East Tennessee History · County by county
Where the Tennessee River bends past Lookout Mountain: Chickamauga towns and a Scots trader’s family, a mission school for Cherokee children, John Ross’s landing and the boats and wagons of 1838, a county seat that moved from a tavern to Dallas, Harrison and Chattanooga, the railroads that made a gateway to the Deep South, the battles of 1863 and the first national military park, a county carved off and folded back, Coca-Cola’s first bottlers, Bessie Smith, a lynching that reached the Supreme Court, TVA’s Chickamauga Dam, the Howard High sit-ins and a rebuilt riverfront.
The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s John Wilson writes that the General Assembly created Hamilton County on October 25, 1819, bounded by Rhea, Marion and Bledsoe counties and reaching south to the state line, out of land the Cherokees gave up in the Hiwassee Purchase of 1817, and that it was named for Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the treasury under George Washington; Hamilton was also the name of the district this section had belonged to. [S1710] The Tennessee Blue Book says the county was created from Rhea County and Indian lands, and it lists Hamilton County in the eastern grand division of the state. [S38]
UT’s County Technical Assistance Service counted 366,207 people in Hamilton County in 2020, up from 336,463 in 2010, and lists ten incorporated cities and towns: Chattanooga, Collegedale, East Ridge, Lakesite, Lookout Mountain, Red Bank, Ridgeside, Signal Mountain, Soddy-Daisy and Walden. [S1711] UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service puts Chattanooga, the county seat, in the East grand division on Eastern time, and notes that the city reaches into Marion County as well as Hamilton. [S1712]
Wilson calls this region, where the Tennessee River winds through the meeting of several mountain ranges, the last stronghold of the Cherokees, and says Ross’s Landing became one of the main staging areas for the trek west. [S1710] The county’s story runs from that landing through the railroads that met at Chattanooga, the battles of 1863, an industrial city built partly by former Union officers, TVA’s Chickamauga Dam and the civil rights struggle, to a riverfront rebuilt around an aquarium and a footbridge. [S1710][S1713]
The encyclopedia’s Timothy P. Ezzell describes Chattanooga’s setting as a bend in the Tennessee River near a natural opening in the southern Appalachians, where the riverbanks formed a secure, temperate and fertile plain ringed by mountains and ridges. He writes that archaeological excavations show Native Americans first settled the site more than eight thousand years ago, that around A.D. 1300 the area became a center of Mississippian culture, and that in the mid-1500s Mississippian people met the region’s first white visitors when Spanish expeditions camped nearby. [S1713]
A state marker erected in 2025 says Chickamauga Mound, an earthen mound 200 feet to the west, was the center of a Woodland-period town between about 350 and 900 CE, with households, gardens, public spaces and more mounds, most of which were destroyed in the early 1970s when the Roxbury Southern Mills textile plant was built. The marker says artifacts and records show people lived at the creek mouth from about 8000 BCE until the removal of 1838. [S1714] At the trailhead for the Brown’s Ferry Federal Road on Moccasin Bend, a marker placed by the Friends of Moccasin Bend National Park says prehistoric and historic sites on the peninsula reveal some 12,000 years of human occupation. [S1715]
Ezzell writes that with the tribal era of the seventeenth century the area came under the control of the Cherokees, who called the spot Chado-na-ugsa, "rock that comes to a point," a reference to Lookout Mountain. [S1713]
The encyclopedia’s Fred S. Rolater explains how one group of Cherokees came to live on the creek that now names a lake, a dam and a battlefield. After the 1776 attacks on the Upper East Tennessee settlements failed and Carolina and Virginia soldiers destroyed most Cherokee villages east of the mountains, the Cherokees most opposed to white settlement, led by Dragging Canoe, Bloody Fellow, Young Tassel and Hanging Maw, moved into abandoned Creek towns including Citico and Chickamauga along Chickamauga Creek and began calling themselves Chickamaugas. [S1666]
Rolater writes that early in 1779 Evan Shelby and 900 Virginia and North Carolina troops came down the Tennessee by boat, surprised the Chickamaugas, burned the villages and seized British supplies, and that Dragging Canoe then moved his people west of Lookout Mountain to the five Lower Towns. By then the Chickamaugas included Upper Creeks, Shawnees, French boatmen, Black people and Scots traders, and Daniel Ross had settled among them by 1785. [S1666]
A state marker on Broad Street at West 34th Street says the home of Daniel Ross, a trader born in Scotland in 1760, stood about 250 yards east. It says he came to this area in 1785, soon married a daughter of the trader John McDonald, who lived at the site of Rossville, Georgia, and that the first school in the Cherokee Nation was at the Ross home about 1800. His eldest son, John, became a famous chief of the Cherokee. [S1716] Rolater adds that, except for Daniel Ross’s trading post, no effective white settlements reached Chattanooga until 1817. [S1666]
The encyclopedia’s Patrice Hobbs Glass writes that John Ross was born in the fall of 1790 in present-day Cherokee County, Alabama, and that when he was seven the family settled near the northern end of Lookout Mountain. He was educated at schools in Kingston and Maryville. In 1813 he formed "Meigs and Ross" with Timothy Meigs, son of the U.S. agent Return J. Meigs, supplying goods to the Cherokees under government contracts during the Creek War; after Timothy Meigs died, Ross’s brother Lewis joined the business. Their warehouse on the south bank of the Tennessee became an important source of supplies for Indians and settlers, and the settlement around it became known as Ross’s Landing. [S1717]
The National Park Service says Ross set up a ferry crossing and warehouse at the landing between 1813 and 1816, and that from 1819 to 1838 the river was the border between Cherokee land on the south bank and United States land on the north. [S1718] A state marker on Riverfront Parkway says the landing, with its ferry, warehouse and landing, was established about 1816 some 370 yards east of the marker, and that once Hamilton County was organized north of the river in 1819 it served as a business center for the county as well as for the Cherokee trade. [S1719]
Glass writes that Ross, who spoke Cherokee fluently, was elected a delegate to the Cherokee National Council in 1817, drew up the Cherokee constitution of 1827 on the model of the United States Constitution, and was elected principal chief in 1828. [S1717]
A state marker on Eastgate Loop near Brainerd Road says the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions founded Brainerd Mission in 1817, that it played an important part in educating and Christianizing the Cherokees, and that it was discontinued at the time of the removal in 1838; its cemetery holds the graves of whites and Indians who died at the mission. [S1720] A 1924 marker placed nearby by the Chickamauga Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution says the mission was first called Chickamaugah, renamed Brainerd in 1818, was maintained with aid from the federal government, and had forty buildings. [S1721]
The encyclopedia’s Gary C. Jenkins writes that in 1818 Elias Cornelius, a clergyman visiting Brainerd Mission, left the first written account of a tour atop Lookout Mountain. [S1722]
Wilson writes that the treaty of 1817 with the Cherokees, the Hiwassee Purchase, gave up large sections of Alabama and Georgia as well as the Sequatchie Valley and the area that became Hamilton County. At first the county did not reach south of the Tennessee River; that land, including the site of John Ross’s landing, became part of the county only after the disputed Treaty of 1835 that led to removal and the Trail of Tears. [S1710]
Glass writes that Ross was at the council where government officials demanded the cession of Cherokee land north of the Hiwassee River and that, despite his protests and those of several chiefs, the land was ceded. [S1717]
The 1820 census, Wilson says, counted 821 residents, including 16 free Black people and 39 enslaved people, while about 100 Cherokees lived on six private family reserves. Settlers clustered at Sale Creek, at Poe’s Crossroads (Daisy) and at the farm of Asahel Rawlings (Dallas). [S1710]
A state marker on Dayton Pike in Soddy-Daisy says Hasten Poe, a veteran of the War of 1812, moved from Virginia and built a log tavern and inn on the site in 1818; the area became known as Poe’s Cross Roads, later Daisy, and in 1969 Soddy Daisy. It says Hamilton County was formed from the southern section of Rhea County on October 25, 1819, and that the tavern served as the county’s first courthouse and county seat. [S1723] A newer marker at the rebuilt tavern adds that Poe and others met there in 1818 to draw up the petition for a new county, that by 1840 he ran a toll road across the mountain between Hamilton and Sequatchie counties, and that he was the largest slaveholder in Hamilton County. It says the original log house was torn down in 1915 and the tavern was rebuilt by hand in 2011–2012 and dedicated on September 1, 2012. [S1724]
Wilson writes that the courts moved from the tavern to the nearby farm of John Mitchell before a log courthouse was built at Dallas on the Tennessee River. [S1710] The state’s Old Dallas marker in Chester Frost Park says the county’s first courthouse, with a post office, stood in 1822 on Asahel Rawlings’s land half a mile northeast; that a town called Dallas was founded in 1830; and that by 1834 it had about 200 people, four stores, two taverns, two doctors, a lawyer and a blacksmith. [S1725]
Wilson writes that the seat shifted across the river to the new town of Harrison in 1840. [S1710] The Old Harrison marker on Tennessee 58 says a courthouse was built that year about 500 yards northwest of the marker and the new town was named for President William Henry Harrison. [S1726] Wilson writes that Chattanooga, which far outgrew Harrison, became the seat of government in 1870. [S1710]
The encyclopedia’s Ben Harris McClary writes that the Senate ratified the Treaty of New Echota on May 23, 1836, by a single vote, and that the roundup of the Cherokees began in May 1838 with seven thousand soldiers under Gen. Winfield Scott. The prisoners were held in collection camps, where most spent the summer. [S12]
Ross’s Landing was a departure point even before the roundup. The Park Service says about 350 Muscogee (Creek) people who had taken refuge in the Cherokee Nation were brought to the landing at gunpoint in May 1837 and sent west by boat, and that two Cherokee detachments left the landing by boat that year on their own. [S1718] The state archaeologists’ study of the removal routes, by Benjamin C. Nance, says 466 Cherokees left Ross’s Landing in March 1837 in a group led by Gen. Nathaniel Smith that included Major Ridge and Stand Watie. [S1549]
In 1838, the Park Service says, the landing was a holding camp and launching point for the first three detachments forced from their homelands. More than 1,300 people in the first two were crowded onto flatboats pulled by steamboats; in the third, 1,072 people crossed the river on Ross’s swing ferry and went overland to Waterloo, Alabama, where they boarded boats. The Park Service counts 216 deaths in those three detachments. [S1718] A marker in Renaissance Park on the north shore gives about 800 people leaving on June 6 aboard a 100-ton steamboat and six flatboats, 875 more on June 13, and 1,070 sent overland by wagons on June 17, and says that overland route is believed to have crossed Moccasin Bend to Brown’s Ferry. [S1727]
Nance writes that the Cherokees were concentrated in camps about four miles above Ross’s Landing, south of South Chickamauga Creek, an area since heavily changed by industry. Because the river was low in a drought, Capt. G. S. Drane’s detachment left those camps on June 17, 1838, and traveled overland to Waterloo to board boats. [S1549] He adds that in August the Hamilton Gazette, printed at Ross’s Landing, reported that all the Cherokees had been collected. [S1549]
Nance writes that two of the fall detachments under John Ross’s supervision, led by Richard Taylor and James Brown, began from camps near Ross’s Landing, and that by September the camp had moved to the area of Joseph Vann’s plantation near Harrison, a town now under Chickamauga Lake. Taylor’s detachment left there on November 1, 1838, crossed the Tennessee by ferry, and, by the route Nance traces, passed the site of Dallas to Daisy and climbed Walden’s Ridge on what is now Daisy Mountain Road, following the old Poe’s Trace across the ridge. [S1549] The newer Poe’s Tavern marker says two groups of more than 1,000 people each camped at Poe’s Springs for several days on their way west. [S1724] The Friends of Moccasin Bend marker says the Brown’s Ferry Federal Road trace on the peninsula was walked by emigrating Cherokees in 1838 and used by Union supply wagons in 1863. [S1715]
Ezzell writes that permanent white settlers came to the site in the early 1830s and set up Ross’s Landing as a trading post near the foot of present-day Broad Street, and that in 1839 the residents incorporated the settlement, which started with fifty-three families, as the town of Chattanooga. [S1713] UT’s municipal directory gives Chattanooga’s incorporation act as Private Acts 1839–40, chapter 32, and its incorporation date as November 1, 1839. [S1712] The state’s Ross’s Landing marker says the growing community took the name Chattanooga in 1838, the same year the Cherokee parties left. [S1719]
Jenkins writes that after the removal and the founding of Chattanooga, in 1838, the State of Tennessee granted James A. Whiteside a large tract covering the point of Lookout Mountain. In the 1850s Whiteside built the Lookout Mountain Turnpike from an old Indian path and developed the northern summit, and the University of the South held its organizational meeting there in 1857. [S1722] A marker on Sanders Road says Whiteside hoped the mountain air would draw residents from the coastal South fleeing yellow fever and malaria, and that by the Civil War there was a community called Summertown on the summit. [S1728]
Wilson writes that Chattanooga’s future as a railroad center was assured when the Western and Atlantic Railroad made it the northern terminus; the line reached the city in 1849, the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad was completed in 1854, and the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia, the Cincinnati Southern and other lines followed. [S1710] Ezzell dates the arrival of the Western and Atlantic to 1850 and says it set off an immediate boom; by 1860, he writes, Chattanooga was a vital link in the region’s rail system. [S1713]
A state marker at the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum says its line runs near the original East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia right of way through the 984-foot Missionary Ridge Tunnel, built in 1852–54, the only "horseshoe" railway tunnel in the state. [S1729]
Ezzell writes that Chattanooga, known as the place "where cotton meets corn," kept strong social and economic ties to the Deep South, and that in 1861, though most of East Tennessee stayed loyal to the Union, Chattanoogans voted overwhelmingly to join the Confederacy. [S1713]
Ezzell writes that the first Confederate troops arrived in late 1861 to protect the town from East Tennessee Unionists, and that by 1863 the junction was a critical Confederate administrative center and supply depot. He quotes Abraham Lincoln: "If we can hold Chattanooga and East Tennessee, I think the Rebellion must dwindle and die." [S1713]
An 1890 marker of the battlefield commission, now beside the downtown library, traces the city’s military history. It says Confederate troops occupied the city in the spring of 1862 under Generals Floyd, Maxey and Leadbetter; that Union troops under General Mitchell shelled it on June 7 and 8; that Bragg’s army held it at several points in 1862 and 1863; that Wilder shelled the city from Stringer’s Ridge on August 21, 1863; and that Bragg evacuated it on September 7 and 8. [S1730] The Chattanooga National Cemetery marker recounts the Andrews Raid of April 12, 1862, in which James J. Andrews, another civilian and twenty Ohio soldiers stole the locomotive General at Big Shanty, Georgia, and steamed toward Chattanooga burning bridges until all were captured; Andrews and seven others were hanged as spies, and Andrews and eight raiders are buried in the cemetery’s Section H. [S1731]
The encyclopedia’s James L. McDonough writes that in the summer of 1863 Gen. William S. Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland forced Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee out of Middle Tennessee and then out of Chattanooga, which the Federals occupied with only a handful of casualties. [S1732]
McDonough writes that Rosecrans, believing Bragg in full retreat, sent three widely separated corps into north Georgia, and that Bragg turned and, reinforced, attacked along Chickamauga Creek on September 19, 1863, with about sixty-six thousand men against about fifty-eight thousand. On the 20th a misunderstanding opened a gap in the Union line just where Lt. Gen. James Longstreet struck, and Rosecrans and thousands of troops fled to Chattanooga; Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas held Snodgrass Hill until dark and became "the Rock of Chickamauga." McDonough puts the Confederate losses at eighteen thousand and the Union’s at sixteen thousand. [S1732] A marker on the Read House says the Crutchfield House, on that site, took in 500 wounded on September 20, 1863. [S1733]
McDonough writes that Bragg’s army then besieged the city from Missionary Ridge, Lookout Mountain and Brown’s Ferry, blocking the river and the railroads that supplied the Federals. Lincoln replaced Rosecrans and on October 18 gave Ulysses S. Grant command at Chattanooga, and that Grant arrived on October 23. [S1732] A Civil War Trails marker at the old Chickamauga Station says Confederate President Jefferson Davis stopped there on October 9 to visit the troops and soothe the quarrels over Bragg. [S1734]
The battlefield commission’s marker on Cameron Hill describes how the river was reopened. Before dawn on October 27, fifty boats carrying 1,500 men of Hazen’s brigade floated past the Confederate pickets to Brown’s Ferry and seized the gorge with help from Turchin’s brigade; Hooker’s men arrived from Bridgeport on the 28th; and a Confederate night attack at Wauhatchie was turned back, leaving the supply line open by way of Brown’s Ferry. [S1735] The Park Service says supplies flowed from as far away as Bridgeport over a pontoon bridge at Ross’s Landing on the route soldiers called the Cracker Line. [S1718]
McDonough writes that Grant’s plan gave Sherman the main attack on the north end of Missionary Ridge, with Hooker and Thomas making diversions, and that the battle did not go as planned. [S1732] The commission’s markers on Cameron Hill trace the three days. On November 23, Thomas’s troops advanced from in front of Fort Wood and carried Orchard Knob. On November 24, Sherman held the ground now called Sherman Heights while Hooker’s divisions crossed Lookout Creek, climbed the mountain’s flank to the foot of the palisades, carried the Cravens House by noon, and the Confederates abandoned the mountain at 2 a.m. On November 25, Sherman’s assault on Tunnel Hill failed against Cleburne’s division, and at 3:15 p.m. Thomas’s four divisions took the rifle pits at the foot of Missionary Ridge and then stormed the ridge itself. [S1736][S1737][S1738]
McDonough writes that newspapers called the fight on Lookout "the Battle Above the Clouds," that Thomas’s men charged up Missionary Ridge without orders in one of the most decisive acts of the war, and that each side lost about six thousand men. [S1732] Jenkins adds that the Lookout fight was fought in heavy fog and that the Union later set up a military hospital on the summit. [S1722] A state marker at the Cravens House says the home of iron manufacturer Robert Cravens, a landmark called the "White House" during the siege, was heavily damaged and later destroyed, rebuilt by Cravens after the war, and restored in 1956. [S1739] Ezzell writes that the battles at Chickamauga and Chattanooga caused more than forty-seven thousand casualties and that most residents who fled the city never returned. [S1713]
Ezzell writes that the Union army turned the river town into a fortified military complex and one of the North’s most important supply centers, a staging point for Sherman’s march into Georgia, with warehouses, stockyards, hospitals, shops and manufacturing works. [S1713] The Industrial Heritage marker on the Riverwalk says that during the occupation of 1864–65 the riverfront from Ross’s Landing to the west side of Cameron Hill was covered by docks, warehouses, a sawmill and a shipyard, much of which passed to Chattanooga when the army left in late 1865. [S72]
The Veterans Affairs marker at Chattanooga National Cemetery says Gen. George H. Thomas established the cemetery on December 25, 1863; it was named Chattanooga National Cemetery in 1867, and the army’s 1874 inspection counted 12,928 burials, 4,860 of them unknown. [S1731] A 2021 marker at the cemetery says Black soldiers located Union dead around the city and reburied them there, and that more than 880 U.S. Colored Troops are buried in the cemetery. [S1740]
Ezzell writes that Union officers who had served in Chattanooga noticed its location and the nearby iron deposits of East Tennessee and north Alabama, and that after the war men such as Henry Clay Evans, Hiram S. Chamberlain and John T. Wilder set out to make it the "Chicago of the South." [S1713] The Industrial Heritage marker says Wilder and Chamberlain opened the Roane Iron Works at Rockwood in 1867 and by the early 1870s ran a large iron and steel mill on the riverbank at Chattanooga, on the marker’s site. [S72]
Ezzell writes that Northern Republicans controlled city government for more than two decades after the war, increasingly relying on Black voters, and that Black Chattanoogans won seats on the board of aldermen, held city posts and served on the police force. [S1713] Wilson notes a cholera epidemic in 1873, yellow fever five years later, and floods in 1867 and 1886. [S1710]
Ezzell writes that in the 1880s boosters led by Chattanooga Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs drew investors from both sides of the Atlantic before property values crashed and the iron and steel industry, facing competition from Birmingham, collapsed; and that in the 1890s Jim Crow laws and the decline of the local Republicans took away Black citizens’ votes and their voice in city government. [S1713]
The State Library and Archives says James County was formed in 1871 from Bradley and Hamilton counties, with its seat at Ooltewah, and was abolished in 1919 and folded into Hamilton County, where its surviving records are held; it notes that most James County records were destroyed by fire. The act it reproduces names the county "in honor of the late Jesse J. James." [S1741]
The encyclopedia’s James N. Monroe writes that Elbert Abdiel James, a representative from Hamilton County, introduced the act, naming the county for his father, the Methodist minister Jesse J. James. He describes a 285-square-mile county of thirteen communities, among them Ooltewah, Harrison, Apison and Thatcher’s Switch (Collegedale), whose people were mostly Republican and rural while Chattanooga’s were largely Democratic and urban. The expected tax base never came, and the county ended in bankruptcy in 1919. [S1742] A state marker in Ooltewah says the county was created out of the rivalry of political factions during Reconstruction and that its forty-eight-year history ended in bankruptcy. [S1743]
The Blue Book adds that Sequatchie County, created in 1857, was made from parts of Hamilton, Marion and Warren counties. [S38]
The National Register nomination for the Walnut Street Bridge, prepared by Lynn Hulan with Martha Carver of the Tennessee Department of Transportation, says the bridge was begun in 1889 and completed in 1891 to a design by the engineer Edwin Thacher: 2,370 feet long, with six camelback truss spans and thirty-nine steel stringer spans. Masonry work began on September 20, 1889, the first mule-drawn streetcar crossed on February 17, 1891, and 4,000 to 6,000 people came to the dedication the next day. It was the only bridge across the river in Chattanooga until 1917, and it closed to all traffic on May 11, 1978. [S1744] The Ed Johnson memorial at the foot of the bridge says it was first known as "the county bridge," that it linked the mostly white south side with the Black Hill City neighborhood across the river, and that a community campaign saved it from demolition and reopened it as a pedestrian bridge in 1993. [S1745]
A marker at the Cincinnati Southern Railway bridge says the line, financed by the city of Cincinnati, was the first major north-south passenger route built after the Civil War and ended at Chattanooga; that its bridge was completed in 1888 and rebuilt in 1980; and that in 1880 a Cincinnati reporter dubbed the first train leaving for Tennessee "the Chattanooga Choo Choo." [S1746]
Jenkins writes that tourism flourished on Lookout Mountain in the 1880s and 1890s, served by a turnpike, two incline railways and a broad-gauge railroad. [S1722] A marker on Shingle Road says the first incline, built in the mid-1880s, hauled materials for the Point Hotel, that Incline Number Two was built in 1895, and that the first incline and the hotel fell into disuse early in the twentieth century. [S1747] A marker at Broad Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard says July 4, 1934, was the last day of trolley service on Signal Mountain. [S1748]
The Park Service says a reunion of Union and Confederate veterans of Chickamauga, the Blue and Gray barbecue, sparked the idea of a park, and that on August 19, 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed the law making the battlefields of Chickamauga and Chattanooga the nation’s first official national military park, five years before Gettysburg won similar status. Veterans led by Henry Van Ness Boynton and Ferdinand Van Der Veer pushed the bill through Congress; the commission set out hundreds of cast-iron tablets, and the park was formally dedicated in 1895. The army used the park to train soldiers during the Spanish-American War and both world wars; Franklin D. Roosevelt moved it from the War Department to the Park Service in 1933; and in 2003 Congress added the Moccasin Bend National Archeological District. [S1749]
Jenkins writes that the War Department bought Robert Cravens’s property, the scene of the Battle Above the Clouds, in 1896 and the point of Lookout Mountain from the Whiteside estate in 1898, making it Point Park. Adolph Ochs, he writes, led a movement that eventually brought more than two thousand acres of the mountain under the Park Service, and Ochs Highway is named for him. [S1722] McDonough notes that the park keeps its visitor center in Georgia but preserves land on Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain in Tennessee. [S1732]
Ezzell writes that recovery came in 1898, when thousands of soldiers passed through on their way to the Spanish-American War, and that civic leaders then built a balanced economy on banking, insurance, manufacturing and tourism. [S1713] The encyclopedia’s Ned L. Irwin writes that on July 21, 1899, Chattanooga attorneys Benjamin F. Thomas and Joseph B. Whitehead signed an agreement with Asa Candler, president of the Coca-Cola Company, for exclusive rights to bottle the drink across most of the United States; John T. Lupton soon joined them, and by September 1899 the first bottling plant had opened at 17 Market Street. Thomas sold that plant in 1902 to concentrate on franchises; Irwin calls it the first franchised Coca-Cola bottler in the world. [S1750]
The encyclopedia’s Jon Meacham writes that the Chattanooga Times was founded in 1869 and had dwindled to two hundred subscribers by 1878, when Adolph Ochs, not yet twenty-one, bought a half-interest with two hundred dollars; he soon owned it outright, kept its news columns evenhanded, and in 1896 bought the failing New York Times, while remaining publisher of the Chattanooga paper until his death during a visit to the city in 1935. [S1751]
The encyclopedia’s John Longwith writes that the Methodist Episcopal Church, North, founded Chattanooga University in 1886; that after a merger and years of trouble the school took the name University of Chattanooga in 1909; and that after the University of Tennessee announced plans in 1968 to build a four-year college in the city, the trustees merged their school with it as the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He writes that African Americans were first admitted as undergraduates in 1965. [S1752]
The encyclopedia’s Jerry R. Desmond writes that Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga and grew up in Blue Goose Hollow at the foot of Cameron Hill, and that after her mother died when she was nine she began singing and dancing for change on Ninth Street to her brother’s guitar. She joined the Rabbit Foot Minstrels in 1912, where Gertrude "Ma" Rainey tutored her, and in 1923 recorded "Down Hearted Blues" for Columbia, which sold 800,000 copies. Billed as "The Empress of the Blues," she recorded 156 known sides, some with Louis Armstrong. She was killed in a highway accident outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1937; Desmond writes that contemporary accounts that she was turned away from a whites-only hospital have proven unfounded. [S1753]
The Ed Johnson memorial at the Walnut Street Bridge tells the story on nine plaques. It says that on January 25, 1906, Ed Johnson, a young Black day laborer who had helped build Thankful Memorial Episcopal Church in St. Elmo, was falsely accused of raping Nevada Taylor, a white woman, by a man seeking a $375 reward offered by the sheriff, and that black and white witnesses later confirmed he was at work at the Last Chance Saloon at the time. [S1745]
The memorial says Johnson’s lawyers were given little time to prepare, that a hostile jury of white Chattanoogans convicted him at a trial that began on February 6, and that Judge Sam McReynolds sentenced him to death. The Black attorneys Styles Hutchins and Noah Parden took up his case, and on March 17 Parden presented a petition to Justice John Marshall Harlan; on March 18 the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the execution and ordered Sheriff Joseph Shipp to protect Johnson. On the night of March 19 a mob broke into the Hamilton County Jail, dragged Johnson to the bridge and hanged and shot him while Shipp, who had sent most of his deputies home, stood by. [S1745]
In what the memorial calls the first and only criminal trial in the Supreme Court’s history, United States v. Shipp, the Court held Shipp and five others in criminal contempt; Shipp, his deputy and four members of the mob served brief prison terms, and Shipp returned to a hero’s welcome and was reelected. More than 2,000 people attended Johnson’s funeral, and Parden and Hutchins, facing death threats, left for Illinois. The memorial lists Johnson among five documented victims of lynching in Hamilton County, along with Eldridge Merrill (1873), Charles Williams (1885), Alfred Blount (1893, also on the bridge) and Charles Brown (1897). [S1745]
Ezzell writes that the Tennessee Valley Authority eased the hardships of the Great Depression after 1933, that Chattanooga became a center of TVA’s work, and that projects such as Chickamauga Dam employed hundreds of local residents. [S1713] TVA says that before its dams Chattanooga was the valley’s most flood-prone city, with serious floods in 1867, 1875, 1886 and 1917, and that annual flood damage in the area was estimated at $1.7 million when TVA was formed. [S1609]
TVA says construction of Chickamauga Dam began in 1936 and was completed in 1940; the dam is 129 feet high and 5,800 feet long, and its reservoir stretches 59 miles upriver to Watts Bar Dam, with 784 miles of shoreline. TVA credits Chickamauga and its other reservoirs with preventing nearly $5 billion in flood damage in Chattanooga alone. [S1609] A marker on the Riverwalk says President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the dam on September 2, 1940, that it was the fourth of TVA’s projects on the Tennessee, and that its lock lifts boats about 50 feet. [S1754]
Wilson writes that the old towns of Dallas and Harrison were covered by the waters of the new lake, and that Hamilton County became a center for the agency. [S1710]
A state marker on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard says Carver Memorial Hospital opened on June 18, 1947, in the old West Ellis Hospital building, and is said to have been the first municipally owned, tax-supported hospital in America staffed by Black doctors and nurses for Black patients; it closed in 1962. [S1755]
A marker on the Riverwalk says that in November 1955 Mayor Rudy Olgiati announced federal funding for urban renewal of the West Side, the neighborhood on the slopes of Cameron Hill where most working-class residents were African American. It says the Golden Gateway project, the nation’s 12th costliest and 5th largest, demolished more than 1,000 homes, 196 businesses, 21 churches and two schools, displaced nearly 1,100 families, and cut down the top of Cameron Hill for fill for I-24 and U.S. 27, and that most Black families had to find housing in the city’s most polluted sections. [S1756]
A marker near Miller Plaza says that on February 19, 1960, fifteen members of Howard High School’s class of 1960 sat in at the S. H. Kress five-and-dime, were arrested and charged with a felony, and bonded out with help from the NAACP, led by James R. Mapp, with attorney Robert H. Craig; the charges were later expunged, and the students kept up sit-ins at other lunch counters. [S1757] Ezzell writes that federal courts ordered the desegregation of the city’s schools in March 1962, that Mayor Ralph Kelly opened all city-owned facilities to Black residents the next year, and that racial tensions stayed high through the 1960s and 1970s. [S1713]
Ezzell writes that World War II ended the Depression in Chattanooga and that its factories went on to make everything from Chris-Craft boats to Buster Brown socks, but that by the late 1960s it was among the nation’s most polluted communities; civic leaders answered with strict pollution-control laws. [S1713] Wilson writes that the county became headquarters for several major insurance companies, that Combustion Engineering, DuPont and McKee Baking were key employers, and that the Krystal hamburger, the Moon Pie, Double-Cola and the Little Debbie snack cake all began in Hamilton County. [S1710] The encyclopedia’s Margaret D. Binnicker writes that O. D. and Ruth McKee moved the McKee Baking Company to Collegedale in 1957 and introduced Little Debbie snack cakes in 1960. [S1758]
The encyclopedia’s Carroll Van West writes that the Southern Railway Terminal on Market Street, designed by Donn Barber, opened during the Christmas season of 1909; that passenger service ended with the last run of the Georgian on May 1, 1971; and that in 1973 the terminal reopened as the Chattanooga Choo-Choo hotel, one of the city’s earliest historic preservation projects. [S1759] The encyclopedia’s Patti Jo Lambert writes that the Tennessee Aquarium opened on May 1, 1992, as the world’s first major freshwater life center devoted to rivers. [S1760] Ezzell credits much of the city’s renaissance to the Lyndhurst Foundation, set up by members of the Lupton family. [S1713]
UT’s municipal directory dates the incorporation of the county’s other municipalities: Lookout Mountain in 1890, Signal Mountain in 1919, East Ridge in 1921, Ridgeside in 1925, Red Bank in 1945, Collegedale in 1968, Soddy-Daisy in 1969, Lakesite in 1972 and Walden in 1975. It lists all of them in the East grand division on Eastern time. [S1761][S1762][S1763][S1764][S1765][S1766][S1767][S1768][S1769]
Wilson lists the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga State Technical Community College, Southern University, Tennessee Temple University and Covenant College among the county’s schools. He writes that the 2000 census counted 155,554 people in Chattanooga and 307,896 in the county, which covers 542 square miles, and that Chattanooga and Hamilton County operate under separate governments. [S1710]
Wilson lists among the county’s museums the Chattanooga African American Museum, the Chattanooga Regional History Museum, the Houston Museum of Decorative Arts, the Hunter Museum of American Art and the museum of the Tennessee Valley Railroad, and notes that Engel Stadium is the historic home of the Chattanooga Lookouts. [S1710]
Visit:
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 350–900 CE | A Woodland-period town centers on Chickamauga Mound at the mouth of South Chickamauga Creek. [S1714] |
| c. 1300 | The Chattanooga area becomes a center of Mississippian culture. [S1713] |
| 1779 | Shelby’s troops burn the Chickamauga towns; Dragging Canoe moves west of Lookout Mountain. [S1666] |
| 1785 | Daniel Ross, a Scots trader, comes to the area. [S1716] |
| 1813–16 | John Ross sets up a ferry and warehouse at what becomes Ross’s Landing. [S1718] |
| 1817 | Brainerd Mission is founded; the Hiwassee Purchase opens the land north of the river. [S1720][S1710] |
| 1819 | Hamilton County is created on October 25; the first court meets at Poe’s Tavern. [S1710][S1723] |
| 1830 | The town of Dallas is founded. [S1725] |
| 1838 | Cherokee detachments leave Ross’s Landing; Brainerd Mission closes. [S1718][S1720] |
| 1839 | Chattanooga is incorporated. [S1712] |
| 1840 | The county seat moves to Harrison. [S1726] |
| 1849–50 | The Western and Atlantic Railroad reaches Chattanooga. [S1710][S1713] |
| 1863 | Chickamauga (September 19–20), the siege, Brown’s Ferry (October 27), Lookout Mountain (November 24) and Missionary Ridge (November 25); the national cemetery is founded on December 25. [S1732][S1735][S1731] |
| 1870–71 | The county seat moves to Chattanooga. [S1710][S1726] |
| 1871 | James County is formed from parts of Hamilton and Bradley. [S1741] |
| 1878 | Adolph Ochs buys into the Chattanooga Times. [S1751] |
| 1890 | Chickamauga and Chattanooga becomes the first national military park. [S1749] |
| 1891 | The Walnut Street Bridge opens. [S1744] |
| 1899 | Chattanooga attorneys win the rights to bottle Coca-Cola. [S1750] |
| 1906 | Ed Johnson is lynched on the Walnut Street Bridge on March 19. [S1745] |
| 1909 | The Southern Railway Terminal opens. [S1759] |
| 1919 | James County is abolished and returns to Hamilton County. [S1741] |
| 1923 | Bessie Smith records "Down Hearted Blues." [S1753] |
| 1936–40 | TVA builds Chickamauga Dam; Roosevelt dedicates it on September 2, 1940. [S1609][S1754] |
| 1947 | Carver Memorial Hospital opens. [S1755] |
| 1955 | The West Side urban renewal plan is announced. [S1756] |
| 1960 | Howard High School students sit in at the Kress lunch counter on February 19. [S1757] |
| 1973 | The terminal reopens as the Chattanooga Choo-Choo. [S1759] |
| 1978 | The Walnut Street Bridge closes to traffic. [S1744] |
| 1992 | The Tennessee Aquarium opens on May 1. [S1760] |
| 1993 | The Walnut Street Bridge reopens as a pedestrian bridge. [S1745] |
| 2003 | Congress creates the Moccasin Bend National Archeological District. [S1749] |
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 list each version in the section Where the sources disagree, above, with its source. We don’t republish encyclopedia, museum or marker text — follow the links for the full articles.
Hero: the Walnut Street Bridge and, just downstream, the Market Street (Chief John Ross) Bridge over the Tennessee River in Chattanooga, the same banner we use on our Hamilton County guide. It is a photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, “Across the Chief John Ross (Market Street) Bridge in Chattanooga, Tennessee” (between 1980 and 2006), from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LCCN 2011631080 ↗), which is dedicated to the public domain. We cropped, cleaned and color-graded it, removing trucks, boats, pedestrians and film dust; no generative AI was used and no scenery was added. It is not an official City of Chattanooga or Hamilton County image, and no endorsement by the photographer, the Library of Congress or any source on this page is implied. Reused source numbers (S12, S38, S72, S1549, S1609, S1666) match the same sources on our other history pages. Corrections: [email protected].