day might include:
Visit: Our Fentress County guide has towns, parks and local news, with hours in Central time.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1769 | Daniel and Squire Boone winter in a cave at Pall Mall [S1324] |
| c. 1796 | Coonrod Pile settles in the Wolf River valley [S1324] |
| 1823 | Fentress County created, November 28 [S1317] |
| 1826 | Oldest known grave in Wolf River Cemetery [S1325] |
| 1828 | First courthouse built at Jamestown [S1321] |
| 1832–35 | John M. Clemens is postmaster at Pall Mall [S1317] |
| 1849 | Part of the county goes to Scott County [S1321] |
| 1861 | Fight at Travisville, September 29 [S1324] |
| 1862 | Tinker Dave Beaty forms his Independent Scouts [S1333] |
| 1865 | Champ Ferguson hanged in Nashville, October 20 [S1334] |
| 1879 | Pickett County formed from Fentress and Overton [S38] |
| 1880 | York Grist Mill built on the Wolf River [S1353] |
| 1881 | Bruno Gernt lays out Allardt [S1317] |
| 1887 | Alvin C. York born at Pall Mall, December 13 [S1341] |
| 1898 | Stone county jail built in Jamestown [S1336] |
| 1903 | Wilder mine opens [S1321] |
| 1918 | York’s fight in the Argonne, October 8 [S1342] |
| 1919 | York marries Gracie Williams, June 7 [S1346] |
| 1925 | Legislature funds the York Institute [S1345] |
| 1929 | York Institute building opens [S1345] |
| 1930 | Oneida and Western Railroad reaches Jamestown [S1321] |
| 1932 | Wilder miners strike, July 9 [S1340] |
| 1933 | Union president Barney Graham killed, April 30 [S1340] |
| 1936 | Kate Bradford Stockton runs for governor [S1351] |
| 1941 | Sergeant York opens in theaters, July [S1342] |
| 1951 | Horse Pound, the area’s last mine, closes, June 1 [S1340] |
| 1964 | Alvin C. York dies, September 2 [S1342] |
| 1967 | State buys the York Grist Mill [S1353] |
| 1974 | Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area authorized, March 7 [S46] |
| 1976 | York farm named a National Historic Landmark, May 11 [S1332] |
| 1980 | Highland Manor Winery opens near Jamestown [S1356] |
| 1984 | Colditz Cove State Natural Area designated; York home and farm join the state park [S1322][S1332] |
| 2006 | Pogue Creek Canyon becomes a state natural area [S1355] |
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 was carved in 1823 from Overton and Morgan counties (the Tennessee Encyclopedia and the 1990 National Register study of the county), from Morgan and White (the Tennessee State Library and Archives, citing the 1823 act), or from Morgan, Overton and White (the Tennessee Blue Book and the county government); whether Jamestown dates from 1823 (the city and the National Register study) or 1828 (the encyclopedia), and whether it was incorporated in 1837 (the National Register study) or by a 1920 act (UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service, which may reflect a later reincorporation); whether Pickett County was taken from Fentress in 1879 (the Blue Book, a state marker, the encyclopedia’s Pickett County entry and the National Register study) or 1881 (the encyclopedia’s Fentress County entry); whether Tinker Dave Beaty died in 1883 (the encyclopedia) or 1876 (a Civil War Trails marker), and how his name is spelled (Beaty or Beatty); whether Alvin York’s religious conversion came in 1914 (the encyclopedia’s York entry) or 1915 (a state park marker and the encyclopedia’s World War I entry); whether York acted single-handedly at the Argonne (Tennessee State Parks, a state marker and the encyclopedia’s World War I entry, which says he "purportedly" killed 25 Germans and silenced 35 machine guns) or, as the encyclopedia’s York entry stresses, never claimed he acted alone; whether the York Institute dates from 1924 (the county government), 1925 (when the legislature funded it), 1926 (when York’s fund drive began), 1928 (the National Register study and the encyclopedia’s county entry) or 1929 (when its building opened, per the encyclopedia’s York Institute entry and a state marker), and whether the state took it over after a 1933 investigation (the encyclopedia) or in 1937 (a state marker and the National Register study); whether the third courthouse dates from 1901 (the National Register study and the old jail’s nomination) or after the 1905 fire (the state library, and a 1905 act that let the county sell $15,000 in courthouse bonds); whether Northrup Falls drops more than 60 feet (the state Division of Natural Areas) or 54 feet (the National Register study); whether the Big South Fork protects 106,000 acres (the encyclopedia) or up to 125,000 acres, about 116,000 of them now federally owned (the National Park Service); and whether the first United Mine Workers local at Wilder dates from 1919 (the encyclopedia) or 1918–19 (the National Register study). We also note that the county’s two legislators voted for secession in 1861, according to the county government, although the encyclopedia says most people in the Big South Fork country were loyal to the Union; that the film Sergeant York was not shot in Tennessee; and that the Tinker Dave Beaty marker, which stood at an Interstate 40 rest area in Cumberland County, is reported removed. We don’t republish encyclopedia, museum or marker text — follow the links for the full articles.
Hero art: our AI-assisted illustration of the Sgt. Alvin C. York Grist Mill on the Wolf River at Pall Mall, reused from our Fentress County guide. It was redrawn by My East TN with reference to Creative Commons photographs on Wikimedia Commons by Jerrye and Roy Klotz, MD (CC BY-SA 3.0), and Brian Stansberry (CC BY 3.0); it is not a photograph, and no endorsement by Tennessee State Parks, the photographers or any source on this page is implied. Reused source numbers (S38, S46, S1279) match the same sources on our other history pages. Corrections: [email protected].