East Tennessee History · County by county
One of Tennessee’s first counties: a Holston River frontier in Cherokee country, the spring where Davy Crockett’s grandparents died, a county seat built around Joseph Rogers’ tavern, the press that printed Tennessee’s first newspaper, marble for the U.S. Capitol, a railroad gap fought over twice, a county split by the Civil War, a printers’ union town in the hills, and the factories, power plants and lake that came after.
Hawkins County sits in the Great Valley of East Tennessee between Bays Mountain and Clinch Mountain, with the Holston River winding down most of its length. [S607] It is one of the oldest counties in the state. North Carolina created it out of Sullivan County in the 1780s and named it for Benjamin Hawkins, a North Carolina senator. [S606][S38][S608] The original county ran southwest along the Holston as far as the "Big Suck" near today’s Chattanooga, and pieces of it later went into Hancock, Grainger, Jefferson, Knox, Roane, Meigs and Hamilton counties. [S606]
The county seat, Rogersville, grew up around Joseph Rogers’ tavern beside the spring where Davy Crockett’s grandparents were killed in 1777. [S609][S610] North Carolina authorized a town there in 1789, and in 1791 Tennessee’s first newspaper, the Knoxville Gazette, was printed on its courthouse square. [S606][S611][S144] Rogersville calls itself Tennessee’s second-oldest town; how true that is depends on which date you count, and we lay out the claims below. [S610][S612][S613]
In the nineteenth century the county quarried a red and pink marble that went into the U.S. Capitol. [S606][S607] The railroad reached Bulls Gap in 1858. [S606] Hawkins voted against secession in 1861, but Rogersville leaned Confederate, and the county saw murders, raids, a surprise battle at Big Creek in 1863 and fighting at Bulls Gap in 1864. [S614][S615][S616][S617] In the twentieth century came the printers’ union headquarters at Pressmen’s Home, the Holston Ordnance Works, TVA’s Cherokee Lake and John Sevier steam plant, a nuclear plant at Phipps Bend that was never finished, and a line of factories along U.S. 11W. [S618][S619][S607][S620][S621]
Long before white settlers arrived, the Holston valley was Indian country. Wolfe’s 1983 industrial history of the county, written for TVA, notes archaeological evidence of Indian people, mainly Cherokee, living along the river banks. [S607] The Great Indian Warpath ran through this part of the valley, and the Daughters of the American Revolution marked its route in 1934. [S622]
Upriver, just past the county line at Kingsport in Sullivan County, lies the Long Island of the Holston. The state marker there calls it a sacred Cherokee island that was not given up to white settlers until 1806, long after the Cherokee had ceded the land around it. It was Tennessee’s first National Historic Landmark and the starting point for the Wilderness Road into Kentucky. [S623] The island is not in Hawkins County, but the boats and wagons that left it for the west came down the Holston through Hawkins. Wolfe describes boatloads of pioneers headed for Natchez, Kentucky, the Illinois country and Middle Tennessee leaving from the site of Kingsport and floating down the river through what became Hawkins County. [S607]
The Cherokee, the settlers and the governments behind them all claimed this land. The roadside markers below tell the story almost entirely from the settlers’ side, as forts, raids and deaths. We keep to what they say, but the Cherokee side is not written on any of these signs.
The first known settlers in what became Hawkins County were Joseph Kinkead and John Long, who settled in Carters Valley in 1769–70, according to a Tennessee Historical Commission marker near Church Hill. [S624] The valley takes its name from Colonel John Carter, who settled there before becoming a leader of the Watauga settlement. [S624] Wolfe dates the first settlement attempt to around 1770, when Carter and William Parker built a trading post in the valley. [S607]
That store did not last long in peace. Another state marker says it was plundered in a Shawnee raid in 1774, and that at the Sycamore Shoals treaty of 1775 the owners were awarded the whole of Carters Valley as compensation. [S625] A stone milestone in the county honors Carter as the valley’s "first merchant" on one face and Benjamin Hawkins on another. [S626]
Settlers built forts and fortified mills. Robert Patterson built a fort around 1775 at the site of what became Patterson’s Mill at Church Hill, and soon after a mill. It was one of two stations where settlers took shelter during a Cherokee raid led by the Raven in 1776. [S627][S607] Henry Rice built and fortified a mill in 1775. Settlers sheltered there from the Cherokee in 1776, and in April 1777 Captain James Robertson and eight other men fought a party of thirty or forty Cherokee nearby. [S628] Castleton Brooks, a onetime long hunter, found the Hickory Cove in 1774, settled there in 1775 and was killed by Indians in 1777; a fort stood there in 1775 under Captain Robert Kyle. [S629]
At Chisholm’s Ford, a state marker says, the man it calls "The Father of Middle Tennessee," then a captain, lived in 1777 and 1778 on the south side of Big Creek, and a fort there was garrisoned. In 1779 Colonel Evan Shelby set off from there with 300 men in canoes to attack the Chickamauga towns near present-day Chattanooga. [S630] The raids did not stop when the county was organized. About 1784, according to another marker, young Joab Mitchell was ambushed and mortally wounded while bringing salt back to the besieged fort at Big Creek. [S631]
Churches came early too. New Providence Presbyterian Church was organized in Carters Valley in 1780 by the Reverends Charles Cummings and Samuel Doak, and moved to its present site in 1815. [S632]
The best-known killing of those years happened at a big spring in what is now downtown Rogersville. David and Elizabeth Crockett, grandparents of the frontiersman and congressman Davy Crockett, had a cabin there. [S609][S633] In 1777 they were killed in an attack on their home. Their son Joseph was wounded in the arm, and their deaf son James was carried off and held for more than seventeen years before family members found and bought him back. [S634][S633]
Sources disagree about who carried out the attack. Davy Crockett’s own Narrative, published in 1834, says plainly that his grandparents were murdered "by the Creeks" on "the very spot of ground where Rogersville, in Hawkins county, now stands." [S634] The state’s Rogers Tavern marker says they were killed by Cherokee. [S609] An article from the Washington County, Tennessee, archives says the raid was made by Chickamauga Cherokee led by Dragging Canoe, yet says James was held by the Creeks. [S633] We give all three versions.
Sources also differ on where the Crocketts are buried. A Tennessee Historical Commission marker says they are buried in the Rogers Cemetery, alongside Joseph Rogers. [S635] The Washington County archives article reprints the wording of a 1927 state marker at the cemetery and adds a note that the marker is wrong on that point; it says the couple are widely believed to have been buried on their farm nearby. [S633]
What happened to the land afterward is also told two ways. The Rogers Tavern marker says Joseph Rogers bought the property after the Crocketts were killed. [S609] The Rogersville history published on the East Tennessee Visitors Guide says the Crocketts sold it to Colonel Thomas Amis, who later handed it to Rogers, his son-in-law. [S610] The visitors’ guide calls the spring Crocketts’ Spring. [S610]
In the mid-1780s the settlers west of the mountains tried to form their own state, Franklin. A historical marker in Rogersville says this area was both Spencer County, State of Franklin, and Hawkins County, North Carolina, in 1786–88, and became Hawkins County, Tennessee, in 1796. [S636] The Tennessee Encyclopedia also says the county had been Spencer County, State of Franklin, before North Carolina created it. [S606] The courts of Spencer County met at the house of Thomas Gibbons on Big Creek from 1785 to 1787. [S637]
The founding date is one of the first places sources disagree. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says North Carolina created Hawkins County on January 6, 1787, by dividing Sullivan County. [S606] The state Blue Book, a Tennessee Historical Commission marker on the Hamblen–Hawkins line, Wolfe’s TVA history, the 1973 National Register nomination for Rogersville, and the UT County Technical Assistance Service profile all give 1786. [S38][S608][S607][S638][S639] We use "1786" in short references, as the state does, and note the January 1787 date beside it.
The county was named for Benjamin Hawkins (1754–1818). The Blue Book describes him as a member of the North Carolina legislature and the Continental Congress, a U.S. senator, and an agent to the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Choctaw. [S38] The state marker adds that he signed the deed of cession that handed North Carolina’s western lands, the future Tennessee, to the federal government. [S608] Wolfe dates that deed to February 25, 1790, and says Hawkins signed it together with the state’s other senator. [S607]
The act that created the county named seven commissioners to choose a central place for a courthouse, prison and stocks, and to set a tax to pay for local government. [S606] On June 4, 1787, the first county court of Hawkins County, North Carolina, met at Gibbons’ house. [S637][S606] There the commissioners chose Joseph Rogers’ land on Crockett’s Creek for the county seat. The courthouse, jail and stocks went up that summer, and the place was called Hawkins Court House. [S606] The first county officers were John Hunt as sheriff, William Marshall as register and Thomas Hutchins as clerk. Thomas Amis went to the North Carolina Senate as the county’s first senator. [S606]
Hawkins was huge at the start. Later acts cut it down: Knox and Jefferson in 1792 (each partly from Greene), Grainger in 1796 (with Knox), Claiborne in 1801 (with Grainger), and Hancock in 1844 (with Claiborne). [S38] Hamblen County, created in 1870, was named for Hezekiah Hamblen of Hawkins County, a longtime member of the Hawkins circuit and county courts. [S38][S608]
Rogersville’s founding family story begins with Thomas Amis. A state marker says Amis built a stone house near Rogersville between 1781 and 1783. He had been a captain and commissary of North Carolina troops in the Revolution and an original member of the Society of the Cincinnati. At the house he ran a distillery, forge, store and tavern where many travelers stopped. [S640] Wolfe says the Frenchman André Michaux stayed at the Amis house on November 16, 1793. [S607]
Joseph Rogers, an Irish-born newcomer, married Amis’s daughter Mary on October 24, 1786. [S610][S607] The visitors’ guide history says the marriage went ahead against her father’s wishes; the 1973 National Register nomination says Amis gave the young couple the land on which the town was built. [S610][S638] Rogers ran a tavern, and the state marker says his property included an Old Tavern House built between 1790 and 1800 and a Big Tavern House built between 1800 and 1810, both partly of logs and covered in weatherboard. [S609] The nomination calls the Rogers Tavern buildings among the most historically important in town. [S638]
The county seat came to Rogers’ land in 1787. [S609][S606] In 1789 Thomas Amis took a petition to the North Carolina General Assembly to set up a town at Hawkins Court House and name it Rogersville. The legislature approved it on November 7, 1789, and told the county commissioners to lay out half-acre lots with streets and land set aside for public buildings. [S606] Wolfe says the town was laid out in a grid by proprietors Joseph Rogers and James Hagan with five commissioners. [S607] The visitors’ guide adds that the plan set aside a public square for the town well and the courthouse, that Joseph Rogers was the first postmaster, and that Joseph and Mary Rogers both died in 1833. [S610] Rogers is buried in the family cemetery behind the tavern. [S635][S638]
Rogersville’s visitors’ guide calls it "the second oldest town in the state of Tennessee," and dates its settlement to 1775, when Davy Crockett’s grandparents settled at the spring. [S610] An Emerging Civil War travel piece repeats the "second oldest" claim. [S641] The claim needs some care.
Put simply: Jonesborough is older by any count. Rogersville’s "second-oldest" claim rests on counting from the 1775 settlement or the 1787 county seat rather than the 1789 town act, and Dandridge makes the same claim. We don’t settle the argument; we show the dates.
On November 5, 1791, the first issue of the Knoxville Gazette, the first newspaper printed in what became Tennessee, came off a press in Rogersville. [S611][S144] The state marker says George Roulstone and Robert Ferguson brought the press over the mountains from North Carolina at the invitation of territorial governor William Blount and set it up in a log cabin on the courthouse square. [S144] The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s entry on the paper names Roulstone alone as editor, printer and publisher; its county entry names both men. [S611][S606]
The paper carried Knoxville’s name before Knoxville had much to show. Wolfe notes that the town barely existed in 1791, and says some forty-five issues were printed in Rogersville. [S607] The Gazette moved to Knoxville, Blount’s new capital, in the fall of 1792; the marker and Wolfe say October 1792. [S611][S144][S607] Roulstone went on to be Knoxville’s first postmaster and the state’s first public printer. [S611]
Printing did not leave Rogersville for good. Wolfe lists a string of later papers there, starting with John B. Hood’s East Tennessee Gazette in 1813, and traces today’s Rogersville Review to a paper founded in 1882. [S607] An Emerging Civil War piece notes that the town now has a Tennessee Newspaper and Printing Museum. [S641]
Rogersville’s Main Street followed the Great Wilderness Road, which carried settlers through town toward Bean Station, Cumberland Gap and Kentucky. [S606] The National Register nomination says the town prospered mainly because it sat on a major stage route to Kentucky and the Cumberland settlements. [S638] A stone milestone in the county marks the route of the old East Tennessee stagecoach line, which it dates to 1825–1855. [S626]
By 1833, according to a state gazetteer quoted in the nomination, Rogersville had about 300 people, with lawyers, doctors, an academy, seven stores, three taverns, six blacksmiths, cabinetmakers, hatters, tailors, a silversmith, tanners and wagonmakers. [S638] A bank was operating there by 1817. [S638]
The town’s best-known building is the Hale Springs Inn on the square. The nomination says lawyer and judge John A. McKinney, an Irishman educated at the University of Edinburgh, built it in 1824–25 as McKinney Tavern. Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk were among its guests and are said to have spoken to townspeople from the balcony. It took the Hale Springs name in 1884, when it became a stopover for travelers headed to the Hale Springs resort. [S638] In 1973 the nomination said it had been used as a hotel continuously since it was built. [S638]
The Hawkins County Courthouse stands on the southeast corner of the square. Sources describe it in different terms:
We repeat what the marker and the nomination support: it is one of the oldest courthouses in the state, built in the later 1830s. We have not found a source that settles the "oldest" claim.
Across the square is the Greek Revival Masonic Temple, built about 1840 as a bank, according to the nomination. Emerging Civil War dates it to 1839 and says it was a branch of the Bank of the State of Tennessee. [S638][S641] The Kyle House, built in the late 1830s, faces the inn. [S638] The nomination counted about thirty buildings of interest in the district, which was listed on the National Register in 1973. [S638]
Business was not always good. Wolfe quotes the merchant George Hale complaining in 1835 that steamboats on the Ohio and railroads north and south had "cut off" the travelers who once filled the Great Road. [S607]
Rogersville’s Presbyterian church was organized in 1805. It split in 1838 into "Old School" and "New School" congregations, which reunited in 1881 as Rogersville Presbyterian Church. [S643] In Surgoinsville, the New Providence church opened Maxwell Academy in 1852 and ran it until 1907; the county ran it until 1954. [S644] The painter Samuel M. Shaver, East Tennessee’s leading portrait artist for a quarter century, taught drawing and painting at the Odd Fellows Female Institute in Rogersville in 1851. [S645]
The early county produced leaders well beyond its borders:
From the 1840s through the 1870s, Hawkins County became known for its variegated pink and red marble, according to the Tennessee Encyclopedia. [S606] Wolfe says the first attempts to quarry marble in Tennessee were made in the county, and that the Rogersville Marble Company was organized in 1838 with Orville Rice as president. [S607] Rice sent a block to Washington for the Washington Monument carved "From Hawkins County, Tennessee." [S607]
The stone went into the U.S. Capitol’s extensions of the 1850s. Wolfe says a large quarry opened near Mooresburg, sometimes called the Dougherty Quarry, supplied perhaps half the ornamental work in the Capitol, including balustrades, stair columns for the House and Senate galleries and the walls of the Marble Room. [S607] The Tennessee Encyclopedia names the Capitol’s balustrades and stairways, the South Carolina State Capitol and municipal buildings in Baltimore. [S606] Wolfe adds the U.S. Treasury Building. [S607]
Getting the stone out was hard. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says wagons pulled by sixteen- or twenty-mule teams hauled it to Rogersville, and from there it went down the Holston on rafts or later by railroad. [S606] Wolfe describes a tramway to the river, flatboats to Loudon and rail from there to Washington. [S607] He says the last big operation was the quarry of H. B. Stamps, opened in 1887, and that transportation troubles, including railroad flatcars too flimsy for the stone, helped put it out of business. [S607] A marble block quarried by hand in 1880 now marks the site of the old Rogersville town well. [S650]
The story of Bulls Gap also starts with a road. In 1792 John Bull got a grant of 55 acres near a pass over Bays Mountain and ran a stage line through it, and the pass became known as Bulls Gap. [S606][S651] In 1858 the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad laid the first tracks through the gap using enslaved labor. [S606] After the war the railroad ran the town’s economy. Around 1900 the Southern Railway took over the line and built a small maintenance center and rail yard there. [S606]
Rogersville itself was off the main line. A 1902 report quoted by Wolfe says the Southern Railway main line touched less than three miles of the county, and a sixteen-mile branch ran from Rogersville Junction to Rogersville. [S607] The 1890 depot still stands at Broadway and Depot Street, according to Emerging Civil War. [S641] Wolfe says Southern track in the upper end of the county near Church Hill was built from 1904 to 1910, and that the Carolina, Clinchfield & Ohio Railroad reached the North Fork of the Holston by 1908. [S607]
When Tennessee voted on secession in June 1861, Hawkins County voted against it, 1,250 to 835, according to a Civil War Trails marker. [S614] The same marker says country people tended toward the Union while townspeople, such as those in Rogersville, sided with the Confederacy. [S614] Another Civil War Trails marker, at Surgoinsville, says pockets of Confederate support existed and that Clinton G. Lyons and Frank L. Phipps organized a Confederate cavalry company at the Lyons store there in May 1862. [S652]
The war in Hawkins was personal. In December 1861 local Confederates killed Unionist William K. Byrd in what was called the "Byrd Raid," and John G. Bynum, a wealthy landowner and slaveholder who had helped raise the county’s first Confederate company, was suspected of a part in it. A Civil War Trails marker says the raid began almost four years of attacks between Confederates and Unionists in the county. [S616] In 1862 Bynum was shot dead in front of the bank on the square by John D. Riley, a fellow Confederate supporter with an old grudge, and Riley was never arrested. [S616][S641]
The Battle of Big Creek (Rogersville), November 6, 1863. In the cold rain before dawn, Confederate General William E. "Grumble" Jones sent two brigades across the Holston against Union troops camped near Big Creek, outside Rogersville. One column came from the Rogersville side and struck the 7th Ohio Cavalry and the wagon train; the other, under Colonel Henry L. Giltner, overran an Illinois battery and closed the Union escape route. [S615] The Union colonel reported that he had been "totally defeated." [S615] Jones reported capturing 775 prisoners and large amounts of wagons, horses and supplies. [S615][S641] The Tennessee Civil War Preservation Association reprints a Confederate report saying the first count was 850 prisoners and that "about 775" arrived. [S653] The Civil War Trails marker says Rogersville stayed in Confederate hands for the rest of the war. [S615]
That last point is one place the sources disagree. Another Civil War Trails marker in Rogersville says Confederate forces "often occupied" the town, and that on August 21, 1864, Union Lt. Col. William H. Ingerton of the 13th Tennessee Cavalry drove them out, killing 23 and capturing 35, and returned two days later to kill 13 and capture 24 more. [S614] Among the prisoners was Confederate congressman Joseph B. Heiskell, a Rogersville lawyer who spent the rest of the war in prison at Camp Chase, Ohio. [S614] The Tennessee Civil War Preservation Association page also gives two dates: its heading says November 6, 1863, and its summary paragraph says November 11. [S653] We use November 6, which the markers and the reprinted reports support. [S615][S652][S653]
Each side used the square. The courthouse served as a headquarters for both sides at different times. [S614] The National Register nomination says the Hale Springs hotel was Union headquarters and the Kyle House across the street was Confederate headquarters. [S638][S641]
Bulls Gap, November 1864. The railroad gap was fought over again in November 1864. Union General Alvan C. Gillem fell back to Bulls Gap to protect the line to Knoxville, and Confederate General John C. Breckinridge attacked on November 11. After two more days of fighting, Gillem’s men, short of ammunition and rations, pulled out toward Russellville. [S654] The National Park Service lists the battle as a Confederate victory with about 424 estimated casualties (324 Union, 100 Confederate). [S617] The Town of Bulls Gap’s own history page also describes the battle as a Confederate tactical victory. [S651]
Here too the sources do not line up. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says Bulls Gap and the railroad "remained under Federal control throughout the war," which sits awkwardly with the November 1864 Confederate victory there. [S606][S617] The preservation association also lists the battle under Hamblen and Greene counties, even though the town of Bulls Gap is in Hawkins County. [S654][S655] We describe it simply as fighting at Bulls Gap.
Freedom brought schools. In 1868 four Black men, Alexander Fain, Jordan Netherland, Albert Jones and Nathaniel Mitchell, bought land in Rogersville "for the purpose of building a schoolhouse for the education of colored children." A two-room log school served until the early 1900s. The present Price Public School building went up in 1923 and taught grades one through eight until 1958. It was listed on the National Register in 1988, is the only known surviving Black school building in Rogersville, and is now a community center and museum. [S656]
St. Marks Presbyterian Church, founded in 1875, was the first Black Presbyterian church in Rogersville, and moved to the corner of Kyle and Hasson streets in 1912. Its founder and pastor was the Reverend William H. Franklin. [S657] Franklin, one of the first Black graduates of Maryville College (1881), founded Swift Memorial College in Rogersville in 1883. [S658][S659] It was named for Elijah E. Swift of Pittsburgh, president of the Presbyterian board that served freedmen. [S658]
The college grew with help from Maryville College, which in 1901 sent Swift $25,000 after a new state law forced Maryville to stop admitting Black students. [S659] It started four-year college work in 1904 and by 1909 had 208 students and ten teachers. [S659] Franklin led it until 1926. [S659][S657]
Sources give different end dates for Swift:
These fit together if 1955 is the end of the college and 1963 the end of the public school on the same campus. The main three-story building was torn down in 1964, and three remaining buildings became offices for the county schools. [S658]
Mineral springs drew summer visitors to Hawkins County long before tourism had a name. Wolfe says Major James Richards of Virginia bought 800 acres in the mountains near Rogersville in the 1830s; the place passed to his daughter Harriet and her husband, Colonel Phillip Hale, and took the name Hale Springs. Wolfe says the springs had at least five kinds of water and that Indians had used them before Richards came. [S607] He also describes a hotel at Three Springs that drew as many as a hundred summer guests, and hotels at Galbraith Springs and Mooresburg that were reportedly crowded each summer into the 1930s. [S607] A state marker in Mooresburg says Hugh G. and Carrie Moore Williams owned the Mooresburg Springs Hotel in the late 1800s, where guests came to drink the water, dance and pitch horseshoes. [S660]
The Hale Springs resort became something no one expected: the headquarters of a national labor union. George L. Berry was born in Lee Valley in Hawkins County on September 12, 1882. [S661] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says he was fatherless at three; Wolfe says he was orphaned at six. [S661][S607] Berry became president of the International Printing Pressmen and Assistants’ Union (IPPAU) in 1907, at age 25, and led it until his death in 1948. [S661][S618]
Under Berry the union bought the old Hale Springs resort. Wolfe says it paid $8,423.70 around 1910 for 519 acres with a power plant, cottages and an unfinished hotel. [S607] The union moved its headquarters there from Cincinnati in 1911, and Pressmen’s Home grew into a 2,700-acre complex with its own phone system, post office, power system and farm. [S618] It held a tuberculosis sanatorium, opened in 1916 and closed in 1961, a retirement home and a technical school that became the largest trade school of its kind in the world, retraining letterpress printers for offset printing. [S618][S606] The union left for Washington, D.C., in 1967, and the school closed. [S618]
The sources count the years differently. The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s county entry says the union kept Pressmen’s Home for fifty-six years, 1911 to 1967. Its entry on the union says "sixty-five years." [S606][S618] The dates 1911 and 1967 agree in both, so we use those.
Berry was also a national figure. He served on New Deal labor boards, helped lead Labor’s Non-Partisan League for Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, and was appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1937 to fill the term of Nathan Bachman. He lost the 1938 Democratic primary, faced tax troubles in the 1940s, and died at Pressmen’s Home on December 4, 1948. [S661] Wolfe adds that in 1926 Berry proposed a union-run playing card and label company. It took over the old Rogersville Knitting Mill, was producing by 1929, and was the county’s one truly modern factory of the 1930s. [S607]
The planned industrial city of Kingsport, chartered in 1917, grew up just across the line in Sullivan County, and much of Hawkins County’s twentieth century was tied to it. [S662][S607] Wolfe says Kingsport’s factories pulled young workers out of Hawkins farms, and that Tennessee Eastman bought timber from southeastern Hawkins County for its wood-distillation plant, building a fifteen-mile private railroad along Beech Creek to haul it. [S607]
During World War II, the Holston Ordnance Works was built along the Holston in Sullivan and Hawkins counties to make Composition B, a powerful explosive. [S619] Wolfe says about 5,912 of its roughly 6,000 acres lie in Hawkins County. [S607] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the plant was fully running by mid-1943, became the world’s largest maker of high explosives the next year, and at its peak employed nearly 7,000 people, 40 percent of them women. [S619] It still operates as the Holston Army Ammunition Plant. [S619] In the 1960s Kingsport annexed land across the Holston in Hawkins County, according to Wolfe. [S607]
TVA first offered electric power to Hawkins County residents in September 1938, according to Wolfe. [S607] TVA’s Cherokee Dam, downstream on the Holston, was built from August 1, 1940, to December 5, 1941, and its lake backs up into the county. [S555][S607] Wolfe says two early mills were torn down when the lake was created and the steam plant built. [S607] He also says a dispute over TVA flooding land where George Berry owned mineral rights helped bring on the removal of TVA chairman Arthur E. Morgan. [S607]
The John Sevier Steam Plant went up near Rogersville in the 1950s. TVA says its first two coal units went into service in 1955, the third in 1956 and the fourth in 1957, and that it ran until 2012, when a natural gas plant replaced it. [S620] Wolfe says construction began in 1952 and that three units were running by 1956. [S607] We go with TVA’s own unit dates.
The biggest TVA project in the county never ran. In the 1970s TVA planned a nuclear plant at Phipps Bend on the Holston near Surgoinsville; the environmental impact statement came out in 1977. [S607] TVA paid for local mitigation projects, including two new county high schools, and the Rogersville Review says crews finished the concrete reactor shell and the steel frame of a cooling tower. [S607][S621] Sources differ on when it ended. Wolfe, writing in 1983, says TVA deferred the plant in 1981 and canceled it in 1982. [S607] A 2023 Rogersville Review history column says it was canceled in 1981 and that TVA did not finally rule out restarting it until 1987, after which the site became an industrial park. [S621]
After World War II, Wolfe writes, U.S. 11W became the county’s main street, with new industries "strung like pearls" along it. [S607] Glassmaker American St. Gobain, later AFG Industries, built a plant near Church Hill starting in 1959 and opened it in 1962. Holliston Mills followed in 1963, Alladin Plastics near Surgoinsville in 1965 and a Kingsport Press plant in 1966. [S607] Rogersville gained Dodge-Reliance in 1971 and TRW, a steering-gear maker, in 1972. [S607]
Towns incorporated as the county grew. UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service lists Bulls Gap as incorporated in 1955, Church Hill in 1958 and Mount Carmel in 1961. [S663][S664][S665] It lists Surgoinsville’s incorporation act as a private act of 1815. [S666]
A few more Hawkins County people from the sources:
The families later called Melungeons are most closely tied to Hancock County, which was cut partly from Hawkins in 1844. [S668][S38] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the best-known Melungeon area in the state is the Clinch River country of Hancock and Hawkins counties, that the term was long used as an insult by outsiders, and that scholars have traced the families mainly to free people of color from Virginia and North Carolina who intermarried with whites and people of Native American descent. [S668] We mention them here because the encyclopedia ties them to the area, not to suggest any particular family’s ancestry.
UT’s County Technical Assistance Service counts 56,721 people in Hawkins County in 2020. [S639] Part of Kingsport now lies in the county. [S662][S607]
The county’s Laurel Run Park near Church Hill covers 440 acres on the Holston. The county says it was the setting for the 1984 Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek film The River and was given to the county after filming. Its trails link with Bays Mountain Park. [S669] The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s county entry mentions Rogersville’s three-day Heritage Days festival in October and Archie Campbell Homecoming Day in Bulls Gap, and notes the genealogy and local history collection at the H. B. Stamps Memorial Library in Rogersville. [S606]
Start on the Rogersville square. Walk around the courthouse, the Hale Springs Inn, the Masonic Temple and the Kyle House, then find the state marker for Tennessee’s first newspaper and the Civil War Trails marker on the Rogersville engagements. [S638][S144][S614] Nearby, the Clay-Kenner House marker tells the Bynum shooting story. [S616] Head to Crocketts’ Spring, the Rogers Tavern marker and the Rogers Cemetery. [S609][S635][S610] Then visit the Price Public School museum and the Swift College markers. [S656][S658]
Visit: Historic Rogersville (East Tennessee Visitors Guide) ↗ [S610]
Drive east on U.S. 11W toward Surgoinsville and Church Hill. The Battle of Big Creek marker and the "Fighting in Hawkins County" marker tell the 1863 story, and the Patterson’s Mill, Rice’s Mill and Carters Valley markers tell the frontier one. [S615][S652][S627][S628][S624] End at Laurel Run Park on the Holston. Check the county’s park page for seasonal hours. [S669]
Visit: Hawkins County Parks: Laurel Run ↗ [S669]
On another day, go southwest to Bulls Gap for the Archie Campbell Museum and the town’s railroad history. [S655][S651] Check the town’s visitors page for museum hours.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1769–70 | Joseph Kinkead and John Long settle in Carters Valley [S624] |
| c. 1770 | John Carter and William Parker open a store in Carters Valley [S607][S625] |
| 1774 | Shawnee raid plunders Carter’s store [S625] |
| 1775 | Patterson’s and Rice’s mills fortified; Hickory Cove fort; Crocketts settle at the spring, per the visitors’ guide [S627][S628][S629][S610] |
| 1776 | Settlers take refuge from a Cherokee raid led by the Raven [S627] |
| 1777 | David and Elizabeth Crockett killed at the spring (Creeks, Cherokee or Chickamauga, depending on the source) [S634][S609][S633] |
| 1779 | Evan Shelby’s expedition leaves from near Chisholm’s Ford [S630] |
| 1780 | New Providence Presbyterian Church organized in Carters Valley [S632] |
| 1781–83 | Thomas Amis builds his stone house [S640] |
| 1785–87 | Spencer County (State of Franklin) courts meet at Thomas Gibbons’ house [S637] |
| 1786–87 | Hawkins County created from Sullivan (1786 in most sources; Jan. 6, 1787, per the Tennessee Encyclopedia) [S38][S606] |
| 1787 | First county court at Gibbons’ house (June 4); Hawkins Court House set on Joseph Rogers’ land [S637][S606] |
| 1789 | North Carolina act creates the town of Rogersville (Nov. 7) [S606] |
| 1791 | Knoxville Gazette first printed in Rogersville (Nov. 5) [S611][S144] |
| 1792 | Gazette moves to Knoxville; John Bull’s land grant at Bulls Gap [S611][S606] |
| 1824–25 | McKinney Tavern, later the Hale Springs Inn, built [S638] |
| 1836–37 | Hawkins County Courthouse built [S614] |
| 1838 | Rogersville Marble Company organized [S607] |
| 1858 | East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad lays track through Bulls Gap [S606] |
| 1861 | Hawkins votes against secession, 1,250 to 835 (June) [S614] |
| 1863 | Battle of Big Creek (Rogersville), Nov. 6 [S615] |
| 1864 | Union raids on Rogersville (Aug. 21 and 23); Battle of Bull’s Gap (Nov. 11–13) [S614][S654] |
| 1868 | Land bought for Rogersville’s first school for Black children [S656] |
| 1883 | Swift Memorial College founded [S659] |
| 1884 | McKinney’s hotel renamed Hale Springs [S638] |
| 1911 | Pressmen’s union moves its headquarters to Pressmen’s Home [S618] |
| 1923 | Present Price Public School built [S656] |
| 1937 | George L. Berry appointed to the U.S. Senate [S661] |
| 1940–41 | Cherokee Dam built [S555] |
| 1942–44 | Holston Ordnance Works built [S619] |
| 1955–57 | John Sevier Steam Plant units go into service [S620] |
| 1958–61 | Church Hill (1958) and Mount Carmel (1961) incorporated [S664][S665] |
| 1963 | Swift closes as a public school [S658] |
| 1967 | Pressmen’s union moves to Washington, D.C. [S618] |
| 1973 | Rogersville Historic District listed on the National Register [S638] |
| 1977 | Phipps Bend nuclear plant environmental statement issued [S607] |
| 1981–82 | Phipps Bend deferred and canceled (dates vary by source) [S607][S621] |
| 1984 | The River filmed at what became Laurel Run Park [S669] |
| 2012 | John Sevier coal plant replaced by a gas plant [S620] |
| 2020 | Census counts 56,721 people [S639] |
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 Hawkins County dates from 1786 (Blue Book, state markers, CTAS, the National Register nomination, Wolfe) or January 6, 1787 (Tennessee Encyclopedia); who killed David and Elizabeth Crockett in 1777 (Creeks, per Davy Crockett’s own Narrative; Cherokee, per the state marker; Chickamauga Cherokee under Dragging Canoe, per the Washington County archives) and whether they lie in the Rogers Cemetery; whether Joseph Rogers bought the Crockett land or got it through Thomas Amis; which date makes Rogersville a town (1775, c. 1786, 1787, 1789, or its present 1903 charter) and whether it, or Dandridge, is Tennessee’s second-oldest town; whether one or two men founded the Knoxville Gazette; the courthouse’s date, builder’s spelling (Dameron or Damron) and ’oldest’ claims; whether Rogersville stayed in Confederate hands after November 1863 and whether the Big Creek fight was November 6 or 11; how Bulls Gap could stay under Federal control yet see a Confederate victory in 1864, and which counties the battle is listed under; when Swift College closed (1955 or 1963); whether George Berry lost his father at three or six; whether Pressmen’s Home lasted 56 or 65 years; when the John Sevier units started; and whether Phipps Bend was canceled in 1981, 1982 or 1987. Several industrial details come from one source, Margaret Ripley Wolfe’s 1983 TVA history, and are credited to her by name. 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. Cherokee Lake reaches into Hawkins County, but the picture is an illustration, not a view of a specific Hawkins County landmark. Corrections: [email protected].