East Tennessee History · County by county
One of Tennessee’s smallest counties, made in 1870 around a railroad town: pioneer grants on the Bend of Chucky, a stage road lined with taverns where young David Crockett grew up, a Confederate army wintering at Russellville, a college for Black students founded on the site of a slave market, a branch line nicknamed the Peavine, furniture and textile mills, a TVA lake on the north shore and a downtown that built its sidewalks one story up.
Hamblen County sits in the Great Valley of East Tennessee between the Holston River on the north and the Nolichucky River on the south. The Tennessee Encyclopedia ranks it the third smallest of Tennessee’s 95 counties by area. [S561] The legislature created it in 1870, and Morristown became the county seat. [S561][S567][S569] The county takes its name from Hezekiah Hamblen, a Hawkins County lawyer, and the encyclopedia says the choice came "after much controversy." [S561][S38]
Long before there was a county, two old routes crossed here. One was a north–south trail toward the Clinch River and Kentucky, and the other was the east–west stage road between Abingdon, Virginia, and Knoxville. [S570][S588] Settlers took up land on the Bend of Chucky in 1783, and the Morris brothers gave Morristown its name. [S561][S582] John Crockett kept a tavern on the stage road, and his son David Crockett spent part of his boyhood there. [S593][S594]
The East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad reached Morristown in the 1850s, crossing the old road to Cumberland Gap there. [S566][S570][S580] In the Civil War the town leaned Confederate even though much of East Tennessee did not. Confederate General James Longstreet spent the winter of 1863–64 at Russellville, and armies fought in Morristown’s streets in 1864. [S580][S597][S598] After the war came the new county, a Second Empire courthouse in 1874, Morristown College for Black students in 1881, a branch railroad called the Peavine, and mills that made Morristown a furniture center. [S581][S562][S570] In the twentieth century TVA’s Cherokee Lake filled the north edge of the county, and in 1967 Morristown opened the SkyMart, a row of second-story sidewalks above Main Street that still stands. [S555][S573][S571]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia describes Hamblen as a fertile, well-watered valley between the Holston and the Nolichucky, with Clinch Mountain to the north. [S561] Today the county has two incorporated places, Morristown and White Pine, and CTAS counted 64,499 people in 2020. [S567]
Native peoples knew this valley long before European settlers did. The encyclopedia names Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks and Shawnees among the people who moved through the region before settlement. [S561] The interpretive panel at the Panther Creek State Park overlook says the valley was at the heart of Cherokee territory until the late 1700s. It also says there is no evidence of established Cherokee villages in the old Panther Springs area, and that the Cherokee are believed to have used it as hunting ground. [S592] The same panel says the Cherokee called the river below the ridge the "Hogoheegee," or "Big River," and that a branch of the Great Indian Warpath ran through the area on a line later followed by U.S. 11E. [S592] These are a park panel’s summaries, not tribal sources, so we report them as the panel’s account.
The springs drew people too. A 1939 WPA guide, quoted in the Tennessee Encyclopedia, described a rock at Panther Springs with a hollow where early settlers ground corn using the force of the stream. The state marker at Panther Springs calls the remains in the spring an "Indian mill." [S563][S591] We give both descriptions because the two sources frame the same feature differently.
Early land grants sat right at the edge of Native land. A Hamblen County Historical Society marker says David Coffman’s 1783 grant near Russellville "adjoined Indian territory." [S585] The Russellville Area marker says the land was still known as Indian Territory when the first pioneers arrived around 1780–1782. [S586]
According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, Robert McFarland and Alexander Outlaw came from Virginia in 1783 to claim land grants on the "Bend of Chucky," the big loop of the Nolichucky River. [S561] The county archives also give 1783 as the year the first settlers arrived. [S569] A state marker on Route 160 says McFarland, born in 1759 in Orange County, North Carolina, served in the Virginia militia from 1776 to 1781. It says his homesite and grave are at Springvale, and that he became the first sheriff of Jefferson County, part of which is now Hamblen. [S583]
Outlaw built a stone house for his son-in-law. A Historical Society marker on Route 160 says Rural Mount was built around 1799 of native limestone by Alexander Outlaw for Joseph Hamilton and his wife Penelope, original settlers on the Bend of Chucky in 1783. Hamilton was clerk of the Jefferson County court for many years and a trustee of Washington College and Greeneville College. [S584]
The next settlers, the encyclopedia says, were Gideon Morris and his brothers Daniel and Absalom, who took land grants inside what are now the Morristown city limits and gave the town its name. [S561] A state marker on Cumberland Street gives the year of their grants as 1787, says the brothers came from the Watauga settlement, and says Gideon deeded the land on which the town was built. [S582] The MTSU walking and driving tour adds that Gideon died in 1798 and is buried in the family graveyard near the marker, and that part of the burying ground holds unmarked graves that may be those of enslaved people. [S570]
Roads made Hamblen. The encyclopedia says a road connecting the stage routes from Abingdon, Virginia, and Knoxville was built in 1792, and more settlers followed it. It names William Chaney, Thomas Daggett, Richard Thomas and John Crockett among those who lived along the road. [S561] The MTSU tour says two routes met at Turkey Creek in what became downtown Morristown: a north–south "Buffalo Trail," now Cumberland Street, and the east–west "Great Road," now Main Street. It estimates that 200,000 travelers used the two routes in the late 1700s. [S570]
At Cheek’s Crossroads, east of Morristown, a state marker says the Kentucky Road from Cumberland Gap to the Carolinas crossed the stage road from Abingdon. Jesse Cheek had a store nearby in 1790. The Deaderick family ran a store on the spot from 1802, and James Deaderick closed it in 1844 to study law. He later became chief justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court. [S588] The Russellville Area marker says Cheek’s store account books list many early settlers, including the Crocketts, and that cattle penned at the store were driven to market in Virginia. [S586]
John and Rebecca Crockett ran a tavern on the road, and a state marker on Morningside Drive marks the site as the boyhood home of David Crockett (1786–1836). [S593] A newer marker at the museum quotes Crockett’s own 1834 Narrative: his father’s tavern "was on a small scale," serving mostly the wagoners who traveled the road. The marker says that around 1798, poverty led John Crockett to hire out twelve-year-old David to a Virginia drover named Jacob Siler. [S594] The encyclopedia adds that David lived in what is now Hamblen County until shortly after his marriage to Polly Finley. He later served in the Tennessee legislature and the U.S. Congress, and he died at the Alamo in 1836. [S561]
Today’s Crockett Tavern Museum is a reconstruction. The museum says the Hamblen County chapter of the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities was organized in 1952. During Morristown’s 1955 centennial, the chapter celebrated Crockett with a pageant and a visit from Fess Parker, star of Disney’s Crockett film. Ground was broken in 1956, and the museum opened on April 21, 1958, as a log building of the kind that would have housed John Crockett’s tavern. [S576] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says weaver Sarah Dougherty of Russellville was instrumental in creating the museum. [S564]
By 1800, the encyclopedia says, Russellville, Whitesburg, Springvale and Panther Springs were all established communities. [S561]
Russellville was at one time larger than Morristown. The encyclopedia says the "famous Boone Trace and Buffalo Trail" passed through it. [S561] The Russellville Area marker names David and Andrew Coffman, George Russell and Col. James Roddye among the earliest grantees between 1782 and 1785, and says the town was named for George Russell. [S586] The MTSU tour puts the first white settlement at Russellville a little later, about 1785. [S570] A state marker says Roddye built Hayslope in 1785. Roddye was later a delegate to North Carolina’s constitutional convention, a Jefferson County magistrate and register, and a member of Tennessee’s first constitutional convention. The house was also a tavern on the Kentucky Road. [S587] The Russellville marker says Roddye’s fortified home was first known as Red Door Tavern. [S586] The Coffman House marker says Andrew Coffman, a pioneer Baptist preacher, was born in the original log cabin in 1784, and the MTSU tour calls the house probably the oldest standing structure in the county. [S585][S570]
Near Whitesburg, Baptists put down early roots. A state marker says Elders Tidence Lane and William Murphy founded Bent Creek Church in 1785, about a mile southwest of the present building, on the old stage road. [S589] A second marker says Lane had been pastor of Buffalo Ridge Baptist Church in Washington County, the first church in Tennessee, in 1778, and was the first moderator of the Holston Baptist Association in 1786. [S590] The MTSU tour says the congregation moved into an 1872 building it shared with a Masonic lodge and took the name Whitesburg Baptist Church in 1875. [S570]
Presbyterians came too. A Historical Society marker says St. Paul Presbyterian Church at Lowland was founded in 1804 on Flat Creek, and that the present church was built in 1857. [S605] Bethesda Presbyterian Church near Russellville was finished in 1835. [S598]
Panther Springs was a stagecoach stop west of Morristown. The state marker says a pioneer community grew up around a huge spring where a Colonel Bradley killed a panther, and that Panther Springs Academy stood there. [S591] The encyclopedia lists a store, a church, an academy and several homes. [S561] Tennessee State Parks says the community was once considerably more important than Morristown because it was the first stop on the stage route from Knoxville to Abingdon. It faded after the railroad of the late 1850s passed it by and put its depot at Morristown. [S574]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia names Shields’ Paper Mill, at Marshall’s Ferry on the Holston, as the county’s first industry. It says the mill ran from 1825 to 1861 and made fine paper from rags, lint and wheat straw, and that two books were printed there. [S561] We found no second source for the mill, so these details rest on the encyclopedia alone.
Morristown itself was still small. The MTSU tour says that in the 1830s the settlement had a post office, a store, a blacksmith shop and a scattering of log houses. [S570] Before 1870 the town was split between two counties, Grainger to the north and Jefferson to the south. [S570]
People in Morristown pushed for a railroad from the late 1830s, according to the MTSU tour. [S570] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad was completed from Knoxville to Bristol in 1858, ending East Tennessee’s railroad isolation. [S566] The encyclopedia dates the company’s charter to 1849. [S566] The line ran through Russellville and Morristown. A Civil War Trails marker describes 1861 Morristown as a small railroad town where the railroad crossed the road to Cumberland Gap. [S580][S597] The MTSU tour says Morristown had about 500 people by 1860 and served travelers at the Virginia House Hotel. [S570] It also says the new railroad gave rise to a business district at Whitesburg in 1856. [S570]
When Morristown became a town is one of the clearest conflicts in the record. The Tennessee Encyclopedia and the MTSU tour both say Morristown was incorporated in 1855. [S561][S570] The Crockett Tavern Museum’s history describes a "1955 Morristown City Centennial," which fits the 1855 date. [S576] But the University of Tennessee’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service lists Morristown’s incorporation act as Private Acts 1867–68, chapter 19, with an incorporation date of February 1, 1867. [S568] Both can be true if the town was chartered in the 1850s and given a new charter after the war, but we found no source that says so. We give both dates.
Hamblen County did not exist yet, but the war came through its towns. The Civil War Trails marker beside the courthouse says Morristown held secessionist sympathies even though much of East Tennessee was Unionist. Confederate Capt. Stephen M. Cocke recruited a company by marching a band down Main Street. The same marker tells of Union Lt. James A. Bird of the 2nd Tennessee Infantry (US), who was wounded while burning bridges, was discharged in 1863, and opened a store in Morristown despite persecution for his service. [S580] The MTSU tour connects the town’s Confederate leanings to its place on major transportation routes, which tied it to the slave economy of the Deep South more closely than many rural areas nearby. [S570]
In 1862, after Braxton Bragg’s failed invasion of Kentucky, his army came back through Cumberland Gap and turned west toward Knoxville at a point now marked on Davy Crockett Parkway. The state marker says Scott’s cavalry led, followed by refugees, captured livestock and supplies, and the corps of Polk, Hardee and Kirby Smith. [S595]
The worst winter came in 1863–64. After the failed siege of Knoxville and the Battle of Bean’s Station in December 1863, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet chose Russellville, a town on the railroad about halfway between Morristown and Bull’s Gap, for his winter quarters. [S597][S598] A Civil War Trails marker says he and his staff used the first floor of the William Nenney House as their headquarters, while soldiers built hut camps along the railroad and between the Holston and Nolichucky rivers. [S597] A state marker nearby, "Longstreet’s Billet," says Kershaw’s troops camped north of the road and McLaws’s division to the south, and that McLaws lived at Hayslope. [S596] The Civil War Trails marker says Longstreet’s staff had to feed about 25,000 men. The army took over most of the area’s mills and tanneries, Cain Mill ground corn day and night, and the local Methodist church became a hospital. On January 1, 1864, the temperature fell to 24 below zero, and neither side could advance. Longstreet held the area until after February 26, 1864, when he moved to Greeneville. [S597]
Bethesda Presbyterian Church became a hospital that winter. Its Civil War Trails marker says soldiers of both armies are buried in the cemetery, including 80 unknown dead believed to be mostly Confederate. [S598] The war split the congregation. The marker says that from 1866 to 1871 each side sat in the outer pews and left the middle empty, until one group walked out and helped organize First Presbyterian Church of Morristown. The rest moved to the new Russellville Presbyterian Church in 1875. [S598] The MTSU tour says it was Confederate sympathizers who walked out, in 1871. [S570]
The fighting returned in the fall of 1864. On October 28, Union Gen. Alvan C. Gillem attacked Confederate Gen. John C. Vaughn at Morristown, and Vaughn’s men fell back toward Russellville. Vaughn reported that his command "was stampeded." Two weeks later Vaughn and Gen. John C. Breckinridge beat Gillem at Bull’s Gap. [S580] The Bethesda marker calls the two routs "Vaughn’s Stampede" and "Gillem’s Stampede," and says a cannonball from one engagement struck the church’s east wall, which was then braced with iron rods. [S598] The 2019 Morristown College marker says the college site was part of the Battle of Morristown and later served as a Federal camp through the end of the war and Reconstruction. [S600] The MTSU tour sums it up: both Union and Confederate generals kept headquarters in Morristown at different times, and twice the armies fought in its streets. [S570]
Five years after the war, the General Assembly made a new county around the railroad town. The county archives give the date as May 31, 1870. [S569] The Panther Springs marker and the Tennessee Encyclopedia say the commissioners who set up the county met at Tate’s Store, the Panther Springs post office. [S591][S563]
Sources disagree about which counties gave up land. The Tennessee Encyclopedia and the state courthouse marker say Hamblen came from parts of Jefferson, Grainger and Hawkins. [S561][S581] The state Blue Book says Jefferson, Grainger and Greene. [S38] All of them agree on Jefferson and Grainger, the two counties Morristown had straddled. [S570] The Blue Book gives Hezekiah Hamblen’s dates as 1775–1854 and calls him an early settler, landowner, attorney and longtime member of the Hawkins County courts. [S38]
Courts met in a storehouse on Main Street at first, according to the MTSU tour. [S570] The courthouse, designed by architect A. C. Bruce, came four years after the county did and is on the National Register. [S561] The state marker says it was finished in 1874 on land given by G. W. Barnett, George W. Folsom, D. Morris and John Murphey. [S581] The MTSU tour gives the dedication date as August 17, 1874, and calls it Second Empire in style. [S570] The Civil War Trails marker also calls it Second Empire and says it was a sign the county had recovered enough to build. [S580] Later changes are dated differently. The courthouse marker lists additions in 1955 and 1956 and major renovations in 1969, while a caption in the MTSU tour says additions took place in 1956 and 1969. [S581][S570] The tour adds that the mid-century additions hide the original mansard roof and domed cupola. [S570]
Hamblen’s most important institution in the decades after the war was a school for Black students. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says that in 1869 Almyra H. Stearns, a New Jersey missionary, started a small Freedmen’s Bureau grammar school near where the college would stand. In 1881 the Methodist Episcopal Church expanded it into a seminary and normal school, which became Morristown College. [S562] The 2019 marker in Heritage Park credits the National Freedman’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. [S600] An older state marker, now missing, said Rev. Judson S. Hill founded it as Morristown Seminary in 1881. That marker said the first building had been a slave mart, a hospital for both armies, a Baptist church and an elementary school. [S599]
The site’s history was personal. The 2019 marker says a young man named Andrew Fulton and his mother were sold at the slave market on the site for $1,400. After the war Fulton was educated at the school and returned as one of its first professors. [S600] The MTSU tour says Fulton had been sold there in 1861 and died in 1932. [S570]
Hill, who was 27 when he became the first president, raised money from Andrew Carnegie, the McCormicks of Chicago and the Kelloggs of Battle Creek, and the school grew to more than 300 students by 1900. [S562][S600] By 1901 it was Morristown Normal and Industrial College, teaching brickmaking, masonry, carpentry, shoemaking, broom making and farming. [S562] The 2019 marker says bricks made on campus went into campus buildings and hundreds of other buildings in Morristown and at Carson-Newman. [S600] The MTSU tour adds that in 1923 the school became Tennessee’s first junior college. [S570] After Hill died in 1931, the school moved toward the liberal arts. J. W. Haywood became its first Black president in 1937, and alumnus Miller W. Boyd, president from 1944, brought enrollment to its peak. [S562][S570]
Sources describe the college’s place in different ways. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says that before the civil rights movement it was one of only two institutions in East Tennessee for African Americans, the other being Knoxville College. [S562] The 2019 marker names three: Morristown College, Knoxville College and the Swift Institute in Rogersville. [S600] The MTSU tour calls it the second Black institution of higher learning in Tennessee. [S570] They also disagree on the ending. The encyclopedia says Knoxville College took it over in 1989 and closed it in the mid-1990s. [S562] The MTSU tour says it lost accreditation in 1986, ran as Knoxville College’s Morristown campus from 1989 to 1994, and lost its last buildings to demolition in 2017. [S570] The encyclopedia, writing before the demolition, noted that the campus was on the National Register but neglected. [S562]
The college’s church carried on. A state marker on Cumberland Street says Bethel began as First Methodist Episcopal Church in 1881, was the home church of Morristown College and a hub for Morristown’s Black community, and hosted leaders of the national civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. It became Bethel United Methodist Church in 1968. [S601] The MTSU tour says the congregation moved to its present building on land given by the college in 1907, and that the church joined the National Register in 2018. [S570]
After 1870 Morristown filled in fast. The MTSU tour says banks, merchants and industries crowded the old crossroads, and by 1900 the town was a wholesale center supplying hardware and dry goods to the countryside. [S570] The Downtown Morristown program says the Main Street district grew up around Turkey Creek and the meeting of two railroad lines. [S571] The tour says a freight platform once ran behind the wholesale block on South Cumberland Street, and that Pinnacle Mills, a cotton mill, opened in 1890. Its 1930 tower still stands. [S570] Russellville got the county’s first telephone in the spring of 1878, and a smallpox epidemic struck Morristown in the spring of 1883. [S570]
The second railroad was the Peavine. A U.S. Supreme Court case from 1895 says the Morristown & Cumberland Gap Railroad Company contracted in 1890 to build a line from Morristown to Corryton, about 40 miles, and that the work was "partially completed in February or March, 1892." The company had become insolvent by 1892. [S572] The MTSU tour says the Peavine opened to passengers in 1891, never reached Cumberland Gap, and carried Knoxville, Cumberland Gap & Louisville trains to the resorts at Lea and Tate springs from 1893. By 1903 it was part of the Southern, it stopped serving Tate Springs by 1919, and the Southern gave up the line in 1928. [S570] We give both the 1891 opening date and the court record’s account of work still unfinished in early 1892.
Coffee and furniture came next. The Tennessee Encyclopedia lists the Morristown Manufacturing Company and the J. F. Goodson Coffee Company, maker of JFG Coffee, among early businesses, and says JFG now operates from Knoxville. [S561] The MTSU tour says J. F. Goodson was later elected mayor and oversaw a county fair and a modern water system. [S570] The encyclopedia says textile and furniture companies led local industry in the first half of the twentieth century. [S561] The MTSU tour says Morristown grew from 3,000 people in 1900 to more than 8,000 in 1940, and by 1952 was the third-largest furniture maker in the South. [S570] Out at Whitesburg, the tour says, the railroad depot shipped marble from the hills north of the Holston after the war. Frederick Netherland, a formerly enslaved man, hauled the big slabs to the depot with a 32-mule team. [S570]
DeWitt Clinton Senter, governor from 1869 to 1871, lived in what became Hamblen. A Historical Society marker on U.S. 11E marks the site of his home and lists his terms in the state House and Senate. [S604] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says he retired to a farm near Morristown and died there in 1898. [S522] Sources do not agree on where he was born. The Hamblen marker says Rhea County, the Tennessee Encyclopedia says McMinn County, and a state marker in Rutledge calls him a Grainger County native. [S604][S522][S541]
Joseph Anderson, a U.S. senator, lived at Lowland from 1797 to 1815, according to the encyclopedia, and later became comptroller of the U.S. Treasury. [S561]
Two Hamblen men received the Medal of Honor in World War I. [S561] The Congressional Medal of Honor Society says Sgt. Edward R. Talley of Russellville, Company L, 117th Infantry, rushed a German machine-gun nest alone near Ponchaux, France, on October 7, 1918. The medal was presented to him at Russellville High School in 1924. [S578] The Society says Pvt. Calvin John Ward, born in Greene County and accredited to Morristown, helped knock out a machine-gun nest near Estrées, France, on October 8, 1918. [S579] The Tennessee Encyclopedia spells his first name "Alvin." We use the Society’s spelling. [S561][S579]
Hamblen also had writers and inventors. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says Mildred Haun, author of The Hawk’s Done Gone (1940), was born in Hamblen County in 1911, grew up in Cocke County, and is buried in Morristown. [S565] Novelist Helen Topping Miller lived at Arrow Hill until her death in 1960, the encyclopedia says. [S561] The MTSU tour, which spells the house Arrowhill, says it was built around 1855 for U.S. Rep. Albert G. Watkins and that about a dozen enslaved people worked the farm. It says the Millers bought the house in 1939 and lived there until 1958, two years earlier than the encyclopedia’s date. We give both. [S570][S561] A 2022 marker on East First North Street says Hannah J. Price founded the Morristown Equal Suffrage League in 1911, led its meetings at her house, and wrote a novel, The Closed Door, in favor of votes for women. [S602] A Historical Society marker on Panther Creek Road says Melville Milton Murrell patented an "American Flying Machine" in 1877 and served 45 years as a Methodist circuit rider. [S603]
Russellville kept old crafts alive. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the Dougherty family founded the Shuttle-Crafters weaving center there in 1923. Sisters Sarah Dougherty, Mary Ella Dougherty Wall and Rebecca Dougherty Hyatt wove coverlets with dyes from family recipes. The Southern Highland Handicraft Guild met at their cabin in 1934, and House and Garden featured them in 1942. [S564]
In politics, the encyclopedia names Herbert Sanford Walters, a U.S. senator and state Democratic chairman, and Z. Buda, mayor from 1972 to 1978, who fought a regional prison in the city and became the largest donor to Walters State. [S561]
TVA changed the north edge of the county. TVA says Cherokee Dam on the Holston was built between August 1, 1940, and December 5, 1941. [S555] Tennessee State Parks notes that the dam was finished two days before Pearl Harbor to make power for the war effort. [S574] The lake now fills the Holston valley along the county’s north side, and Panther Creek State Park sits on its shore. [S561][S573]
Panther Creek State Park sits on the old Panther Springs community. Tennessee State Parks says the park was established in 1967 on land that had been mostly farms averaging about 60 acres. The park says four cemeteries, four springhouses, six house foundations, a cellar and the remains of two barns have been located inside it. [S574] Sources give different sizes. The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s county article says two thousand acres, its park article says 1,435 acres, and Tennessee State Parks says 1,444 acres today. [S561][S563][S573] The park’s lake overlook, with its panels on Cherokee and settler history, looks across to Clinch Mountain. [S592][S574]
Downtown Morristown had a hard 1960s. The Downtown Morristown program says Turkey Creek flooded in 1962 and nearly wiped out the commercial district, just as a new shopping mall on the west side was pulling shoppers away. [S571] The city’s answer was the SkyMart: second-story sidewalks along Main Street that turned the upper floors into a new street and roofed the sidewalk below. Building owners spent nearly $2 million, and government spent more than $5 million on the walkways and on enlarging and rerouting the creek’s underground channel. [S571] The project was finished in 1967. The program admits that it could not compete with enclosed malls, but the overhead sidewalks still stand. A newly accessible ramp and a greenway plan are meant to bring people back up to them. [S571][S570]
Education and the arts grew in the same years. Walters State Community College, named for Senator Herbert S. Walters, opened in Morristown in September 1970, the sixth of Tennessee’s community colleges. Its first building was finished in 1971. [S577] Rose School, built in 1892 and named for Judge James G. Rose, became the Rose Center in the 1970s. [S575][S570] The Rose Center says the school ran from 1892 to 1975 and was then reopened as a museum and cultural center for the Bicentennial. The MTSU tour says the school operated until 1976. [S575][S570] The building is on the National Register, and the encyclopedia notes the Mountain Makin’s festival held there every year. [S575][S561]
Industry kept changing. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the county built two large industrial parks, East and West. It says that in 1999 the six largest industrial employers were automotive parts or furniture makers, and that tobacco still brought in more than $5 million a year. [S561] Those figures are from the late 1990s, and we did not find a newer source to update them. The county grew from 58,128 people in 2000 to 62,544 in 2010 and 64,499 in 2020. [S561][S567] MTAS puts Morristown’s 2026 estimate at 33,517. [S568]
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1783 | Robert McFarland and Alexander Outlaw claim land on the Bend of Chucky; county archives date first settlement to this year [S561][S569] |
| 1783 | David Coffman’s grant near Russellville "adjoined Indian territory" [S585] |
| 1785 | Hayslope built by Col. James Roddye; Bent Creek Church founded by Tidence Lane and William Murphy [S587][S589] |
| 1787 | Gideon, Daniel and Absalom Morris receive grants where Morristown stands, per the state marker [S582] |
| 1790 | Jesse Cheek’s store near the crossing of the Kentucky Road and the stage road [S588] |
| 1792 | Road linking the Abingdon and Knoxville stage routes built [S561] |
| c. 1798 | David Crockett, about 12, hired out by his father from the tavern on the road [S594] |
| c. 1799 | Rural Mount built for Joseph and Penelope Hamilton [S584] |
| 1825–1861 | Shields’ Paper Mill runs at Marshall’s Ferry on the Holston [S561] |
| 1835 | Bethesda Presbyterian Church finished [S598] |
| 1855 / 1867 | Morristown incorporated (Tennessee Encyclopedia and MTSU: 1855; MTAS: Feb. 1, 1867) [S561][S570][S568] |
| 1858 | East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad finished, Knoxville to Bristol [S566] |
| 1862 | Bragg’s army returns from Kentucky and turns west toward Knoxville [S595] |
| 1863–64 | Longstreet winters at Russellville; Bethesda Church a hospital [S597][S598] |
| 1864 | Battle of Morristown (Oct. 28); Confederates win at Bull’s Gap two weeks later [S580] |
| 1869 | Almyra Stearns opens a Freedmen’s Bureau school [S562] |
| 1870 | Hamblen County created (May 31, per county archives) [S569][S561] |
| 1874 | Courthouse finished; dedicated Aug. 17 [S581][S570] |
| 1878 | County’s first telephone, at Russellville [S570] |
| 1881 | Morristown College founded; Bethel church begins [S562][S601] |
| 1890 | Pinnacle Mills cotton mill opens; Morristown & Cumberland Gap Railroad contracts for its line [S570][S572] |
| 1891–92 | Peavine opens to passengers (MTSU: 1891); work only partly done in early 1892 (U.S. Supreme Court record) [S570][S572] |
| 1892 | Rose School built [S575] |
| 1911 | Hannah J. Price founds the Morristown Equal Suffrage League [S602] |
| 1918 | Edward R. Talley and Calvin John Ward earn the Medal of Honor in France [S578][S579] |
| 1923 | Shuttle-Crafters founded at Russellville; Morristown College becomes Tennessee’s first junior college, per MTSU [S564][S570] |
| 1928 | Southern abandons the Peavine line to Corryton [S570] |
| 1940–41 | Cherokee Dam built (Aug. 1, 1940–Dec. 5, 1941) [S555] |
| 1952 | Morristown ranks third in the South in furniture making, per MTSU [S570] |
| 1958 | Crockett Tavern Museum opens (Apr. 21) [S576] |
| 1962 | Turkey Creek flood hits downtown [S571] |
| 1967 | SkyMart finished; Panther Creek State Park established [S571][S574] |
| 1970 | Walters State Community College opens (September) [S577] |
| 1975–76 | Rose School closes and reopens as Rose Center [S575][S570] |
| 1989–1990s | Knoxville College runs Morristown College until it closes (MTSU: 1994) [S562][S570] |
| 2020 | Census counts 64,499 people [S567] |
Start downtown at the courthouse at 511 West Second North Street. The state marker, the Civil War Trails panel and the war memorials are on the grounds. [S567][S581][S580] Walk down to Main Street and climb to the SkyMart. The Downtown Morristown program and the MTSU walking tour both use it as the best way to see the old commercial buildings. [S571][S570] Then visit the Rose Center, a block west at 442 West Second North Street, which keeps historical displays along with its galleries. [S575]
Visit: Hamblen County Government · Downtown Morristown · Rose Center [S569][S571][S575]
Next, head to the Crockett Tavern Museum at 2002 Morningside Drive. The museum lists admission prices and tour times on its site, and the 2019 MTSU guide listed it as open May through October, so check before you go. [S576][S570] Other markers close to downtown include the Morris Cemetery marker on Cumberland Street and the Bethel church marker. [S582][S601] The former Morristown College grounds are now Heritage Park, where the 2019 marker stands. [S600]
Visit: Crockett Tavern Museum [S576]
Next, follow U.S. 11E east toward Russellville. The Civil War Trails marker at the Nenney House, which the MTSU tour says is now the General Longstreet Headquarters Museum, tells the story of the winter of 1863–64. [S597][S570] The Bethesda Church marker is about 700 yards up Bethesda Road. The tour notes that the cemetery is public and the church is private. [S598][S570] Along U.S. 11E around Russellville and on toward Whitesburg are the Cheek’s Crossroads, Hayslope and Coffman House markers and the old Bent Creek Church. Most of these buildings are private, so look from the road. [S587][S588][S585][S589][S570]
End the day west of Morristown at Panther Creek State Park, 2010 Panther Creek Park Road. The Panther Springs marker is at Old 11E and Panther Creek Road, and the park’s lake overlook looks out over Cherokee Lake. [S591][S573][S592] Tennessee State Parks lists construction closures through mid-2027, so check the park page first. [S573]
Visit: Panther Creek State Park · TVA: Cherokee Reservoir [S573][S555]
Every bracketed number on this page links here. Written by My East TN in our own words and checked against each source on 2026-10-31 (ET). Where sources disagree (for example, which counties gave land to Hamblen in 1870, whether Morristown was incorporated in 1855 or 1867, when Russellville was first settled, when the Peavine railroad was finished, when the courthouse additions were built, where DeWitt Senter was born, when Helen Topping Miller left Arrowhill, how Morristown College ranked among Black colleges and when it closed, when Rose School stopped holding classes, how big Panther Creek State Park is, and how a World War I Medal of Honor recipient’s first name is spelled), we give each version and name the source. Several business details (Shields’ Paper Mill, the J. F. Goodson coffee company’s start and the late-1990s factory figures) come from a single source, the Tennessee Encyclopedia, and are marked that way. We don’t republish encyclopedia, museum or marker text — follow the links for the full articles.
Hero art: our Cherokee Lake illustration, reused from the site’s lake guide (an illustration of Cherokee Lake, the TVA lake on Hamblen County’s north side, not a picture of a specific Hamblen County landmark). Corrections: [email protected].