East Tennessee History · County by county
A Nolichucky valley county named for a Revolutionary general: Greeneville as the capital of the State of Franklin, two Presbyterian colleges that became Tusculum, an antislavery newspaper, the tailor who became the seventeenth president and the people he held in slavery, the state’s largest Union meeting of 1861, the Lick Creek bridge burners, John Hunt Morgan’s last morning, burley warehouses, a milk plant and a television town, and a dam that held in Helene’s flood.
Greene County lies in the Great Valley in the northeast corner of Tennessee, with Bays Mountain and Lick Creek on its north side; to the east, in the Tennessee Encyclopedia’s words, "the Unaka, or Great Smoky, Mountains" slope down to the Nolichucky River. [S860] North Carolina created the county in 1783 out of Washington County and named it for General Nathanael Greene. [S38][S861] Its seat, Greeneville, was the capital of the would-be State of Franklin in the 1780s, the home of two of the oldest colleges in the West, and for half a century the hometown of Andrew Johnson, the tailor who became the seventeenth president. [S860][S6][S16]
The county also gave the region one of its first antislavery newspapers, the largest Union meeting in Tennessee before the Civil War, and some of the war’s harshest episodes: hangings of local bridge burners, a battle at Blue Springs, a Confederate winter camp, and the death of John Hunt Morgan in a Greeneville garden. [S862][S860][S863][S864] In the twentieth century burley tobacco, a Pet Milk plant and Magnavox’s television factories built the modern town, while the Cherokee National Forest took in mountain land a few miles from Greeneville. [S860][S865][S203][S866] The 2020 census counted 70,152 people in the county. [S867]
Limestone weathered into rich soil gives Greene County its valley farmland, and the county’s creeks, game and river bottoms drew Native people long before Europeans arrived. The Camp Creek site on the Nolichucky documents life there in the Woodland period. [S860] Later trails crossed the valley too: Greeneville grew up where two Indian trails met at the Big Spring, which made a natural stopping place for travelers. [S868] When John Carter came from Surry County, North Carolina, in 1783, the state marker at Carter’s Station says he found an Indian fortified village there and made peace before setting up a camp for settlers. [S869]
The Cherokee claim to this country did not end with the first cabins. In 1785, at Hopewell in South Carolina, Cherokee leaders and American commissioners drew a treaty line north of Greeneville itself, one of the conflicts that kept the frontier at war through the decade. [S6]
Settlement began about 1772, when Jacob Brown and a couple of families from North Carolina camped on the Nolichucky, the first settlers in its valley. In 1775 Brown leased a large tract from the Cherokees, later titled to him as part of North Carolina’s Washington District. [S860] Near what is now Afton, Anthony Moore settled on Sinking Creek in 1778, and Daniel Kennedy arrived in 1779; Kennedy fought at King’s Mountain and became Greene County’s first court clerk. A fort for settlers, later Henderson’s Mill, stood nearby. [S870]
Henry Earnest, a Swiss immigrant, set up Elmwood Farm on the Nolichucky in 1777; the Tennessee Encyclopedia calls it the oldest Tennessee Century Farm. [S860] Born Heinrich Ernst in the canton of Zürich, he had come to America as a boy in 1743 and lived in Virginia and North Carolina before reaching the Nolichucky in the spring of 1777. He claimed 645 acres in 1778. [S871] An older state marker gives a different date, saying the Earnest family settled there in 1779. [S872]
The Earnests’ three-story stone and log house, built between 1779 and 1784, is one of the oldest buildings in Tennessee. It has long been called the Earnest Fort House, but the architectural historian Robbie D. Jones writes that there is no evidence it ever served as a fort. Its basement held a kitchen and workspace for enslaved people, and later generations of the family used slave labor to raise wheat, oats and corn on the farm. [S871]
David Crockett was born in Greene County on August 17, 1786. [S743] A state marker says a flat limestone slab, said to be the doorstone of the family’s first cabin, marks the spot. [S873] Another marker says the Crocketts lived near the birthplace, by Fort Lee on the Nolichucky, before moving to a 1780 claim of John Crockett’s about 1792–1794. Late in 1794 they moved 16 miles to Cove Creek, where a flood washed out John Crockett’s newly finished mill. [S874]
So many settlers arrived between 1778 and 1783 that residents wanted a government closer to home. Daniel Kennedy and Waightstill Avery worked to get one, and in 1783 North Carolina established Greene County, named for General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, under whom many of the settlers had fought in the Revolution. [S860] The Blue Book records the county as created in 1783 from Washington County. [S38] A state marker on the Hawkins County line sums up Greene’s war: he fought at Trenton, the Brandywine and Germantown, served at Valley Forge, became quartermaster general, and then commanded the army in the South. [S861]
Greene was soon a parent county itself. Jefferson and Knox counties were both created in 1792 partly from Greene. [S38] The record is less clear on Hamblen: the Blue Book lists Greene among the counties Hamblen was formed from in 1870, while the Tennessee Encyclopedia names Jefferson, Grainger and Hawkins. [S38][S561]
The new county’s first court met at the house of Robert Kerr in Greeneville, the same house where the upper house of the State of Franklin later held sessions. [S875]
In 1784, after North Carolina offered its western lands to Congress, settlers frustrated with their distant government met at Jonesborough and voted unanimously for statehood. When a new legislature took the offer back, a December 1784 convention went ahead anyway and named the new state Franklin. A second convention, in November 1785, drafted a permanent constitution. [S6] That 1785 convention was held at Greeneville, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia’s county entry says the split there led to Franklin’s end. [S860]
A replica on College Street stands for the building that is "believed" to have served as Franklin’s capitol from 1785 until 1788. It first stood near Main and Depot streets. According to the state marker, the arguments at its conventions produced the first political pamphlets printed west of the Appalachians. The chief writers were three Presbyterian ministers: Samuel Houston, William Graham and Hezekiah Balch. The Franklin legislature also met there and passed laws to tax, raise a militia, set up courts and open a land office, all in defiance of North Carolina. [S876] The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s entry on Franklin calls Greeneville "the capital of Franklin" in 1785. [S6]
Those dates are narrower than the movement itself. Franklin is usually dated 1784–1789, from the Jonesborough meeting to the collapse of the movement. By early 1789 North Carolina was winning former Franklinites back, and it let John Sevier take a seat in its legislature as the representative from Greene County. [S6]
Greeneville’s founders were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, and according to the state marker they made the Big Spring the reason for the town in 1783. Samuel Doak had already preached to settlers at the spring as early as 1780. [S868] The congregation he began there under the trees was first called Mount Bethel. Hezekiah Balch became its first settled pastor in 1783, and fifteen years later it took the name Harmony. Its present building, now First Presbyterian Church, dates from 1848 and was restored after a 1928 fire. [S877] The Old Harmony Graveyard, opened in 1791, holds Balch, the college president Charles Coffin, William Dickson, Valentine Sevier and others of the founding generation. [S878]
Greeneville was incorporated by an act of 1795, with an incorporation date of December 1, 1795. [S879] Valentine Sevier’s house of about 1795, later owned by Andrew Johnson, is the oldest house still standing in town. [S880] Greene County has kept a jail on the same lot since 1806. The first log jail, with its stocks, dated from 1794. A later jail was built with the labor of enslaved people, and in 1882 its limestone and wrought iron went into the present stone jail. [S881]
Methodism took root early in the county too. The Ebenezer society on the Nolichucky grew out of the Earnest settlement, and Bishop Francis Asbury preached there. Western Conferences of the church met at Ebenezer from 1795. [S882] The founding date depends on the source. The older state marker says an "early Methodist society" was organized there in 1790, with the Earnest family making up four-fifths of its members. [S872] Its replacement says the society formed in 1792 with 31 members and calls it the second-oldest Methodist congregation in Tennessee. [S882] The Tennessee Encyclopedia gives 1792 and ties Ebenezer to the founding of Methodism in Tennessee. It also records an early Quaker meeting at New Hope, near Ripley Creek, in 1795. [S860] The Ebenezer cemetery holds pioneers, Revolutionary War soldiers and enslaved people. [S882] In 1797, land on Lick Creek was deeded for a Methodist meeting house that became known as the "Old Brick Church"; it stood until a fire about 1880. [S883]
Presbyterian ministers ran most of the county’s early schooling. [S860] Hezekiah Balch and Charles Coffin founded Greeneville College, chartered in 1794 by the legislature of the Southwest Territory. [S884] Its first degree went to Hugh Brown in 1808. [S885] Coffin built up a library of about 2,000 volumes before leaving to lead East Tennessee College, the forerunner of the University of Tennessee. Tusculum still had 1,467 of those books when the collection was retired from circulation in 1910; the oldest is an incunabulum printed in 1487. [S884] One early student was John Gloucester, a formerly enslaved man freed in Blount County in 1807. He was educated at Greeneville College, became a Presbyterian missionary in 1809, and was the first African American ordained as a Presbyterian minister. [S886]
In 1818 Samuel Witherspoon Doak opened Tusculum Academy near Greeneville, and his father, Samuel Doak, came to teach with him. [S887][S888] The elder Doak had already founded the region’s first chartered school in Washington County. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says it was chartered as St. Martin’s Academy in 1783, while Tusculum’s own timeline gives 1784; it became Washington College in 1795. [S888][S885] The younger Doak’s brick house, now the Doak House Museum, went up about 1830, and the academy was renamed Tusculum College in 1844. [S885] The two family sources do not agree on when the elder Doak died. The state marker at the house says he lived there until his death in 1829, while the Tennessee Encyclopedia gives December 12, 1830. [S889][S888]
Both Greeneville schools claim to be firsts. A 1926 Daughters of the American Revolution tablet calls Greeneville College the "first institution of higher learning west of the Allegheny Mountains," chartered September 3, 1794. [S890] The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s Tusculum entry dates the charter September 9, 1794, and calls Tusculum the oldest college in Tennessee. [S884] Its county entry also calls Greeneville College "the first college west of the Alleghenies," while noting that Doak’s Washington County academy had been chartered a decade earlier. [S860] We print each claim as its source makes it.
The two colleges merged in 1868 as Greeneville and Tusculum College. [S887][S885] The school was among the earliest in the region to admit women, though the date varies: the Tennessee Encyclopedia gives 1872, Tusculum’s timeline 1875. [S884][S885] Gifts from Nettie Fowler McCormick, the widow of the reaper inventor Cyrus McCormick, paid for McCormick Hall in 1887. In 1901 the college built Virginia Hall, designed by the architect Louis Sullivan and named for the McCormicks’ daughter. [S885][S884] A merger with Washington College in 1908 lasted until 1912. On July 1, 2018, the school became Tusculum University. [S885]
Early Greene County made more than crops. On Furnace Creek, the Bright Hope Iron Works, built about 1830, mined and smelted ore and made cast and wrought iron. A paper mill and a pottery grew up beside it. The state marker says the works probably failed in the Panic of 1837, but they left the place names Furnace Creek and Ore Bank behind. [S891] The Quaker Embree family, who had prospered in Greene County’s iron trade, produced Elihu Embree, who published the Emancipator at Jonesborough in 1820. The Tennessee Encyclopedia calls it the first newspaper in the United States devoted entirely to abolition. [S892]
After Embree died, Tennessee abolitionists recruited the Quaker editor Benjamin Lundy to carry on. Lundy bought Embree’s printing equipment and moved to Greeneville, where he published the monthly Genius of Universal Emancipation and a second paper, a weekly that covered farm prices and political news. He sent the Genius into more than twenty-one states. In Greeneville he also became president of the local branch of the Tennessee Manumission Society, and in 1824 he moved the paper to Baltimore. [S862][S893] The dates shift slightly between sources. The state marker and the Tennessee Encyclopedia’s Lundy entry give 1822–1824. The encyclopedia’s publishing entry has Lundy bringing the paper in 1821 and Embree dying in December 1820, while its Emancipator entry puts the last issue on October 31, 1820. [S893][S862][S894][S892]
The town also held a small free Black community. Ellen "Nelly" VanVactor was born enslaved in Virginia in 1780 and came to Greeneville in 1818. She had been freed by 1822, when she inherited the estate of Benjamin VanVactor, whose house she kept. She bought her first town lot the next year and owned six by 1837, which made her one of the first free women of color to own real estate in Greeneville. Her son, Alfred VanVactor Thompson, born free in 1818, learned tailoring from Andrew Johnson, went to Liberia in 1842, and later became a tailor in Ohio. [S895]
Andrew Johnson was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, on December 29, 1808, and apprenticed to a tailor as a boy. After running away and wandering as far as Columbia, Tennessee, he brought his mother and stepfather over the mountains to Greeneville in September 1826. In the spring of 1827 he married Eliza McCardle; he was eighteen and she was sixteen. [S16][S896] He set up his tailor shop across the street from where his statue now stands. [S897]
Johnson was elected alderman two years later and became mayor in 1834. [S16] From Greeneville he rose to the state house in 1835, lost in 1837, won the seat back in 1839, and went to the state senate in 1841. He then spent ten years in Congress, from 1843 to 1853, where he pushed his Homestead Bill, before being elected governor in 1853 and reelected in 1855. The legislature sent him to the U.S. Senate in 1857. [S16] As governor he proposed a school tax that passed in 1854. [S898]
The family lived in a two-story brick house in town until 1851. The National Park Service says they moved in "some time in the 1830s," and the state’s highway marker gives 1838. [S899][S900] In September 1851 Johnson bought the larger house on Main Street that became the Homestead, his home for the rest of his life. [S901] He gave money toward Tusculum’s Old College, built in 1841, which now houses the President Andrew Johnson Museum and Library. [S902][S884] Greeneville’s Cumberland Presbyterian congregation built its church in 1860 on land bought from Johnson. [S903]
Johnson’s tailoring paid for a growing household and, by the 1840s, for enslaved people.
Johnson bought his first enslaved person in 1842, while he was a state senator. A bill of sale shows he paid $541 on November 29, 1842, for Sam, a boy "about thirteen." On January 3, 1843, he paid $500 for Sam’s half-sister Dolly, described as "about nineteen." In 1857 he bought a third youth, Henry. [S904] A National Park Service marker at the early home tells Dolly’s purchase differently. It says Johnson bought her first, in 1842, when she was fourteen and about to be sold at auction, and that according to her son William she asked Johnson to buy her. On this account her brother Sam, aged twelve, was bought after her. [S905] The Park Service’s own history page follows the bills of sale.
Sam was hired out around town for wages that went to Johnson. Dolly had three children; her son William’s death certificate names Johnson’s son Robert as his father. [S904] William later remembered rising at four in the morning to make fires, shine Johnson’s boots and wash the dishes. [S905] According to family lore, Johnson freed his personal slaves on August 8, 1863, and they stayed on as paid servants. [S904] In 1864, as military governor, he proclaimed freedom for enslaved people across Tennessee. [S905]
After the war Sam Johnson became a commissioner for the Freedmen’s Bureau. In 1867 he wrote to the president asking to buy land west of town for a school for Black children; Johnson replied that he would have a lot surveyed and convey it without charge. [S904] The state marker on his education record notes that Johnson gave land in Greeneville for a church and a freedmen’s school. [S898] In 1871 Sam was "officer of the day" at a Greeneville celebration of August 8, and the former president rode out to speak. The day spread as an Emancipation Day across Tennessee and neighboring states, and in 2007 a state law recognized it. [S906] Dolly later opened a bakery in the old tailor shop; a Greeneville paper noted it in March 1881. [S904]
Greene County was strongly Unionist. [S860] A Civil War Trails marker at the David Crockett Birthplace State Park says the county had "a long history of abolitionist sentiment" behind that loyalty. [S907] After Tennessee voted to leave the Union in June 1861, delegates from every East Tennessee county except Rhea met in Greeneville on June 17 and sat for four days. Their leaders included Thomas A. R. Nelson, William G. Brownlow, Horace Maynard, William B. Carter and Andrew Johnson. [S14] The Tennessee Encyclopedia calls it the state’s largest and most important pro-Union meeting in the weeks before the war. [S860] The convention resolved that it wanted peace, and above all that East Tennessee "shall not be involved in civil war," and it asked the legislature to let the eastern counties form a separate state. The legislature refused, and Confederate General Felix Zollicoffer arrived with about 4,000 troops to hold the region. [S907][S14]
The war split households and campuses alike. At Tusculum, secessionist students burned Johnson in effigy and raised a Confederate flag over Old College. Classes were suspended, and both armies later camped in and around the building. [S902]
That fall a Unionist minister, William Blount Carter, planned to burn every major railroad bridge in East Tennessee in a single night. Lincoln approved and promised that Union troops would protect the families involved. [S15][S908] Captain David Fry came from Kentucky with orders. On the night of November 8, 1861, men from the Pottertown community gathered at the home of the potter Jacob Harmon Jr. and were sworn into Company F, 2nd Tennessee Infantry (U.S.). Between forty and sixty of them captured the Confederate guards at the Lick Creek railroad bridge, burned it, and let the guards go. [S15][S908] A Civil War Trails marker in Greeneville dates the bridge burnings to November 9, 1861. [S909]
The promised army did not come. Confederate authorities captured five men and hanged them. Henry Fry and Jacob M. Hinshaw were hanged at Greeneville on November 30 from an oak near the depot, and their bodies were left hanging into the next afternoon. Christopher Alexander Haun died at Knoxville on December 11, and Jacob Harmon Jr. and his son Henry on December 17. [S910][S909][S863] The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s entry on Haun groups Hinshaw with the men court-martialed and hanged after a Knoxville trial and does not name Fry. [S15] A sixth prisoner was spared, but the sources disagree on his name and the reason. The encyclopedia and the Pottertown marker say Harrison Self was pardoned or had his sentence commuted by Jefferson Davis. The Greeneville marker calls him Hugh Self and says his death sentence was commuted because he was sixteen. [S15][S908][S909]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia counts Haun among southern Appalachia’s most significant antebellum potters, known for his multicolored earthenware. He is buried near the bridge site on Pottertown Road. [S15] The Pottertown monument says the five executions left nearly twenty children without fathers. [S910]
Fighting returned in 1863 as Union forces pushed into East Tennessee. At Limestone on September 8, Confederate troops drove the 100th Ohio back to the Nolichucky, and a local man, Nicholas Earnest, ferried 35 Union soldiers across the river to escape capture. [S907] On October 10, General Ambrose Burnside’s Union troops attacked Confederate General John S. Williams’s men at Blue Springs, near present-day Mosheim. The state marker says Williams had 1,700 men, lost 66 killed and wounded and 150 taken prisoner, and that it was the last major battle in upper East Tennessee. [S864] The Civil War Trails markers describe the Union infantry attack beginning at 5 p.m. and the Confederates slipping away after dark. A second, smaller fight was fought on the same ground on August 23, 1864. [S911][S912] The Blue Springs Lutheran church, founded by the county’s German settlers before 1811, served as a hospital, and its cemetery became a burial ground; it holds 32 known Civil War soldiers’ graves. [S913]
After his failed attack on Knoxville in November 1863, Confederate General James Longstreet spent the winter in the county. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says he placed his troops in winter quarters at Greeneville. [S860] The Civil War Trails marker at Town Hall tells it in stages: Longstreet’s 20,000-man corps camped about 25 miles west late in December, then moved to the Lick Creek valley about ten miles west of town. On February 28, 1864, he moved his headquarters into the Greeneville house of Samuel Milligan, a Unionist judge. His men foraged through a bitterly cold winter and skirmished with Union patrols before rejoining Robert E. Lee in Virginia in mid-April. [S914]
Greeneville’s best-known house of the war was the Dickson-Williams Mansion, built in 1815–21 by William Dickson, the town’s first postmaster, for his daughter Catharine Williams. [S915] Catharine Williams was famous as a hostess. During the war she entertained officers of both armies and would not say which side she favored, while her sons served in both. [S916]
Early on September 4, 1864, Union cavalry raided the town to capture the Confederate raider John Hunt Morgan, who was staying at the mansion. According to the Civil War Trails marker, Lieutenant Colonel William H. Ingerton’s 13th Tennessee Cavalry (U.S.) surrounded the house. Morgan ran out, hid with his staff under St. James Episcopal Church, and then made for the grape arbors near the stables. There Private Andrew J. Campbell ordered him to halt and shot him when he did not. [S917] The state marker says the raiders came "just after dawn." The older memorial at the courthouse says Morgan was "surprised at night," and the Civil War Trails panel at the Crockett birthplace park gives the date as September 8, while every other source here gives September 4. [S918][S919][S907] The accounts also place the death in slightly different spots: the state marker says Morgan was killed in the mansion garden, while the trail marker says he fell a few hundred yards away. [S915][S916]
Union General Alvan C. Gillem returned the body to the mansion. There Catharine and Lucy Williams and their enslaved servants, including Minerva Clem, dressed Morgan in a clean uniform and laid him in a walnut coffin. [S916] The Cumberland Presbyterian church across the street was shelled that day. [S903] A Union soldiers’ monument association later raised a Greeneville monument to the county’s Union men with the line "In the hour of their country’s peril they were loyal and true." [S920]
Johnson became vice president in March 1865 and president on the morning after Lincoln’s assassination in April. He vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau and Civil Rights bills, was impeached in 1868, and was acquitted by the Senate that May. [S16] He returned to Greeneville in 1869, and the second story of the Homestead’s ell was added in 1868–69 to prepare for him. [S901] He lost a Senate race in 1869 and a House race in 1872, then won a Senate seat in January 1875. He died of a stroke on July 31, 1875. [S16]
Johnson bought the hilltop in 1852. Family tradition says he liked its view, and he told Sam he wanted to be buried there. [S921][S922] Soldiers had used it for signaling during the war, which gave it the name Signal Hill. Johnson was buried at its crest on August 3, 1875, with Masonic rites, and the family raised the marble obelisk in 1878, after which it became Monument Hill. [S922] Eliza Johnson was buried beside him six months later. [S921]
Johnson’s daughter Martha Johnson Patterson asked in her will that the hill become a resting place for veterans. The family owned the cemetery until 1906, when the War Department took it over as a national cemetery; the first veteran was buried there in 1909. [S922][S923] The State of Tennessee bought the tailor shop in 1921 and later enclosed it in a brick memorial building. [S924][S925] Johnson’s great-granddaughter Margaret Johnson Patterson Bartlett lobbied Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and senators to save the Homestead. [S925][S922]
Congress authorized an Andrew Johnson National Monument in 1935. A presidential proclamation established it on April 27, 1942, and Congress acted on the site again in 1963; today it is the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site. [S926] The National Park Service took over the cemetery in 1942. It stayed an active national cemetery, one of only two in the park system, until 2019, by which time more than 2,000 headstones stood there. [S922] The park takes in the tailor shop, the early home, the Homestead and the cemetery. [S924]
Freedom brought new schools for Black children. In 1887 the George Clem School began as Greeneville College, organized with help from the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The town’s school board leased it in 1932 for public schooling and bought it in 1939, when it took George Clem’s name. It closed in 1965, when Greeneville’s schools desegregated. [S927] In the north of the county, the crossroads village of Laurel Gap was renamed Baileyton in 1892 and incorporated in 1915. Oakland Seminary had been chartered there in 1883. [S928][S929]
The railroad had reached the county before the war. The last rail of the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad was laid at Bulls Gap, a pass in Bays Mountain, on May 14, 1858, according to a state marker that has since gone missing. [S873] Burley tobacco became the crop that brought prosperity in the late nineteenth century, and Greeneville became the region’s most important tobacco market. Its Victorian business blocks went up while it was an important stop on the Southern Railway. [S860] A downtown mural recalls warehouses "on every corner" and the Austin Company, which led the state and region in processing and selling burley and traded with seventy countries in the 1960s. [S930] The University of Tennessee runs a burley tobacco experiment farm outside town. [S860]
Greeneville’s railroad hotel has two different birth stories. The Tennessee Encyclopedia credits the Brumley Hotel to the entrepreneur John H. Doughty in 1884. [S860] The state marker on the building says it was built as the Grand Central between 1887 and 1890 and ran as the Hotel Brumley from 1908 to 1981. Both agree it was restored and reopened, as the General Morgan Inn in 1996 by the marker’s account. [S931][S860]
A northeastern division of the federal court for East Tennessee was set up in 1900, and Greeneville won the courthouse in a political trade-off with Johnson City, which got the veterans’ home. The building was finished in 1904. [S932] A state marker at Chuckey honors the engineer Edward C. Huffaker, who found in glider experiments of 1890–92 how a curved wing creates lift, and who worked with Octave Chanute at Chuckey. [S933] In 1923 E. A. Bible had a covered bridge built over Little Chuckey Creek; it was deeded to the county in 1948 and restored in 2004. [S934]
Mountain land a few miles from Greeneville is now part of the Cherokee National Forest. [S866] The Weeks Act of 1911 let the federal government buy cutover land for national forests. Purchases began in 1912, and in 1936 President Franklin Roosevelt combined the Tennessee parts of the Unaka, Cherokee and Pisgah forests into the Cherokee National Forest, the only national forest in the state. [S203] The Civilian Conservation Corps replanted the slopes and built recreation areas. [S203][S938] At Horse Creek, about eight miles from Greeneville, CCC Company 1455 of Camp Cordell Hull built a rustic picnic pavilion and swimming area in the 1930s. The Forest Service says the pavilion is now closed indefinitely because of damage. [S866]
The Tennessee Eastern Electric Company built Nolichucky Dam and its powerhouse in 1913, forming Davy Crockett Lake. TVA has maintained the reservoir since 1945. It stopped making power there in 1972 because silt had filled the lake, and the area became a wildlife management area. [S939]
In late September 2024 the flood from Hurricane Helene came down the Nolichucky. Early on September 28, the state emergency agency reported that TVA had warned of an imminent breach of the dam that would affect Cocke, Greene and Hamblen counties, and Greene County told some communities to evacuate. [S940] The dam held. TVA later reported that 1.3 million gallons a second had flowed over it, that it had not failed and was stable, and that the damaged old powerhouse, out of service since 1972, had been removed. [S941] The flood wrecked David Crockett Birthplace State Park, a state park since 1973, which has been closed since September 2024. In 2026 the General Assembly approved $61.75 million for the first phase of rebuilding it. [S942]
The county’s four towns are Greeneville, the seat (incorporated 1795); Tusculum (1959); Mosheim (1974); and Baileyton (1915). [S879][S943][S944][S929][S867] The population grew from 62,909 in 2000 to 68,831 in 2010 and 70,152 in 2020. [S860][S867] The Greene County Heritage Trust, founded in 1973, counts more than 36 state historical markers in the county and is raising money to restore the weathered ones. [S873]
Visit: Our Greene County guide has towns, parks and local news.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| Woodland period | Native people live at the Camp Creek site on the Nolichucky [S860] |
| c. 1772 | Jacob Brown settles on the Nolichucky; leases land from the Cherokees in 1775 [S860] |
| 1777 / 1779 | Henry Earnest settles on the Nolichucky (sources differ) [S871][S872] |
| 1780 | Samuel Doak preaches at the Big Spring [S868] |
| 1783 | North Carolina creates Greene County; Greeneville founded at the Big Spring [S38][S868] |
| 1784–85 | Franklin declared; its November 1785 convention meets at Greeneville [S6][S860] |
| 1785–1788 | Greeneville building believed used as Franklin’s capitol [S876] |
| Aug. 17, 1786 | David Crockett born in Greene County [S743] |
| 1790 / 1792 | Ebenezer Methodist society organized (sources differ) [S872][S882] |
| 1794 | Greeneville College chartered [S884][S890] |
| 1795 | Greeneville incorporated; New Hope Quaker meeting [S879][S860] |
| 1818 | Tusculum Academy founded [S887] |
| 1822–1824 | Benjamin Lundy publishes the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Greeneville [S893] |
| 1826–27 | Andrew Johnson arrives and marries Eliza McCardle [S16] |
| 1834 | Johnson becomes mayor of Greeneville [S16] |
| 1842–43 | Johnson buys Sam and Dolly [S904] |
| 1858 | Last rail of the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad laid at Bulls Gap [S873] |
| June 17–20, 1861 | East Tennessee Union convention meets at Greeneville [S14] |
| Nov. 1861 | Lick Creek bridge burned; Fry and Hinshaw hanged at Greeneville [S15][S863] |
| Aug. 8, 1863 | By family tradition, Johnson frees his slaves [S904] |
| Oct. 10, 1863 | Battle of Blue Springs [S864] |
| 1863–64 | Longstreet’s corps winters in the county [S914] |
| Sept. 4, 1864 | John Hunt Morgan killed in Greeneville [S917] |
| 1868 | Greeneville and Tusculum colleges merge [S887] |
| 1871 | August 8 Emancipation Day celebration in Greeneville [S906] |
| 1875 | Johnson dies (July 31); buried on Signal Hill [S16][S922] |
| 1887 | George Clem School begins as Greeneville College [S927] |
| 1901 | Louis Sullivan’s Virginia Hall built at Tusculum [S885] |
| 1906 | Johnson burial ground becomes a national cemetery [S922] |
| 1913 | Nolichucky Dam built [S939] |
| 1928 | Pet Milk plant opens [S860] |
| 1936 | Cherokee National Forest formed in its present shape [S203] |
| 1942 | Andrew Johnson National Monument established [S926] |
| 1947 | Magnavox opens its Greeneville plant [S936] |
| 1965 | George Clem School closes as schools desegregate [S927] |
| 1972 | TVA stops power generation at Nolichucky Dam [S939] |
| 2005 | Last American-made television built in Greeneville [S936] |
| 2018 | Tusculum becomes a university [S885] |
| 2020 | Census counts 70,152 people [S867] |
| Sept. 2024 | Helene floods the Nolichucky; the dam holds [S940][S941] |
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 Henry Earnest reached the Nolichucky in 1777 (Tennessee Encyclopedia, SAH Archipedia) or 1779 (older state marker), when the Earnest Fort House was built (1779–1784) and whether it was ever a fort; whether the Ebenezer Methodist society dates from 1790 or 1792; how long Greeneville served Franklin (a capitol ’believed’ used 1785–1788) against the movement’s 1784–1789 span; whether Samuel Doak’s first academy was chartered in 1783 or 1784; which school was the first college ’west of the Alleghenies’ (Greeneville College, chartered 1794, or Doak’s earlier Washington County academy), whether that charter is dated September 3 or September 9, 1794, and whether Tusculum first admitted women in 1872 or 1875; whether the elder Doak died in 1829 or 1830; whether Benjamin Lundy brought his paper to Greeneville in 1821 or 1822, and whether Elihu Embree died in October or December 1820; whether Andrew Johnson lived in his early home from 1838 or ’some time in the 1830s’; whether Dolly was 14 or about 19 when Johnson bought her, and whether he bought her before or after her brother Sam; the date the Lick Creek bridge burned (November 8 or 9, 1861), where Jacob Hinshaw was hanged, and whether the youngest prisoner was Harrison or Hugh Self and was pardoned by Jefferson Davis or spared for his age; whether Longstreet wintered ’at Greeneville’ or camped to the west and moved headquarters into town in February 1864; whether John Hunt Morgan died at night, at dawn or on September 8 rather than September 4, 1864, and whether in the Williams garden or a few hundred yards away; whether Hamblen County was cut partly from Greene (Blue Book) or not (Tennessee Encyclopedia); whether Greeneville’s grand railroad hotel was built by John H. Doughty in 1884 or as the Grand Central in 1887–1890; and whether Magnavox’s Greeneville story ended with a 1996 closure or with the last television made there in 2005. We don’t republish encyclopedia, museum or marker text — follow the links for the full articles.
Hero photo: the Andrew Johnson monument on Monument Hill, Andrew Johnson National Cemetery, Greeneville. National Park Service photograph, 2007 (public domain), color-graded and cropped by My East TN; it is the same banner used on our Greene County guide. It is not an official NPS image and no endorsement is implied. Reused source numbers (S6, S14, S15, S16, S38, S203, S561, S743) match the same sources on our other history pages. Corrections: [email protected].