East Tennessee History · County by county
Tennessee’s far northeast corner: a trading gap on an old Indian trail, Boone’s hunting grounds, iron forges at Laurel Bloomery, a county carved from Carter in 1836, a seat called Taylorsville that became Mountain City, bushwhackers and a Union cavalry colonel, the posse that caught Tom Dula, timber railroads and the shortest tunnel in the world, a town drowned by Watauga Lake, old-time music that reached Carnegie Hall, cranberry bogs from the Ice Age, and the flood of 2024.
Johnson County sits in the extreme northeastern corner of Tennessee, on the western slope of the Appalachians, with Virginia to the north and North Carolina to the south and east. The Tennessee Encyclopedia puts its area at about 290 square miles and its highest point at Snake Mountain, 5,574 feet; the flattest, richest land lies along the Little Doe River and Roan and Beaverdam creeks. [S1231] The General Assembly created the county from Carter County in 1836 and named it for Thomas Johnson, an early settler on the Doe River, not for the president from neighboring Greene County. [S38] Mountain City is the county seat and its only incorporated town; the county counted 17,948 people in 2020. [S1232]
The county government calls Mountain City the northeasternmost county seat in Tennessee and the state’s highest incorporated town, at 2,418 feet, in a valley between Forge Mountain, Doe Mountain and the Iron Mountains. [S1233] This page follows the county from an Indian trading gap and Daniel Boone’s hunts through the first farms and forges, a new county and its seat, a Union county in the Civil War, the capture of the man behind the ballad "Tom Dooley," timber railroads, the drowning of Old Butler under Watauga Lake, a remarkable run of old-time music, the bogs of Shady Valley, and the flood of September 2024.
Long before white settlement, the Tennessee Encyclopedia says, the Cherokees, Creeks and Yuchis used this country as a hunting and burial ground, and evidence of prehistoric mound builders has been found here. [S1231] Most of the mountain land the hunters knew is now part of the Cherokee National Forest, named for the people who used its resources mainly for hunting and gathering. [S203]
The oldest place name in the county is a word about commerce. The encyclopedia says the first settlement grew up where a buffalo trail met three wilderness trails, and that the name Trade records its importance as a meeting place where settlers, frontiersmen and Native Americans swapped goods and stories. [S1231] The state’s marker at Trade calls the spot a gap on the overmountain Indian trail that Indian traders used as a barter site before settlement, later used by Daniel Boone, James Robertson and other pioneers, and describes it as one of the oldest settlements in Tennessee. [S1234] The county government goes a step further and calls Trade the oldest community in the state, as well as its easternmost and, at 3,133 feet, its highest. [S1233]
Daniel Boone left his name all over these mountains. The encyclopedia says he hunted and explored the area between 1761 and 1769, and that many settlers followed his trail through the wilderness. [S1231] The county government dates his first passage to 1761 [S1235], and a marker placed by the Tennessee Society Daughters of the American Revolution in 2014 marks "Daniel Boone’s Trail" from North Carolina to Kentucky with the date 1769. [S1236] The Museum of Butler tells a local story that Boone, here in 1769, turned loose a lame horse along a creek, found it fat and healthy when he came back two years later, and named the stream Roan Creek after the horse. [S1237] It is a tradition, not a record, and the museum tells it as one.
Among those who followed Boone was John Honeycutt, who built a cabin on Roan Creek and, the encyclopedia says, entertained Boone and James Robertson, the leader later famous in the Watauga and Cumberland settlements. [S1231] The Butler museum dates Honeycutt’s arrival to 1768, when he put up an arbor shelter and lean-to where Roan Creek runs into the Watauga River; James Millican joined him, and a Mr. Smith later built a gristmill there. [S1238] The state marker at Butler says simply that Honeycutt settled the place before 1770. [S1239] The county government describes two early settlements in the late 1760s and 1770s: the trading post at the Trade Gap, on the county’s southeast side, and the settlement on Roan Creek near the Watauga, followed by others farther up Roan Creek and on Little Doe. [S1235]
Before 1800, the encyclopedia says, there were also settlements at Little Doe, Shady Valley and Laurel Bloomery. [S1231] One farm claims a remarkable head start. The state marker at Maymead Stock Farm, near Mountain City, says it was settled in 1746 by Mathias Wagner and has stayed in his family; it calls Maymead one of the largest operating farms in the state and the first incorporated farm in Tennessee, a National Bicentennial Farm and a Tennessee Century Farm listed in the National Register of Historic Places. [S1240] The 1746 date would put Wagner here more than twenty years before Boone and Honeycutt, so we give it as the marker prints it.
The encyclopedia names the families who settled the valleys. On Roan Creek came the Haskins, Neatherly, Asher, Wilson, Grimes, Gentry, Jesse and Higgins families, and Nathaniel Taylor built an iron works there. The first Little Doe settlers included Jacob Perkins, George Brown, George Crosswhite and David Stout; John Vaught ran a mill and a "still house" that passed to his son Joseph. Shouns Crossroads carried Leonard Shoun’s name, and the Laurel settlers included the Keys, Wills, Snyder, Walters and Fisher families. [S1231]
Church came early. The state marker at the First Baptist Church in Mountain City says the county’s first Baptist congregation was organized on April 20, 1794, as the Roan Creek Church of Christ, near Shouns, sponsored by the Three Forks Baptist Church across the line in Watauga County, North Carolina. It moved to its present site in 1843 and by 1950 was known as the First Baptist Church of Mountain City. [S1241]
Iron was the county’s first industry. The state’s Laurel Bloomery marker says the first forge in the area was built about half a mile north on Laurel Fork in 1810, that two more were built west of the marker, the last in 1849, and that an ore bank on Ackerson Creek fed the furnaces until it gave out; operations ended about 1870. [S1242] The county government says the community’s first bloomer forge began work in 1810 and closed in 1870, that portions of it still stand, and that Laurel Bloomery, at 2,410 feet, is the northeasternmost community in Tennessee. [S1233]
Johnson County, the encyclopedia says, shared its early history with Carter and Washington counties. [S1231] The county government explains why it split away: the trip to the Carter County seat at Elizabethton was long. [S1235] The Butler museum puts it more vividly, saying the road to Elizabethton crossed several mountains and the big rivers several times, so the people of the upper valleys pushed hard for a county of their own. [S1238] The State Library and Archives cites the formation act as Chapter 31 of the Private Acts of 1835–1836, creating the county from Carter with its seat at what is now Mountain City. [S1243]
The namesake, Thomas Johnson, is described a little differently by each source. The Tennessee Blue Book calls him an early settler of Carter County on the Doe River, a prominent citizen and one of the first magistrates of Johnson County. [S38] The encyclopedia says he came to Doe Valley from Virginia and died in 1835, the year before the county was created; the first session of the county court met at the home of his son, William Johnson, who sat on the court. [S1231] The Butler museum also says he died in 1835, and that he had owned property on Roan and Doe creeks and in the upper part of the county. [S1238] The county government places that first session of court at the Pleasant Grove School House, beginning May 2, 1836. [S1235]
The encyclopedia lists the other members of the first court, among them Andrew Wilson, James Wright, John Ward, Joseph Robinson, M. M. Wagner, James Brown, Phillip Shull and John Dugger. [S1231] In October 1836, the county government says, the commissioners were authorized to contract for a courthouse; it took about a year to build, and the jail followed two years later. [S1235]
The commissioners chosen to locate the seat of justice bought twenty-five and a half acres from William P. Vaught and laid off a town they named Taylorsville, for Col. James P. Taylor. The first courthouse was finished in 1837 and a jail two years later; a second courthouse went up in 1894, and the third and present one in 1958. [S1231] County government still works from 222 West Main Street in Mountain City. [S1232]
The encyclopedia says Taylorsville was incorporated in 1866, with J. M. Wagner as first mayor, and changed its name to Mountain City in 1885. [S1231] The 1885 change came by act of the General Assembly: Chapter 40 of the Public Acts of 1885 simply declared that the county site of Johnson County be changed from Taylorsville to Mountain City, with a clause keeping court bonds valid under the old name. [S1244] The county government says the new name reflected the town’s place in one of the highest valleys in Tennessee. [S1235] The University of Tennessee’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service lists Mountain City’s incorporation act as Chapter 12 of the Private Acts of 1905, with an incorporation date of February 1, 1905, and its present charter as a 1986 private act. [S1245] We give both dates; the 1905 act may be a later re-incorporation of the town the encyclopedia dates to 1866.
The county seat also had a newspaper early. The encyclopedia says W. R. Keys founded the Taylorsville Reporter in 1844; it became the Tennessee Tomahawk in 1885 and the Johnson County News in 1915. Mac Wright, who published the Johnson County News Bulletin, bought the News in 1950 and sold both papers in 1956 to owners who renamed the paper the Tomahawk. [S1231]
Like other mountain counties, Johnson County strongly supported the Union. The Tennessee Civil War Trails marker in Mountain City says that late in 1862 Confederate authorities sent officers to Taylorsville to conscript white men between eighteen and forty, with mixed results, and that the county’s Confederate minority lived under constant threat. As late as October 1864, Taylorsville secessionists wrote to Gen. John C. Breckinridge that the county was "infested with some four or five bands of robbers and bushwhackers" who robbed and killed Southern men; the help they asked for never came. [S1246]
The Union army came instead. By April 1865, within days of Lee’s surrender, the marker says, Federal authorities had posted the 1st U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery, 420 men, and the 4th Tennessee Infantry, 544 men, at Taylorsville, a sight that must have jarred white residents of a county where relatively few enslaved people had lived. [S1246] The Butler museum describes the war years more bitterly, saying that loyal Johnson County citizens were "largely brutalized" by Confederate occupation and home guards until the Union 13th Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry, organized in 1863, gave them some protection. [S1238]
The best-known Union leader from the county was Roderick Random Butler. The state marker at his house says he was born in Wytheville, Virginia, on April 8, 1827, came to the county at fourteen as a tailor’s apprentice, and served as lieutenant colonel of the 13th Tennessee Cavalry. First elected in 1867, he spent ten years in Congress and twenty-four in the state legislature, finished his house around 1870 and died in 1902; he is buried in Mountain View Cemetery. [S1247] The Civil War Trails marker calls the house a "mammoth" Italianate home, completed about 1871 and listed in the National Register of Historic Places. [S1246] After the war, the settlement on Roan Creek known as Smith’s Mill was renamed Butler in his honor; the state marker gives the year as 1868. [S1238][S1239]
The most famous postwar episode in Taylorsville ended at the gallows in North Carolina. The Civil War Trails marker says Thomas C. Dula, a veteran of the 42nd North Carolina Infantry, was charged with murdering Laura Foster and fled to Johnson County; a posse captured him at Taylorsville in 1866 and took him back to North Carolina, where he was tried and executed in 1868. His story became the folk song "Tom Dooley." [S1246]
The other sources tell the capture a little differently. The county government says Dula hid out at Trade and was arrested by a posse there. [S1233] The Tennessee Music Pathways marker for the fiddler G. B. Grayson says that in 1866 the musician’s uncle, Maj. James Grayson, who had led a pro-Union revolt in northeast Tennessee, was farming at Trade when he hired a laborer calling himself Tom Hall; after Hall left, he was revealed to be Dula, and Grayson headed the search party that caught him. [S1248] A mural marker in Mountain City calls the uncle Colonel James Grayson, and says G. B. Grayson and Henry Whitter made the first recording of the ballad in 1929. [S1249] The Grayson marker adds that the song, rendered graphically, was played within the Grayson family long before it was recorded. [S1248]
The mountains kept the railroads out until the twentieth century. The county government says they did not reach the area until the early 1900s and that, when they came, they greatly influenced the growth of the timber and manganese mining industries. [S1235] The encyclopedia says the county gained railroad service in 1900 and that the line reached Mountain City in 1910. Built to haul timber and manganese into Virginia and North Carolina, it drew miners and timber cutters who made camps along the tracks; in 1922 the Merchant and Traders Bank was founded to handle the payrolls of the mining and timber companies; the encyclopedia says it became the Farmer’s State Bank. [S1231]
In Butler, the state marker says, the railroad arrived in 1902 and turned a farming, milling and mining town into a shipping point for lumber, iron ore and trade goods. [S1239] The Butler museum says the trains carried lumber, finished wood products, iron ore and farm produce to market, and gave students and visitors an easy way in; the town became an educational and trading center. [S1238]
In the north end of the county, lumber companies built their own lines. The Forest Service’s marker at Backbone Rock says the Virginia-Carolina Railway pushed south from Abingdon through Damascus to Sutherland near the state line around the turn of the century, the Beaver Dam Railroad Company extended it to the rail town of Crandull, and a third company carried standard-gauge track into Shady Valley; for fifteen years, mail, passengers and the valley’s timber and ore moved on these lines to the manufacturing town of Damascus. [S1250] To get the railroad around a spur of Holston Mountain at a bend in Beaverdam Creek, crews drilled a tunnel through the rock. The Forest Service’s web page dates the tunnel to 1901 [S1251]; its marker at the site says the Beaver Dam Railway blasted and drilled it around 1908. [S1250] Motorists on Tennessee 133 still pass through what is known as "The Shortest Tunnel in the World." [S1251]
The timber boom did not last. Within twenty years, the Backbone Rock marker says, the privately owned timber around Shady Valley had been cut over twice and swept by a devastating fire, and the minerals were virtually mined out with the methods of the day. [S1250] Congress had already given the federal government the power to buy such land: the Weeks Act of 1911 allowed it to purchase private land for national forests to regulate stream flow and timber production. [S203] Backbone Rock and 20,000 acres around it were bought to become part of Tennessee’s national forest lands, and the Forest Service has managed the land there since the 1910s. [S1250]
The railroad tracks were taken up in 1924 and the route opened to automobiles, and the tunnel was widened for two lanes of traffic in 1930. [S1250] In the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps developed Backbone Rock as a day-use area, building two picnic shelters and hiking trails in native stone; a campground followed in the 1960s. [S1251] The Cherokee National Forest took its present form in 1936, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt combined the Tennessee sections of the Unaka, Cherokee and Pisgah national forests. [S203] The encyclopedia notes that most of Johnson County’s natural resources now lie within the Cherokee National Forest. [S1231]
Butler was the county’s second town. The Butler museum says that by 1820 fifty families lived at the settlement then called Smith’s Mill, for the large mill Ezekiel Smith ran on Roan Creek, and that Joshua Perkins was the first postmaster after it became Butler. [S1238] The county government dates the community’s gristmill to 1820. [S1233]
Education became the town’s pride. The state marker says L. L. Maples founded Aenon Seminary in 1871; it became Holly Springs College in 1886 and Watauga Academy in 1906, and by 1933 it was a public school. Professor James Hamilton Smith was an early leader of the seminary. [S1239] The county government adds that the Watauga Baptist Association bought the school in 1906 and renamed it Watauga Academy. [S1233] The Butler museum calls the academy the heart and soul of Old Butler, with an advanced curriculum for its day that offered drama, music and literary societies, and says it was still running in 1948. [S1238]
The academy’s most famous graduate went to Washington. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says Congressman B. Carroll Reece was born in Butler, attended Watauga Academy and Carson-Newman College, and won the Distinguished Service Cross and the Croix de Guerre in France in World War I. He was elected to Congress from the First District in 1920 and held the seat, with one break in 1930–32 and two years as Republican national chairman in 1946–48, until his death in 1961. [S1252] The state marker says Reece was in the academy’s first graduating class, in 1911. [S1239]
Butler was built where two rivers met, and that was its undoing. The Butler museum says the abundance of water that made the place good for settlement became, in the form of floods, the town’s death knell; after the violent "killer flood" of 1940, the Tennessee Valley Authority decided to build a dam that would flood Butler and the valleys around it. [S1238] The state marker says floods had long plagued the area and that the 1940 flood led TVA to build Watauga Dam. [S1239]
TVA started Watauga Dam early in 1942, stopped later that year for other wartime work, resumed in 1946 and finished in 1948. The earth-filled dam, in neighboring Carter County, is 318 feet high, and its lake covers about 6,430 acres; at more than 1,900 feet above sea level, TVA says, it is the highest reservoir in the Tennessee River system. [S1182] The Forest Service says TVA impounded the Elk River, Roan Creek and the Watauga River to create the lake, and gives the year as 1942, when work began. [S1253] The encyclopedia dates TVA’s Watauga Lake to 1949. [S1231]
The museum gives the town’s last years in detail. In the mid-1940s about 650 families lived in Butler, which had hotels, stores, restaurants, doctors and dentists, churches, schools, a Masonic lodge and a movie theater. TVA completed its purchase of the town, including city hall and the jail, on September 6, 1947, for $35,000; one resident joked that the next mayor of Butler would be a catfish. The gates closed on December 1, 1948, and the water began to rise. TVA bought nearly 12,000 acres and relocated 761 families. [S1238] The town moved to higher ground; the county government says the old site is now known as "Old Butler," "the town that wouldn’t drown." [S1233] The museum adds that many of Butler’s young people were overseas in World War II while their hometown was being dismantled. [S1238]
Watauga Academy’s buildings went too. The state marker says bricks from the academy were used to build the sanctuary of the Virginia Avenue Methodist Church in Bristol. [S1239] One merchant, W. S. Stout, had opened a general store beside the Southern Railway tracks on Roan Creek in 1930; when TVA came, he moved to Pine Orchard on the new State Highway 67 and kept the store open until his death in 1995. His old store now sits across from the Butler museum, trap door for trading chickens and all. [S1237]
Johnson County gave old-time and country music two of its early recording stars. The Tennessee Music Pathways marker says G. B. Grayson was born in Crumpler, in Ashe County, North Carolina, on November 11, 1887, and grew up near Laurel Bloomery, partly sighted after a childhood illness or injury. He played fiddle at schoolhouses and dances, and in 1927 he met Henry Whitter, a guitarist and harmonica player who had already recorded. The pair recorded for Gennett in New York and Victor in Atlanta from 1927 to 1929, making forty recordings, including songs that became standards such as "Tom Dooley," "Little Maggie" and "Nine Pound Hammer." [S1248] On "Train Forty-Five," the marker notes, Grayson tells Whitter he is "a-goin’ to Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee"; a mural marker says the song came from "Reuben’s Train." [S1248][S1254] Grayson was killed on August 16, 1930, when a truck hit the car on whose running board he was riding home from Damascus. [S1248]
Clarence "Tom" Ashley grew up in his grandfather’s boarding house at Shouns, near Mountain City. His Music Pathways marker says he was born in Bristol, Virginia, on a date he gave as September 29, 1895 (the 1900 census suggests 1893), joined a traveling medicine show at sixteen, mentored a young Roy Acuff, and recorded from 1928 to 1933, including a session for Columbia when the company came to Johnson City looking for talent. He was the first to record "House of the Rising Sun." [S1255] A mural marker in Mountain City says he learned the song from his grandfather, Enoch, and recorded it in 1933. [S1256]
Ashley’s second career came with the folk revival. After learning that two of his songs were on the 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, the marker says, he made a comeback album, "Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley’s," with a then-unknown Doc Watson, played coffee houses and folk festivals in North America and Europe, and appeared at Carnegie Hall with Pete Seeger in December 1962. He died on June 2, 1967. [S1255] Another mural marker says that album, Doc Watson’s first, was added to the National Recording Registry in 2013. [S1257] Grayson and Ashley both appear in a mural of the "Historic 1925 Fiddler’s Convention," alongside Fiddlin’ John Carson, Charlie Bowman and Uncle Am Stuart, painted in a 2017 workshop funded by the Tennessee Arts Commission. [S1258] The murals and markers line the streets of downtown Mountain City.
For most of its history Johnson County lived from the land. The encyclopedia says the economy remains somewhat dependent on agriculture, with tobacco long the largest cash crop and corn, apples, strawberries and other fruits and vegetables grown on small farms. In the first half of the twentieth century the county was known as the "Green Bean Capital of the World." [S1231]
Factories came later. The encyclopedia names textile mills as the largest industrial employers in its account, among them Sara Lee Knit Products, Bike Athletic Company, Mountain City Glove Manufacturing Company and C&A Lingerie, and says the county lost jobs as the textile industry changed and turned toward tourism and specialty shops. [S1231] A large new employer arrived in 1990, when the state opened the Northeast Correctional Complex in Mountain City. The Tennessee Department of Correction describes it as a close-custody prison for men with an operating capacity of 1,701 and more than 500 employees. [S1259] The county government places it in the Doe Valley community, on Highway 67 between Mountain City and Butler. [S1233] The Butler museum notes that inmates from the prison finished building its depot-style museum in 1999. [S1237]
Shady Valley lies high between Holston Mountain and Iron Mountain. The county government gives its elevation as 2,785 feet, calls it the second-highest community in Tennessee, and says the valley once held an estimated 10,000 acres of cranberry bogs, now remembered each October in the Cranberry Festival. [S1233] The Nature Conservancy calls the valley a rare high-elevation remnant of the last Ice Age, a mosaic of sphagnum and cranberry bogs and white pine and hemlock forest where plants and animals also found in New England have survived. [S1260]
Most of the wetlands did not survive the twentieth century. From the 1930s through the 1950s, the Conservancy says, a growing population drained most of the valley’s wetlands for farming. The Conservancy bought its first preserve there, the Jess Jenkins Cranberry Bog, in 1979, later transferring it to East Tennessee State University, and now owns four preserves of more than 800 acres. The valley is one of only two places in Tennessee where American cranberry grows naturally, and its wetlands shelter the southern bog turtle, a federally threatened species. [S1260]
Since the 1990s the county has leaned on its mountains. The encyclopedia says the population grew by 27 percent between 1990 and 2000, to 17,499, and that the Appalachian Trail crosses the main highway at the Johnson–Sullivan county line; it prints the road as U.S. 412, but the highway that runs from Mountain City toward Bristol is U.S. 421. [S1231][S1233] The trail also follows the west and north sides of Watauga Lake, which the Forest Service manages for boating, fishing and camping. [S1253] The encyclopedia also mentions the Johnson County Welcome Center, one of the largest in the state, and a municipal airport with a 4,500-foot runway. [S1231] The chamber of commerce describes the log welcome center as a museum of historic artifacts donated by county residents. [S1261]
The Butler and Watauga Valley Heritage Museum opened in 2000, its own site says, to honor the people of Butler and the Watauga, Roan and Elk valleys. [S1238] Another page of the same site says the building, modeled on the old Butler depot, was finished in 1999, and that the Tennessee museum association honored it in 2002. [S1237]
In 2012 a large piece of the county’s middle was saved from the sawmill. The Nature Conservancy says it worked that year with the state and county leaders to buy Doe Mountain, then one of the largest privately owned blocks of forest in the Southern Blue Ridge, which was headed to auction out of bankruptcy and could have been clear-cut. The 8,600-acre tract is now run by the Doe Mountain Recreation Authority, with more than 60 miles of trails for hiking, mountain biking, horseback riding and ATV touring. [S1262]
Floods have shaped this county more than once, and the most recent came on September 27, 2024. The National Weather Service’s storm records say the remnants of Tropical Storm Helene arrived after days of heavy rain and brought catastrophic flash flooding. Water rescues began in Trade at 8:30 that morning, and within an hour floodwater had damaged buildings throughout the community. Flooding spread through Mountain City and north through Laurel Bloomery; workers at the Parkdale plant between Mountain City and Midway were evacuated by helicopter, Antioch Baptist Church near Midway was swept away entirely by Roan Creek, and stretches of Tennessee 91 from Laurel Bloomery to the Virginia line washed out. The record counts one death in the county, a 74-year-old man in a vehicle, and $6.5 million in property damage from that flash flood alone. [S1263]
The state emergency agency’s report the next day listed the Mountain City wastewater treatment plant among those hit by flooding and said FEMA had authorized emergency protective measures for Carter, Johnson and Unicoi counties. [S940] Downstream, Watauga Lake held back part of the flood: TVA reported that the lake behind Watauga Dam rose to an elevation of 1,970.29 feet, about three feet above its previous record. [S1264] The county government notes that Trade’s annual Trade Days and Native American Heritage Festival has been suspended since the storm. [S1233]
Johnson County’s history is spread out along a few mountain highways. A day might include:
Visit: Our Johnson County guide has towns, parks and local news.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1761–69 | Daniel Boone hunts and explores the area [S1231] |
| 1768 | John Honeycutt settles where Roan Creek meets the Watauga [S1238] |
| 1794 | Roan Creek Baptist congregation organized, April 20 [S1241] |
| 1810 | First forge built at Laurel Bloomery [S1242] |
| 1836 | Johnson County created from Carter County; Taylorsville laid out [S1243][S1231] |
| 1837 | First courthouse completed [S1231] |
| 1844 | Taylorsville Reporter founded [S1231] |
| 1862 | Confederate conscription officers sent to Taylorsville [S1246] |
| 1865 | Union troops, including the 1st U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery, posted at Taylorsville, April [S1246] |
| 1866 | Tom Dula captured in Johnson County [S1246] |
| 1868 | Smith’s Mill renamed Butler for Roderick R. Butler [S1239] |
| 1871 | Aenon Seminary founded at Butler [S1239] |
| 1885 | Taylorsville renamed Mountain City [S1244] |
| 1900–10 | Railroad enters the county and reaches Mountain City [S1231] |
| 1911 | Weeks Act allows federal purchase of forest land [S203] |
| 1924 | Rails removed at Backbone Rock; road opens to cars [S1250] |
| 1927–29 | G. B. Grayson and Henry Whitter make their recordings [S1248] |
| 1933 | Clarence Ashley first records "House of the Rising Sun" [S1256] |
| 1940 | Killer flood prompts TVA’s Watauga project [S1238] |
| 1942 | TVA begins Watauga Dam [S1182] |
| 1948 | Watauga Dam finished; gates close December 1 and Old Butler is flooded [S1182][S1238] |
| 1958 | Present courthouse built [S1231] |
| 1962 | Ashley plays Carnegie Hall with Pete Seeger [S1255] |
| 1979 | First Nature Conservancy bog preserve in Shady Valley [S1260] |
| 1990 | Northeast Correctional Complex opens [S1259] |
| 2000 | Butler and Watauga Valley Heritage Museum opens [S1238] |
| 2012 | Doe Mountain protected [S1262] |
| 2024 | Helene floods Trade, Mountain City and Laurel Bloomery, September 27 [S1263] |
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 Daniel Boone came through in 1761 (the county government), hunted here between 1761 and 1769 (the Tennessee Encyclopedia), or was here in 1769 (the Museum of Butler and a DAR trail marker); whether Trade is ’one of the oldest’ settlements in Tennessee (the state marker) or the oldest (the county government); whether John Honeycutt settled at the mouth of Roan Creek in 1768 (the Butler museum and the county) or simply ’before 1770’ (the state marker); whether Maymead Stock Farm was settled in 1746, as its state marker reads, a date that would put it ahead of the first recorded settlers by two decades; whether Thomas Johnson was one of the county’s first magistrates (the Tennessee Blue Book) or died in 1835, before the county existed (the encyclopedia and the Butler museum); whether the first county court met at the home of his son William Johnson (the encyclopedia) or at the Pleasant Grove School House on May 2, 1836 (the county government); whether Taylorsville was incorporated in 1866 (the encyclopedia) or the town’s incorporation dates from February 1, 1905 (the act on file with UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service, which may record a later re-incorporation); who caught Tom Dula, a posse in Taylorsville (the Civil War Trails marker), a posse at Trade (the county government) or a search party led by Maj. James Grayson (the Grayson music marker), whom a mural marker calls a colonel; whether the Backbone Rock tunnel was cut in 1901 (the Forest Service web page) or around 1908 (the Forest Service’s own marker at the rock); whether the railroad reached Butler in 1902 (the state marker and the museum) or the county in 1900 (the encyclopedia); whether the Butler museum building was completed in 1999 or the museum opened in 2000 (two pages of the museum’s own site); and whether Watauga Lake dates from 1942, when TVA began the dam (the Forest Service says it ’impounded’ the rivers that year), 1948, when TVA finished the dam and closed the gates on December 1 (TVA, the state marker and the museum), or 1949 (the encyclopedia). The encyclopedia also prints the Appalachian Trail’s highway crossing at the Sullivan line as U.S. 412; the highway that runs from Mountain City toward Bristol is U.S. 421. We don’t republish encyclopedia, museum or marker text — follow the links for the full articles.
Hero art: our illustrative map of historic East Tennessee counties, reused from the site’s county guides. It is a drawn map, not to scale, showing where Johnson County sits in Tennessee’s far northeastern corner; it is not a photograph of Johnson County, and no endorsement by any agency or source is implied. Reused source numbers (S38, S203, S940, S1182) match the same sources on our other history pages. Corrections: [email protected].