East Tennessee History · County by county
A county between the Holston and the French Broad: a seat named for Martha Washington, the house where Davy Crockett married, a Baptist seminary that became Carson-Newman, a winter of cavalry fights over corn, the canneries behind Stokely and Bush’s beans, the nation’s leading zinc mines, and the wartime dam that drowned the bottomlands while a dike saved Dandridge.
Jefferson County lies in the Great Valley of East Tennessee between the Holston River and the French Broad, with the Great Smoky Mountains on the southern skyline. [S720] The territorial governor, William Blount, created it on June 11, 1792, out of Greene and Hawkins counties, and it was named for Thomas Jefferson. [S720][S38] It is one of the state’s oldest counties: when it was made, it covered roughly 1,200 square miles, and Sevier, Cocke and part of Hamblen counties were later cut from it. [S720][S38]
The county seat, Dandridge, was settled in 1783 and named for Martha Dandridge Washington. [S721][S720] The other large town, Jefferson City, grew up as Mossy Creek around a Baptist seminary that became Carson-Newman University. [S722][S723] In between are farm valleys that fed two armies in the hard winter of 1863–64, when Union and Confederate troops fought at Hay’s Ferry, Mossy Creek and Dandridge in a county where, as one marker puts it, food was the ultimate prize. [S724][S725][S726]
In the twentieth century the county’s tomatoes and beans built two famous canning companies, Stokely and Bush Brothers; its zinc mines led the nation for decades; and in 1942–43 TVA’s Douglas Dam flooded its best bottomland, while a dike saved downtown Dandridge from the new lake. [S727][S728][S720][S729] Sources disagree on many of the details, and where they do, we say so.
Geography shaped Jefferson County from the start. The Holston River formed its northern boundary, and the French Broad cut through the middle. According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, North Carolinians tended to come down the French Broad and Virginians down the Holston, and for decades the rivers were the main roads to market. [S720]
Long before that, the valley was a corridor for Native people. A 2017 marker placed by the Jefferson County Historical Society says the best-known trail through the region, the Great Indian Warpath, crossed the middle of the county along Dumplin Creek and Long Creek, and that many of the earliest settlers built near it. [S730] TVA notes that the same warpath crossed the basin now filled by Cherokee Lake on the Holston. [S555]
In 1785 the short-lived State of Franklin signed its only treaty with Cherokee leaders on Dumplin Creek, near today’s Kodak just across the line in Sevier County. [S115] From 1784 to 1788, the Tennessee Encyclopedia says, the land that became Jefferson County was part of Franklin’s Caswell County. [S720]
The first permanent settlement at Dandridge dates to 1783. [S720][S721] Many of the early settlers were Revolutionary War veterans of Scots-Irish background claiming land grants, and by 1795 Jefferson and Knox counties each counted about 7,500 people. [S720]
Some of the oldest institutions in the county were churches, and two old markers make "first" claims that are worth reading side by side:
The two claims don’t have to clash (one is a church; the other is a church, school and graveyard together), but neither marker gives its evidence, so we report both as claims.
Water power and river crossings followed. William Cox Sr., a Kings Mountain veteran who had voted for the State of Franklin at the Jonesborough convention of 1784, built Cox Mill about 1792; Blount made him a Jefferson County magistrate that year, and the mill ran for more than 150 years and doubled as a post office from 1848 to 1901. [S733] William McBee started a ferry over the Holston near Strawberry Plains in the 1790s that early travelers mentioned in their diaries. [S734] Samuel McSpadden, a Revolutionary veteran and powder maker, built a house in 1804 near a crude powder mill; a state marker says he sent flatboats of gunpowder to New Orleans that Andrew Jackson used at the Battle of New Orleans. [S735] Upstream from Hay’s Ferry, J. C. Turnley’s "Mill Place" ground grain from about 1820 until a fire in 1837 burned nearly everything but a 38-inch grindstone, which now sits in Dandridge. [S736]
Jefferson County came into being under the federal Territory South of the River Ohio. [S721] The Tennessee Encyclopedia gives the date as June 11, 1792, by order of Governor William Blount; the state Blue Book says it was made from Greene and Hawkins counties and named for Thomas Jefferson. [S720][S38] UT’s County Technical Assistance Service lists 1792 as the year the county originated. [S737]
The new county was large. Over the next 78 years it gave up land to three neighbors:
The county’s records have survived unusually well. The county archives says the 1845 courthouse in Dandridge "has not suffered a major disaster," and its marriage bonds, deeds, wills and court minutes run from 1792 to the present. [S738]
A state historical marker in Dandridge says county commissioners chose the site for the seat of Jefferson County in January 1793. Francis Dean, who had built a meeting house where the Revolutionary cemetery remains, donated land, and Samuel Jack laid off the town, named for Martha Dandridge, George Washington’s wife. [S721] The Tennessee Encyclopedia and a 2020 TDOT marker also say Dandridge became the seat in 1793. [S720][S729] The county’s tourism site says Dandridge "has been the county seat since 1792." [S739] We go with 1793, the date the markers and encyclopedia give, and note the other.
The town was incorporated by a private act of 1799, according to UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service. [S740] The first courthouse and jail stood on Gay Street, where a marker says they went up in 1815; the jail there got an addition in 1935 with help from the Tennessee Emergency Relief Administration. [S741] The courthouse that stands today dates to 1845. [S738]
Is Dandridge Tennessee’s second-oldest town? The town’s website calls it "Tennessee’s Second Oldest Town," and the county tourism site says the same. [S613][S739] It isn’t the only claimant. Jonesborough, established in 1779, calls itself the oldest town in Tennessee, and Rogersville in Hawkins County also calls itself the second oldest. [S612][S610] The answer depends on whether you count settlement (Dandridge 1783), selection as a county seat (1793) or a town charter (Dandridge 1799), so we leave the title unsettled.
The early town had some notable visitors. Dr. William Moore set up practice as Dandridge’s first physician, and his wife, Cassie Paxton Moore, kept a large library. Her first cousin Sam Houston spent weeks with the Moores reading, according to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, before his careers in Tennessee and Texas. [S720]
Ferdinand Rugel, a German-born botanist who collected plants across the Southern Appalachians for European buyers, came to Dandridge in 1842, married Laura Bell there, and seems to have practiced medicine in the town in the mid-1840s. After the Civil War he settled in Jefferson County near Talbot, and he died in the county on December 31, 1879. [S742]
The county’s most famous wedding was David Crockett’s. He married Mary "Polly" Finley on August 14, 1806, in Jefferson County, at the home of her parents, William and Jean Finley, near Dumplin Valley Road. [S743][S744] The couple’s 1806 marriage bond is on display in the county museum in the Dandridge courthouse. [S738] Their first two sons, John Wesley and William, were born in the neighborhood. [S744]
Sources differ slightly on when they left. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the Crocketts remained in East Tennessee until 1811, when they moved to Lincoln County; the state marker says they lived in the Finley neighborhood until about 1812. [S743][S744] The Encyclopedia’s Hamblen County entry adds a third angle, saying Crockett lived in what is now Hamblen County until shortly after the wedding. [S561]
Crockett also left behind a rifle. A marker in Dandridge says James McCuistion bought Crockett’s first rifle from him in 1806; it stayed in the McCuistion house until 1893 and, according to the marker, is now owned by a descendant and displayed at the Museum of East Tennessee History in Knoxville. [S745]
Jefferson County was a farming county with a substantial enslaved population, and the sources we checked disagree slightly on the size. A transcription of the 1860 census totals for the county, prepared by volunteers for the USGenWeb census project, counts 13,950 free people and 2,101 enslaved people. [S746] The Black in Appalachia project’s county page puts the number at 2,103 enslaved people held by 347 slaveholders, about 13.2 percent of the population, and counts 172 free Black residents. [S747]
The same project notes that the county also had an early antislavery movement, with about 600 members of antislavery societies in 1841. [S747] After emancipation, it says, Jefferson County had 2,888 Black residents in 1870, most of them working in agriculture. [S747]
The town now called Jefferson City began as Mossy Creek. [S723][S725] A gristmill operated on the creek’s west bank from about 1835. [S748] In 1850 R. R. Bryant built a log schoolhouse that a marker calls the oldest log school in the county. [S749]
Carson-Newman University traces its roots to a Baptist seminary there. Our two main sources disagree on several details:
Both agree that Federal troops occupied and badly damaged the buildings during the war; the Encyclopedia adds that the college filed a damage claim and received $6,000 in 1896. [S722][S750] In 1889 Carson College merged with Newman College, a women’s school founded in 1878, and students celebrated the merger by staging a "wedding" of the two colleges; future governor Ben W. Hooper was among the Carson men who marched to the Newman grounds for it. [S722]
The railroad reached the county in 1858. [S720] A marker at the old depot site says John Roper Branner gave land for the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad to pass through Mossy Creek on the condition that all passenger trains stop there; the first depot was finished in 1870, burned in 1930 and was rebuilt the same year. [S751] The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s mining entry says the first zinc mining in Tennessee happened at Mossy Creek in 1854. [S353]
Like most of East Tennessee, Jefferson County voted to stay in the Union. On June 8, 1861, its voters rejected secession 1,987 to 603. [S752] The state left anyway, and the county’s people split. The Tennessee Encyclopedia notes that members of the same family often fought on opposite sides. [S720] Dandridge’s markers show both: William M. Hill, who later built the house called Hilldale, was a first sergeant in the 9th Tennessee U.S. Cavalry, while the Seabolt–Harris house nearby served as a hospital during the war. [S753][S754]
In late 1861, East Tennessee Unionists tried to burn the railroad bridges that carried Confederate traffic. One target was the railroad bridge over the Holston at Strawberry Plains. According to a historical note published by MTSU’s Walker Library with an 1864 photograph of the bridge, William C. Pickens lit his torch but lost his matches in a scuffle with the sentry, and the bridge survived. [S755]
After Confederate General James Longstreet failed to take Knoxville in November 1863, his army marched east along the railroad to winter quarters around Russellville, in today’s Hamblen County. [S724][S561] Union forces followed. That winter, the corn left standing in the French Broad bottoms was, as one Civil War Trails marker puts it, often all that stood between Confederate soldiers in East Tennessee and starvation, and both armies foraged across Jefferson County. [S724][S720] By winter’s end, the Tennessee Encyclopedia says, even the fence rails had been burned. [S720]
Hay’s Ferry and the first "Battle of Dandridge," December 24, 1863. On Christmas Eve, Union cavalry riding toward Dandridge ran into Confederate cavalry near Hay’s Ferry on the French Broad. The fight moved about three miles; Confederates captured two Union guns, which were retaken, and the Federals fell back toward New Market. [S724][S725] The older state marker in Dandridge calls this fight the Battle of Dandridge and says the Federals lost a gun and caisson. [S756] The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s county entry likewise describes "Christmas Eve, 1863, at Dandridge." [S720] Most other sources, including the Encyclopedia’s own battle entry and the National Park Service, reserve the name "Battle of Dandridge" for the bigger fight of January 17, 1864. [S726][S757]
Mossy Creek, December 29, 1863. Union General Samuel D. Sturgis held a line just east of Mossy Creek when Confederate cavalry under William T. Martin attacked. [S725][S758] The state marker says Martin assembled 2,000 dismounted cavalry at Talbott’s station and the fight lasted seven hours; the Union line, anchored by Capt. Eli Lilly’s 18th Indiana battery, bent but held, and a Union saber charge and returning cavalry drove the Confederates back. [S758][S759][S725] Lilly later founded the drug company that bears his name, according to the Civil War Trails marker. [S759] The details vary:
Kimbrough’s Crossroads and Dandridge, January 16–17, 1864. In mid-January, Union General John G. Parke advanced on Dandridge looking for forage. [S726][S757] On January 16 a Union column ran into Micah Jenkins’ Confederate infantry at Kimbrough’s Crossroads, near Ebenezer Church, and fell back to Dandridge. [S762][S726] The next day Longstreet’s men attacked down the Chucky Road and the Morristown Road, and the fighting lasted until dark. That evening the Union commanders met in the Bradford-Hynds house in Dandridge, decided against a full battle and withdrew overnight toward Strawberry Plains and Knoxville. Longstreet’s troops, many without shoes, could not follow far in the bitter cold. [S726][S763][S764] The Encyclopedia counts about 150 Confederate and 100 Union casualties; the NPS calls the battle a Confederate victory. [S726][S757] Again, details differ:
Blants Hill, January 28, 1864. Confederate cavalry under Col. George G. Dibrell dug in on a wooded hill on the road to Cowan’s Ferry and held off Sturgis’ troopers; with Confederate infantry crossing the river behind him, Sturgis withdrew toward Maryville. A Civil War Trails marker estimates Union losses at 300 and calls this Sturgis’ last attempt to drive Longstreet’s army out of East Tennessee. [S765] Longstreet’s men stayed in their winter quarters around Russellville until March 1864. [S765]
The Branner family, whose land had brought the railroad to Mossy Creek, shaped the town after the war. In 1867, a marker says, John Roper Branner deeded land to trustees for a Black Methodist Episcopal church, school and cemetery. [S766] In 1868–69 Branner, president of the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railroad, built a 27-room, five-story Second Empire brick house originally called "The Oaks." His brother Joseph ran a school for young women in it in the 1870s. [S767] Milton Preston Jarnagin bought the house in 1882, and his family renamed it Glenmore for a son who died in infancy; it is now owned by the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities. [S767] (The Encyclopedia spells the name Jarnagin; a Mossy Creek walking-tour marker spells it Jarnigan and says he was an early president of the Mossy Creek Bank.) [S767][S768]
Freedpeople built their own institutions. Black in Appalachia’s county page lists Bethel Presbyterian Church in Dandridge, officially established on September 4, 1868, and Fairview Baptist Church, formed in 1871 when Black members withdrew from a white congregation. [S747] The same page records the killing of Lucian (or Lucius) Weaver by a group of men near Strawberry Plains on July 14, 1879, after he was accused of assaulting a white woman. [S747]
In 1889 Black Baptists began building Nelson Merry College at Mossy Creek on 12 acres bought largely through the fundraising of Rev. Peter Guinn. It opened in 1890, named for the Nashville pastor Nelson G. Merry, and, despite its name, taught elementary and secondary classes and trained teachers. [S723] It later became Nelson Merry High School, a county school for Black students that closed in 1965 after desegregation; today only its gymnasium remains. [S723] The marker says the county bought the site in 1932 and put up a new brick building with Rosenwald Fund help; Black in Appalachia says the school was rebuilt in 1931. [S723][S747] By the late 1920s, according to Black in Appalachia, the county had seven Black primary schools, several of them Rosenwald buildings, and one Black high school. [S747]
In 1865, a young Englishwoman named Frances Eliza Hodgson spent the winter with her family in a log cabin at New Market. A state marker says she gave music lessons and opened a "Select Seminary for Young People" to help support the family, met Dr. Swan Burnett, whom she married in 1873, and began the writing that made her famous. [S769] A second marker, now reported missing, identified her as the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy and said she spent her first winter in the United States in a small house nearby. [S770] The county’s tourism site also claims her for New Market. [S739]
On September 24, 1904, two Southern Railway passenger trains collided head-on near New Market. A medical history of the wreck quotes a Knoxville newspaper calling it the worst civilian disaster of its kind in East Tennessee. [S771][S772] The death toll has never been settled:
Fertile river bottoms made Jefferson County a canning county. [S720] A state marker near Dandridge says the first Stokely Brothers cannery was built in 1898 on Seehorn Creek, half a mile south, with $3,900 from Col. Alfred R. Swann, Anna Rorex Stokely and her sons James and John. That first summer it canned 4,000 cases of tomatoes, shipped to market by boat. The business grew into Stokely-Van Camp, which the marker calls one of America’s largest companies and the first marketer of Gatorade, before Quaker Oats bought it in 1983. [S727] The Tennessee Encyclopedia places the start of the county’s canneries in the early twentieth century. [S720]
Bush Brothers & Company grew from a general store at Chestnut Hill. The dates depend on the source:
By 1934, according to The Tennessee Magazine, the company had added pork and beans. [S728] In the late 1990s, the Tennessee Encyclopedia says, Bush’s controlled more than half the market for baked beans. [S720] The main cannery is still at Chestnut Hill, and the company runs a visitor center in the old general store. [S728]
Jefferson County’s other big business was underground. The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s county entry says valuable zinc ore was discovered in 1914 by Mark Newman, a geologist for the American Zinc Company, with more deposits found in the 1930s, and that by 1960 four major companies were mining zinc in the county. [S720] It also says that from 1950 to 1995 Jefferson County was the largest producer of zinc ore in the United States. [S720]
The Encyclopedia’s statewide mining entry tells an earlier story: it dates the first zinc mining in Tennessee to Mossy Creek in 1854 and credits most modern production to the "Mascot-Jefferson City district." [S353] The two dates are not necessarily in conflict (an 1854 surface mine and a 1914 discovery of deep ore can both be true), but they are often quoted as if each were "the" beginning. The county entry says the number of mining companies had fallen to two by the time it was written. [S720]
Most of the county’s towns were chartered in the twentieth century. UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service gives these incorporation dates:
Carson-Newman kept growing. Sarah Swann Hall, built by businessman and trustee Col. Alfred Reuben Swann in memory of his mother, served as headquarters and housing for a World War II Navy V-12 training program from 1943 to 1945. [S781] The college won NAIA national championships in baseball (1965) and football (1983, 1984, 1986, 1988 and 1989), and it became Carson-Newman University in 2013. [S722]
TVA had identified a French Broad dam site in the 1930s but held off, because a dam there would flood some of the region’s best farmland and hurt the canning industry. [S782][S783] Tennessee Senator Kenneth McKellar led the opposition. [S782][S720] World War II ended the argument. Congress passed the Douglas Dam bill, President Roosevelt signed it on January 30, 1942, and digging began within days; more than 6,000 people were on the payroll by that summer. [S782] Crews worked around the clock and finished the dam in 12 months and 17 days, a figure TVA still calls a world record for a project of its size; the Tennessee Encyclopedia and a state marker put it at 382 days. [S784][S720][S785] Power went to aluminum production and to the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge. [S720][S783]
The dam itself stands in Sevier County, but its lake spreads over parts of Jefferson, Cocke, Sevier and Hamblen counties. [S783] How much land it took depends on who is counting:
Dandridge nearly went under. The state marker says the business district, the courthouse, the jail and about 1,000 feet of Highway 92 would all have been below the lake’s maximum level, and that the town was "the center of opposition" to the dam. [S785] Residents petitioned political leaders, including Eleanor Roosevelt; in March 1942 the Dandridge Banner reported that the town would be diked. [S729] TVA built the earth-and-stone Dandridge Dike between April 1942 and July 1943, moving or demolishing eleven buildings and rerouting three streets and two creeks. [S729] The TDOT marker says it is 50 feet high and 1,000 feet long; the National Register nomination describes a 900-foot-long, fifty-foot-high dike. [S729][S783] TVA also built a new bridge over the French Broad at Dandridge from 1942 to 1944; it was later named for two Dandridge natives credited with helping save the town, UT president James D. Hoskins and longtime mayor Herbert B. Jarnigan, and it was replaced in 2017. [S786]
On the Holston, the county’s old northern boundary, TVA had already built Cherokee Dam between August 1940 and December 1941, and Douglas was built from Cherokee’s plans. [S720][S555][S782]
In 1972 the Highlander Research and Education Center, the successor to the Highlander Folk School that trained labor and civil rights organizers, moved from Knoxville to a 104-acre farm near New Market. [S787] From there it ran workshops for thousands of Appalachian residents on issues such as strip mining, land ownership and environmental health, and later widened its work to the South and the world. [S787]
The 2020 census counted 54,683 people in Jefferson County, up from 51,407 in 2010. [S737] It has five incorporated towns of its own (Baneberry, Dandridge, Jefferson City, New Market and White Pine), and the Census Bureau also lists part of Morristown, the Hamblen County seat, and the Strawberry Plains census-designated place in Jefferson County, and MTAS lists White Pine in both Jefferson and Hamblen counties. [S737][S117][S778] Dandridge is still the county seat, and the 1845 courthouse still holds county offices, the archives and a museum. [S738]
The county’s museum started in 1957, when the county court asked Rev. Reuel B. Pritchett to lead a committee to set it up; he donated his own collection of artifacts. [S738] The Pritchett name turns up on two of the markers quoted above, too. [S732][S736]
Visit: The Jefferson County Archives and Museum posts current hours and research help; the Mossy Creek Foundation covers the Jefferson City district; and Visit Jefferson County TN lists historic sites.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1783 | First permanent settlement at Dandridge [S720][S721] |
| 1784–88 | Area is part of the State of Franklin’s Caswell County [S720] |
| 1785 | Treaty of Dumplin Creek (Franklin and Cherokee leaders), just over today’s Sevier line; Hopewell Presbyterian Church dated to this year by a 1930 memorial [S115][S731] |
| c. 1787 | Pine Chapel Methodist church, cemetery and school [S732] |
| 1792 | Jefferson County created by Gov. William Blount (June 11); Cox Mill built [S720][S733] |
| 1793 | Commissioners locate the county seat at Dandridge (January) [S721] |
| 1794–97 | Sevier County (1794; 1795 in one source) and Cocke County (1797) cut from Jefferson [S84][S720][S38] |
| 1799 | Dandridge incorporated [S740] |
| 1806 | Davy Crockett marries Polly Finley (Aug. 14) [S743][S744] |
| 1845 | Present courthouse built in Dandridge [S738] |
| 1851 | Baptist seminary at Mossy Creek opens (today’s Carson-Newman) [S722][S750] |
| 1854 | First zinc mining in Tennessee at Mossy Creek, per the Tennessee Encyclopedia’s mining entry [S353] |
| 1858 | Railroad reaches the county [S720][S751] |
| 1861 | County votes 1,987–603 against secession (June 8); attempt to burn the Strawberry Plains bridge fails (November) [S752][S755] |
| 1863 | Fights at Hay’s Ferry (Dec. 24) and Mossy Creek (Dec. 29) [S724][S725] |
| 1864 | Kimbrough’s Crossroads (Jan. 16), Battle of Dandridge (Jan. 17), Blants Hill (Jan. 28) [S762][S726][S765] |
| 1865 | Frances Hodgson (later Burnett) spends the winter at New Market [S769] |
| 1868–69 | Glenmore (first called The Oaks) built at Mossy Creek [S767] |
| 1870 | Hamblen County formed partly from Jefferson [S38][S561] |
| 1889 | Carson and Newman colleges merge; Nelson Merry College building begun [S722][S723] |
| 1898 | First Stokely cannery on Seehorn Creek [S727] |
| 1901 | Mossy Creek incorporated as Jefferson City [S776] |
| 1904 | New Market train wreck (Sept. 24); Bush cannery at Chestnut Hill [S771][S728] |
| 1908 | Bush Brothers & Company formed [S728][S775] |
| 1914 | Zinc ore discovered by Mark Newman, per the county entry [S720] |
| 1942–43 | Douglas Dam and the Dandridge Dike built [S782][S729] |
| 1965 | Nelson Merry High School closes [S723] |
| 1972 | Highlander Center moves to New Market [S787] |
| 1986 | Baneberry incorporated [S780] |
| 2013 | Carson-Newman College becomes a university [S722] |
| 2020 | Census counts 54,683 people [S737] |
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 Dandridge became the county seat in 1793 (state and TDOT markers, Tennessee Encyclopedia) or ’since 1792’ (county tourism); whether Dandridge, Rogersville or another town is Tennessee’s ’second oldest’; whether Sevier County dates from 1794 (Sevier County government) or 1795 (Tennessee Encyclopedia), and whether Hamblen was cut from Jefferson, Grainger and Greene (Blue Book) or Jefferson, Grainger and Hawkins (Tennessee Encyclopedia); which church was ’first’ (Hopewell, 1785, or Pine Chapel, about 1787); whether the Crocketts left in 1811 or about 1812; how many people were enslaved in 1860 (2,101 or 2,103); the seminary’s name and its wartime closing and reopening dates; which fight deserves the name ’Battle of Dandridge’ (Christmas Eve 1863 or January 17, 1864), when Union cavalry reached Dandridge (January 14 or 15) and when the attack began (noon or 4 p.m.); when the Mossy Creek fight began, how many fell, and whether it belongs to Jefferson or Hamblen County; whether Nelson Merry was rebuilt in 1931 or 1932; how many died in the 1904 New Market wreck (56, 63, or 64 to 112); when the Bush business began (1897, 1898, 1904 or 1908) and when Stokely’s canning started; whether zinc mining began in 1854 or with a 1914 discovery; the spelling Jarnagin or Jarnigan; how much land Douglas Dam took (40.5 square miles, 31,000, 33,160 or 60,000 acres); and whether the Dandridge Dike is 900 or 1,000 feet long. We don’t republish encyclopedia, museum or marker text — follow the links for the full articles.
Hero art: our Douglas Lake illustration, reused from the site’s lake guide. It is an illustration, not a photograph, and not a picture of a specific Jefferson County landmark. Reused source numbers (S38, S84, S115, S117, S353, S555, S561, S610, S612, S613) match the same sources on our other history pages. Corrections: [email protected].