East Tennessee History · County by county
A log fort where two rivers make the Tennessee, a frontier town that served as capital twice, a city that split in two in 1861 and was besieged in 1863, a railroad boomtown, the home of TVA and the state’s flagship university, and the small city that threw a World’s Fair.
Knox County sits at the center of the Great Valley of East Tennessee, at the spot where the Holston and French Broad rivers join to form the Tennessee River. [S9] It was created on June 11, 1792, while Tennessee was still the federal Southwest Territory, and it is named, like its county seat, for Henry Knox, George Washington’s secretary of war. [S9] Knoxville began as James White’s frontier fort in 1786, became the territorial capital, then the first capital of the new state of Tennessee, and grew into the region’s railroad, wholesale and university town. [S8][S9] Since then it has been a divided city in the Civil War, the headquarters of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the home campus of the University of Tennessee, and the host of the 1982 World’s Fair. [S8][S9][S29]
The county had 478,971 people in the 2020 Census. [S165] It has only two incorporated places: the city of Knoxville (190,740 people in 2020), the county seat, and the town of Farragut (23,506), which reaches a short way into Loudon County. [S117][S166][S167] Everything else, including Powell, Halls, Karns, Mascot, Corryton, Gibbs, Hardin Valley and Concord, is an unincorporated community; Census lists Halls, Karns, Mascot and Powell as census-designated places. [S117][S9]
Long before there was a Knoxville, people lived along these rivers. Mound-building towns of the Mississippian era stood along the Tennessee and its branches across this part of the valley, and by the 1700s the Cherokee held and hunted the land, with their main Overhill towns farther south on the Little Tennessee. [S2][S3] (Our chapter 1 tells that longer story.) The University of Tennessee’s McClung Museum now works with four Native nations it counts as connected to Knox County, the Cherokee Nation, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, on how that history is shown. [S164]
The land that became Knox County was opened to white settlement in stages and under pressure. A 1785 treaty at Dumplin Creek, made with the breakaway State of Franklin rather than the United States, opened parts of what became Knox and four neighboring counties to settlers. [S92][S6] Then on July 2, 1791, on the riverbank near the mouth of First Creek in what is now downtown Knoxville, territorial governor William Blount and 48 Cherokee leaders signed the Treaty of the Holston. It gave up a long stretch of land east of the Clinch River that took in present-day Knox County, [S143] A state marker in the yard of the old courthouse block on Main Street points toward the spot. [S143]
James White was a Revolutionary War veteran from North Carolina who acquired a large tract between First and Second creeks, on the river about five miles below the junction. [S8][S9][S142] There he put up a two-story log house; the state marker on the site and the Tennessee Encyclopedia both date it to 1786, while the Knoxville History Project says White built it around 1785. [S141][S8][S142] Outbuildings and a stockade followed, and the little compound became known as White’s Fort. [S141][S142] It sat on the southern edge of frontier settlement, and attacks remained a real danger: in 1793 a Creek and Cherokee war party killed thirteen settlers at Alexander Cavet’s fortified house before turning back without assaulting Knoxville itself. [S8]
The fort’s original spot is now under a parking garage near First Presbyterian Church. In the 1950s preservationists found that timbers from White’s cabin had been reused in a house in South Knoxville. Led by the City Association of Women’s Clubs, they moved and rebuilt the cabin and fort on East Hill Avenue, where it opened to the public in 1970. [S142] White himself is remembered as the city’s founder, and the Civic Coliseum carries his name. [S142]
In 1791 Governor Blount chose White’s Fort as the capital of the Territory South of the River Ohio and renamed it Knoxville for Henry Knox. [S8][S9][S141] The same year White and surveyor Charles McClung laid off 64 half-acre lots, set aside ground for a church and a college, and gave the streets names borrowed from Philadelphia and Baltimore. [S8] The territorial government settled in during 1792, moving from Rocky Mount on the Watauga. [S7] The county followed on June 11, 1792, carved from Greene and Hawkins counties; it is one of only eight counties created under the territorial government. [S9] Over the next half century Knox gave up land to help form four newer counties: Blount in 1795, Anderson and Roane in 1801, and Union in 1850. [S9]
Blount built his family a frame house on the bluff above the river, beginning about 1792, at a time when nearly everyone around him lived in log. [S10][S147] Cherokee visitors reportedly called it "the house with many glass eyes" for its rows of windows. [S10] A small office behind the house served, in practice, as the capitol of the territory. [S147] The 1794 charter of Blount College, the school that became the University of Tennessee, was issued here, and in 1796 Blount helped write Tennessee’s first constitution, which is why the city calls the house "the birthplace of Tennessee." [S148][S146] The house left the Blount family in 1820, was altered by a string of later owners, and in the 1920s was nearly torn down for a parking lot before a Daughters of the American Revolution chapter and the new Blount Mansion Association stepped in. It opened as a museum in 1930 and is a National Historic Landmark. [S10][S147][S145]
Knoxville also had Tennessee’s first newspaper, though it was born somewhere else. At Blount’s invitation, printer George Roulstone hauled a press over the mountains from North Carolina and printed the first issue of the Knoxville Gazette on November 5, 1791, in a log cabin on the courthouse square in Rogersville, while Knoxville was still being laid out. The paper moved to Knoxville in the fall of 1792. [S144][S8] (Our chapter 4 follows the territory’s road to statehood.)
When Tennessee became the 16th state on June 1, 1796, Knoxville became its first capital. [S7][S9] It held that role until 1812, apart from a single day in September 1807 when the legislature met in Kingston to satisfy a treaty promise, then adjourned back to Knoxville; it served once more in 1817–18 before the capital moved for good to Middle Tennessee. [S9][S69] (Our Roane County history tells the Kingston story.) There was no capitol building in those years; lawmakers met in taverns and other borrowed rooms. [S9]
The governor for most of the Knoxville years was John Sevier, the frontier commander and former governor of the State of Franklin, who lived in Knox County and held the office for six terms. [S9][S150] His last home and farm, Marble Springs, south of the river, is now a state historic site named for its springs and for the pink marble quarried nearby. [S150] Blount College, meanwhile, held classes in its president’s home until a building on Gay Street went up in 1799; it was rechartered as East Tennessee College in 1807. [S148] (See our Sevier County history for more on Sevier’s career.)
Early on, being the capital and sitting in the middle of the valley made Knoxville the region’s chief trading town. [S9] But the rivers that gave it a start also held it back: shoals and shallows made the Tennessee a poor highway to the outside world, and through the first half of the 1800s Knoxville fell behind Nashville and Memphis. [S9] It had only about 730 people in 1810 and around 2,000 by 1850. [S8] East Tennessee College moved up to "the Hill" west of downtown in 1826, the campus UT still occupies, and became East Tennessee University in 1840. [S149][S168]
The answer came by rail. In 1855 the East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad reached Knoxville from the south, and the East Tennessee and Virginia line soon tied the town to the northeast as well. [S8][S9] Knoxville more than doubled in the 1850s, to about 5,000 people by 1860. [S8]
The railroad also made Knoxville a prize. In 1861 East Tennessee as a whole voted strongly to stay in the Union, but Knoxville itself, tied by trade to Charleston and Savannah, voted with the majority of the state to leave. [S13][S8] On April 27, 1861, before Tennessee seceded, rival Union and Confederate rallies met on Gay Street at the same time: Andrew Johnson spoke against secession at Gay and Main while a Confederate regiment and band marched past. [S151] Unionist editor William G. "Parson" Brownlow kept up a fierce attack on secession in his newspaper. [S8] Once Confederate troops took control, Unionists who burned railroad bridges in November 1861 brought on a harsh crackdown that filled the jail and drove many Union men out of the region. [S8][S15] (Our chapter 6 covers the wider story.)
In September 1863 Union general Ambrose Burnside marched in and ringed the town with earthworks. [S8][S151] In November, Confederate general James Longstreet came north from Chattanooga to retake it. On November 16, Burnside fought a delaying battle at Campbell’s Station, on ground that is now the town of Farragut, and fell back into his lines. [S156][S152] One fort on the western ridge was named for Union cavalry general William P. Sanders, mortally wounded slowing the Confederate advance. [S152] At dawn on November 29, 1863, about 4,000 of Longstreet’s men charged Fort Sanders across telegraph wire strung between stumps, into a deep ditch and up an icy wall. The attack collapsed within about twenty minutes, at a cost the Tennessee Encyclopedia puts at 813 Confederate casualties. [S152][S153][S8] Longstreet pulled away in early December as Union reinforcements approached, and Knoxville stayed in Union hands for the rest of the war. [S152][S9]
Brownlow returned to Knoxville in triumph in 1863, became governor of Tennessee in 1865 and later a U.S. senator. [S9] He is buried in Old Gray Cemetery on North Broadway, where Confederate officers such as Col. Henry Ashby also lie. [S154] The Mabry-Hazen House on Mabry’s Hill was used by both armies; Bethel Cemetery below it holds more than 1,600 Confederate soldiers. [S155][S154]
After the war Knoxville became the warehouse of East Tennessee. Wholesale houses around Jackson Avenue and Depot Street, today’s Old City, shipped goods to country stores across the region, and by 1896 the city claimed to be the South’s third-largest wholesale center, behind only Atlanta and New Orleans. [S8] Ninety-seven new factories opened between 1880 and 1887, and by 1900 the city had about 32,600 people. [S8] Iron and railroad products, textiles, coal, lumber, marble and zinc carried the local economy into the 20th century. [S9][S8]
Freedom brought thousands of African Americans to Knoxville after Union troops arrived; by 1880 about a third of the city was Black, and Knoxville College opened in 1875 to educate them. [S8][S9] The decades that followed were not easy. Political leaders gerrymandered Black voters out of real power in 1894, and in 1919 the city went through a short but violent race riot. [S8] The neighborhood of West Knoxville, annexed in 1897 and now called Fort Sanders, was the setting for James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family. [S8] East Tennessee University, made the state’s land-grant school in 1869, took the name University of Tennessee in 1879. [S149][S168]
Knoxville showed itself off with a run of fairs at Chilhowee Park, east of downtown. The Appalachian Exposition of 1910, the first of its kind in the southern Appalachians, and a second one in 1911 promoted the region’s industry and resources. [S157][S9] The National Conservation Exposition of 1913, opening September 1, drew more than a million visitors and speakers including Booker T. Washington and Helen Keller. [S158]
By the 1930s growth had slowed again, and the New Deal changed the city’s course. [S9] The Tennessee Valley Authority was created in May 1933 to control floods, improve navigation, make electricity and help develop the valley; its first project was Norris Dam, just north of Knox County in Anderson County. [S21][S159] TVA’s leaders made Knoxville their base, and the agency has kept its headquarters here ever since; it is still on West Summit Hill Drive downtown and became one of the city’s big employers. [S9][S159] (See chapter 9, our Norris Lake guide and our Anderson County history.)
At the same time a group of Knoxvillians led by Col. David Chapman pushed hard for a national park in the Smokies, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was dedicated in 1940. [S9][S20] Tourism to the mountains, with Knoxville as the gateway city, followed. [S9] During World War II the secret city of Oak Ridge grew up just over the county line, and after the war its labs and the rapidly growing University of Tennessee did much to reshape Knoxville’s economy. [S9][S23] (See chapter 10 and our Oak Ridge guide.)
Ayres Hall, the tower that is UT’s best-known landmark, opened in 1921 after the legislature’s first million-dollar appropriation for the university. [S168] After 1945 the university grew into a major research school, and in 1968 it became the flagship of a statewide UT System. [S9][S149][S168] UT’s growth, Oak Ridge, TVA and later Pellissippi State Community College, founded in 1974, made Knox County a center of education and research as well as trade. [S9]
The postwar city also lost a great deal. In the decades after World War II, urban renewal cleared Black neighborhoods near downtown, including the area around the Civic Coliseum. Out of that loss, residents founded the Beck Cultural Exchange Center in 1975 in a 1912 house on Dandridge Avenue to save the history of Black Knoxville. [S160] Out west, the Town of Farragut incorporated on January 16, 1980, named for Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, the Navy’s first admiral, who was born in the area; it is the county’s only incorporated place besides Knoxville. [S156][S117]
In 1980 the Wall Street Journal called Knoxville a "scruffy little city." Two years later that city held a World’s Fair. [S162][S161] The Knoxville International Energy Exposition ran from May 1 to October 31, 1982, on an old L&N rail yard between downtown and the UT campus, with the theme "Energy Turns the World." [S161][S162][S29] President Ronald Reagan opened it, about twenty nations took part, and more than 11 million visitors came through the gates. [S161][S162] UT students worked the fair by the thousands and the university housed visitors in its dorms. [S162]
The fair’s symbol, the Sunsphere, is a 266-foot steel tower topped with a gold-glass globe, designed by Hubert Bebb and William Denton of the Knoxville firm Community Tectonics. [S163][S162] Critics at the time were not kind, but it still stands, along with the fabric-roofed Tennessee Amphitheatre, in what is now World’s Fair Park. [S163][S162] The fair broke about even, and the city paid off its fair bonds in 2007. [S162][S161] It did not bring the quick downtown rebirth its backers hoped for, but it left the city a landmark and a park. [S162][S8] (See chapter 12.)
Knox County keeps growing: the Census Bureau’s estimates put it past half a million people in the mid-2020s. [S165] The old wholesale blocks of the Old City and the storefronts of Gay Street and Market Square, once the heart of a railroad town, are busy again. The county’s history is unusually easy to visit: a frontier fort, a territorial capitol, a governor’s farm, Civil War forts and cemeteries, a Black history center, a university museum and a World’s Fair tower are all within a short drive of one another. [S142][S145][S150][S154][S160][S163] For towns, parks and news, see our Knox County guide.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. A.D. 900–1600 | Mississippian mound towns along the Tennessee Valley rivers [S2] |
| 1700s | Cherokee country; Overhill towns on the Little Tennessee [S3] |
| 1785 | Dumplin Creek treaty opens land south of the French Broad [S92] |
| 1785–86 | James White builds his log house; White’s Fort grows around it [S141][S142][S8] |
| 1791 | Treaty of the Holston signed near First Creek, July 2 [S143] |
| 1791 | Blount picks White’s Fort as territorial capital and names it Knoxville [S8][S9] |
| 1791 | First Knoxville Gazette printed at Rogersville, Nov. 5; moves to Knoxville in 1792 [S144] |
| 1792 | Knox County created, June 11; Blount begins his frame house [S9][S147] |
| 1793 | Attack at Cavet’s Station west of town [S8] |
| 1794 | Blount College chartered [S148] |
| 1796 | Tennessee becomes a state, June 1; Knoxville is its first capital [S7][S9] |
| 1807 | Legislature meets one day in Kingston, Sept. 21; East Tennessee College chartered [S69][S148] |
| 1812 | Capital leaves Knoxville (it returns briefly in 1817–18) [S9] |
| 1826 | East Tennessee College moves to "the Hill" [S149] |
| 1855 | East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad reaches Knoxville [S8][S9] |
| 1861 | Rival Union and Confederate rallies on Gay Street, April 27 [S151] |
| 1863 | Burnside takes Knoxville; Campbell’s Station, Nov. 16; Fort Sanders, Nov. 29 [S8][S156][S152] |
| 1865 | Brownlow becomes governor [S9] |
| 1875 | Knoxville College founded [S8][S9] |
| 1879 | East Tennessee University renamed the University of Tennessee [S149] |
| 1896 | Knoxville claims rank as the South’s third-largest wholesale center [S8] |
| 1910–11 | Appalachian Expositions at Chilhowee Park [S157] |
| 1913 | National Conservation Exposition draws more than a million visitors [S158] |
| 1919 | Race riot in Knoxville [S8] |
| 1921 | Ayres Hall opens at UT [S168] |
| 1930 | Blount Mansion opens as a museum [S10] |
| 1933 | TVA created and based in Knoxville [S21][S9] |
| 1940 | Great Smoky Mountains National Park dedicated [S20] |
| 1968 | UT System created [S149] |
| 1970 | Rebuilt James White’s Fort opens to the public [S142] |
| 1975 | Beck Cultural Exchange Center opens [S160] |
| 1980 | Town of Farragut incorporated, Jan. 16 [S156] |
| 1982 | World’s Fair, May 1–Oct. 31 [S161][S29] |
| 2020 | Census counts 478,971 people in Knox County [S165] |
Start downtown at James White’s Fort on East Hill Avenue, then walk a few blocks west to Blount Mansion on West Hill Avenue; the two are among the seven Historic Homes of Knoxville, which sell a combined pass. [S142][S145][S150] Walk up to the old courthouse block on Main Street for the Treaty of the Holston and "Divided City" markers, then down Gay Street to the Museum of East Tennessee History at 601 South Gay. [S143][S151][S154] After lunch on Market Square, head west to World’s Fair Park; the Sunsphere’s fourth-floor observation deck looks out over downtown, the river and the UT campus. [S169] Next door on campus, the McClung Museum is free and has a permanent exhibit on the Battle of Fort Sanders; afterward, walk to the Fort Sanders neighborhood to see the battle’s monuments. [S154][S164] In the afternoon, choose between East Knoxville, with the Mabry-Hazen House, Bethel Cemetery and the Beck Cultural Exchange Center on Dandridge Avenue, and a drive south to John Sevier’s Marble Springs farm. [S155][S160][S150] Hours vary by season at every site, so check before you go. Our Blount County history continues the story south of the river, toward Maryville and the mountains.
Visit: James White’s Fort ↗ · Blount Mansion ↗ · Museum of East Tennessee History · Old Gray Cemetery · World’s Fair Park and the Sunsphere · McClung Museum, UT · Mabry-Hazen House and Bethel Cemetery · Beck Cultural Exchange Center · Marble Springs State Historic Site ↗ · Farragut Museum and Campbell Station Inn, Farragut
Every bracketed number on this page links here. Written by My East TN in our own words and checked against each source on 2026-10-28 (ET). Where sources disagree (for example, whether James White built his first cabin in 1785 or 1786, whether the Knoxville Gazette's first issue should count as a Knoxville or a Rogersville paper, how long the assault on Fort Sanders lasted, and whether the national park was established in 1934 or later), we give both or leave the exact figure out. We don’t republish encyclopedia or museum text — follow the links for the full articles.
Images: My East TN photos and Studio illustrations only. Corrections: [email protected].