East Tennessee History · County by county
Where the Tennessee River leaves its gorge and the Sequatchie Valley runs out: Chickamauga towns at Nickajack and Running Water, destroyed in 1794; a county made from Cherokee lands in 1817 and named for Francis Marion; a county seat at Jasper on land from Betsy Pack; Kelly’s Ferry on the removal road of 1838; Union armies crossing the river in 1863; English money that built South Pittsburg and opened mines at Whitwell; a cement company town at Richard City; Hales Bar, the first dam on the main Tennessee, and the TVA dam that replaced it; and a middle school that collected millions of paper clips.
The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s Patsy B. Beene says Marion County lies in the southern part of the Cumberland Plateau and the Sequatchie Valley, covers about five hundred square miles and was established in 1817 out of Cherokee lands, and that it was named for Gen. Francis Marion, a Revolutionary War leader in South Carolina. [S1517] The Tennessee Blue Book adds that Marion’s guerrilla tactics won him the title "Swamp Fox," and it lists Marion County in the eastern grand division of the state. [S38]
UT’s County Technical Assistance Service counted 28,837 people in Marion County in 2020, up from 28,237 in 2010. It lists Jasper, Kimball, Monteagle, New Hope, Orme, Powells Crossroads, South Pittsburg and Whitwell as the county’s incorporated cities and towns, along with a piece of the city of Chattanooga. [S1663] UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service puts Jasper, the county seat, in the East grand division on Central time. [S1664] One town is an exception: Monteagle, which reaches into Franklin, Grundy and Marion counties, is listed by the same directory in the Middle grand division. [S1665]
The county’s story runs from Chickamauga Cherokee towns beside the river and the expedition that destroyed them in 1794, through a county seat laid out at Jasper, a ferry on the removal road of 1838 and Union armies crossing the river in 1863, to English capital that built South Pittsburg and opened coal mines at Whitwell, a cement company town at Richard City, Hales Bar Dam, and TVA’s Nickajack Dam, which replaced it. [S1517][S1666][S1667][S1668][S1669]
The encyclopedia’s Edward T. Luther calls the Sequatchie Valley a long, arrow-straight slash into the Appalachian Plateau, about five miles wide on average and 1,000 to 1,500 feet deep, running some two hundred miles from Cumberland County, Tennessee, to Blount County, Alabama; only its northeastern seventy-five miles lie in Tennessee. Walden Ridge forms the valley’s southeast wall and runs south to the Tennessee River gorge just north of the point where Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama meet. [S1511]
The river was the hard part. The National Register nomination for the Hales Bar powerhouse says the Tennessee’s passage through Hamilton and Marion counties was known for its whirlpools through a mountain gorge, "The Pot," "The Suck" and "The Skillet," and that the 33-mile stretch from Chattanooga to Shellmound was the most dangerous on the whole river. [S1670] TVA’s history of the dam calls that stretch "the Narrows" or the Tennessee River Gorge and says John Donelson, a founder of Fort Nashborough, recorded his trials there in his Journal of a Voyage. [S1671] TVA says its Nickajack Reservoir offers the scenery of the Tennessee River Gorge, "known as the Grand Canyon of Tennessee." [S1672]
Beene writes that Native Americans built their towns on the rivers here and were living along them when white settlers came, and that the newcomers kept the Indian names Tennessee and Sequatchie. She says recent research indicates that in 1560 Spanish soldiers from Tristán de Luna’s expedition entered the Tennessee River valley near present-day Marion County and visited the main town of a chiefdom called the Napochies. By the later 1700s, she writes, the Cherokees dominated the area. [S1517]
The encyclopedia’s Fred S. Rolater explains how the river towns came to be. Cherokees who opposed the 1775 Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, led by Dragging Canoe, moved into abandoned Creek towns along Chickamauga Creek and began calling themselves Chickamaugas. After Virginia and North Carolina troops burned those villages in 1779, Dragging Canoe moved the group west of Lookout Mountain and set up the five Lower Towns: Running Water and Nickajack in Tennessee, Lookout Mountain in Georgia, and Long Island and Crowtown in Alabama. By then, Rolater says, the Chickamaugas included Upper Creeks, Shawnees, French boatmen, Black people and Scots traders as well as Cherokees, and the Shawnee warrior Cheesekau and his younger brother Tecumseh lived among them. [S1666]
From these towns the Chickamaugas fought the settlements for years. Rolater writes that they struck the Cumberland settlements, attacked Fort Nashborough in 1781 and forced travelers between East and Middle Tennessee north onto the Wilderness Trail. Dragging Canoe died suddenly on February 29, 1792, he says, the day after a victory celebration, and leadership passed to Young Tassel. [S1666] A state marker on U.S. 64 near Haletown says Dragging Canoe is buried near the site of Running Water. [S1673]
Beene tells the story that led to the end of the towns. In 1789, she writes, the chiefs Catetoy and Vann and forty warriors in canoes intercepted the boat of Col. James Brown, who was taking his family to Middle Tennessee to claim land awarded for his Revolutionary War service. The attackers killed the men and captured the women and children, among them a youth named Joseph Brown, who later escaped. [S1517] Rolater says Brown spent a year at Nickajack. [S1666]
In 1794 Joseph Brown guided the Cumberland settlers’ expedition to Nickajack, which destroyed the towns of Nickajack, Running Water and Long Island, Beene writes; afterward, she says, the Indians made a treaty allowing whites into the lower part of the valley. [S1517] Rolater says the force was a Southwest Territory militia unit under Maj. James Ore that crossed Monteagle Mountain, and that by the end of 1794 the remaining Chickamaugas had joined the Overhill Cherokees in making treaties with the Tennesseans. [S1666]
Two state markers record the attack. The Running Water marker says Ore’s troops defeated the Chickamauga Cherokees under John Watts and destroyed their town, Tuskigagee, about 700 yards to the southeast, in the pass. [S1673] The Nickajack Cave marker, now reported missing from the Interstate 24 rest area, said the town of Nickajack, or Anikusatiyi, stood about five miles southeast between the river and a cave where plunder was stored. [S1674] The sources do not agree on the dates; see the section on disagreements below. TVA says Nickajack Dam was later named after the town. [S1675]
A state marker near Guild says the federal government and the state built the Federal-Georgia Road from 1805 to 1808 to connect Tennessee to the Atlantic seaboard: from a fork at Spring Place, Georgia, one branch ran northeast to Tellico Blockhouse and the other northwest to the Stones River and the road to Nashville. [S1676]
When Tennessee became a state, Beene writes, the Sequatchie Valley was part of Roane County, and in 1807 the upper end became Bledsoe County, which took in the whole valley, though treaties with the Cherokees kept white settlers out of the lower end. She says the first white settlers are thought to have been Amos Griffith and William and James Standifer, who came in 1805, while the area was still part of Roane. [S1517]
The state archaeologists’ 2001 study of the Trail of Tears lists Marion County sites recorded in 1979 that include the towns of Running Water, Long Island and Nickajack, Nickajack Cave, and farmsteads of the Lowry family, among them the farmstead of Elizabeth Lowry Pack and a farmstead and ferry of John and Elizabeth Lowry. [S1549] The state marker for Betsy Pack in Jasper says she was born Elizabeth Lowery, a daughter of Chief John Lowery, and lived after her marriage in a house about sixty yards from the marker. [S1677]
The Blue Book says Marion County was created in 1817 from Indian lands, and UT’s county service gives 1817 as the year the county originated. [S38][S1663] The encyclopedia says the first court met in 1817 in the house of John Shropshire, in what is now Whitwell. Court then met for a year in the old Cheek house, a two-story double log house south of Whitwell, at a place called Cheekville and later Liberty, where court had been held, Beene writes, while the county was still in North Carolina. [S1517]
Beene names the commissioners who chose a permanent seat: William Stone, David Oats, Burgess Matthews, Alexander Kelly, William King, William Stevens and Davis Miller. She says John Kelly was the first clerk of the court and Alan Griffith the first registrar. [S1517]
In 1819, Beene writes, the county seat moved to Jasper, named for Sergeant Jasper of Revolutionary War fame. She says Betsy Pack, a Cherokee woman, sold the commissioners forty acres, and that the courthouse built in 1820 stood near the center of the tract, where the present courthouse stands. [S1517] The state marker puts it differently: it says Betsy Pack donated the ground on which Jasper was laid out in 1820, when the county seat moved there from Cheekville, near Whitwell, about twelve miles northeast. [S1677] A community marker in South Pittsburg also says Jasper was formed in 1820 on land donated by Betsy Pack; it says downtown sits on the historic Dixie Highway (U.S. 41), which it calls a critical Civil War supply route, and that Jasper keeps one of the oldest railroad depots on the Sequatchie Valley line. [S1678]
UT’s municipal directory says Jasper was incorporated under a private act of 1851–52 and lists 3,279 residents in the 2010 census. [S1664] The county’s museum guide says the Jasper Museum of History collects the history of the Jasper area, with Civil War artifacts, a room on the Pryor Institute, school annuals and early business photographs. [S1679]
The National Register nomination for Kelly’s Ferry Road and Cemetery says Col. John Kelly (1779–1845) built the ferry, probably by about 1835, on a calmer stretch below "the Suck," and that a road ran from the ferry through a narrow gorge toward Wauhatchie. The nomination says Kelly came to Bledsoe County in 1808, served as a captain in the War of 1812 and represented Bledsoe in the General Assembly from 1817 to 1819, and that he is buried in the cemetery at Kelly’s Ferry. [S1667]
Before the removal, the nomination says, the Kelly’s Ferry area marked the western edge of the Cherokee Nation, and in 1838 the ferry was a campsite and one of the main river crossings for Cherokees forced west. [S1667] The state archaeologists’ study gives the details for one party. The Bell detachment, about 650 to 700 people who had supported the removal treaty of 1835, traveled with a military escort under Lt. Edward Deas. It crossed the Tennessee a third time at Kelly’s Ferry on October 21, 1838, where Deas paid John Kelley for the ferriage, and the study traces its road along the river to Mullens Creek and by the East Valley Road into Jasper. Deas issued vouchers at the head of Battle Creek on October 23 and 24 and on Cumberland Mountain on October 25, which suggests the party climbed the mountain near Monteagle. [S1549]
The same study says Capt. G. S. Drane’s detachment, which left the camps above Ross’s Landing on June 17, 1838, traveled overland because the river was low, probably followed much of the same road to west of Jasper, and near Kimball turned south along the route of present U.S. 72 into Alabama. [S1549] The Kelly’s Ferry road served the public until 1952, and the last burial in its cemetery was in 1988, the nomination says. [S1667]
Marion County lost land when Sequatchie County was formed in 1857. The National Register nomination for the Sequatchie County Courthouse says that on September 21, 1857, the General Assembly annexed the First and Second Civil Districts of Marion County and the Tenth District of Bledsoe County to Hamilton County, and on December 9, 1857, detached them to create Sequatchie County, a step it describes as a way around a limit in the 1835 state constitution. [S1515] The encyclopedia’s entry on Sequatchie County says only that the new county came from a section of Hamilton County, while the Blue Book says it was created from Hamilton, Marion and Warren counties. [S1510][S38]
Beene writes that sentiment in Marion County was so divided during the Civil War that members of the same family could be found in both armies, and that the railroad and major turnpikes brought troops from both sides through the county. [S1517]
The first fighting came in 1862. A Chickamauga Campaign Heritage Trail marker in South Pittsburg says Union Gen. Don Carlos Buell, fearing a Confederate attack after Shiloh, sent two divisions to fortify the west bank of the Tennessee at the mouth of Battle Creek, a work named Fort McCook. On August 27, 1862, Confederate Gen. Samuel B. Maxey crossed at Bridgeport, drove the Federals into the fort and shelled it from across the river until they withdrew in the night. Maxey called the fort "the key to the Sequatchie Valley." The Confederates held it for a time as Fort Maxey, and Union troops later called it Fort Thomas. [S1680]
A Tennessee Civil War Trails marker in Monteagle explains what happened next. In August 1862 Buell spread his army through Franklin, Marion and Grundy counties while Gen. Braxton Bragg marched north from Chattanooga toward Kentucky. On August 23 Buell ordered his forces at Jasper, McMinnville and Tracy City to concentrate at Altamont, but, the marker says, it was too late: Bragg reached the Kentucky border before the Federals got across the rutted mountain roads. [S1681]
A marker at the Shellmound campground says Samuel Love’s ferry between Jasper and Shellmound linked the county with the railroad at Shellmound and became a major crossing for the Union army in the Chickamauga Campaign. In late August 1863 Col. Edward King’s brigade shelled the Confederates out of Shellmound, burned the Nickajack bridge and captured the ferryboat; soldiers built flatboats on Love’s farm, and Reynolds’s division crossed from August 29 to September 2, followed by three divisions of Gen. Crittenden’s 21st Corps. [S1682] The Fort McCook marker says Gen. John M. Brannan’s division crossed at Battle Creek on rafts built from scrap lumber and finished on September 2, losing one soldier, who drowned when a mule knocked him off a raft. [S1680]
The railroad itself was a casualty. A marker near Whiteside says retreating Confederates burned the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad bridge over Running Water Creek in the summer of 1863, a covered, iron-roofed span that a Union private described as about 150 feet high. The army rebuilt it under a Chicago contractor named Boomer, who, an Illinois officer wrote, had forty days "at the outside" to finish. [S1683]
The National Register nomination for the McNabb Mines says David McNabb, who settled on the north bank of the river while the Cherokees were still on the south side, was mining coal before the war to sell to steamboats. When Union forces occupied the area in 1863, the mines were taken over for the army and run by Jonathan Prater, with forty miners brought from the St. Louis area; they complained about seams only 12 to 24 inches thick and about the risk of capture north of the Union lines, and Prater moved the work to a seam near Kelly’s Ferry. [S1684] The state marker for Nickajack Cave says the Confederacy used the cave as a source of saltpeter, and TVA says it was mined for saltpeter during the Civil War. [S1674][S1675]
The Kelly’s Ferry nomination says the ferry road became part of the Union "Cracker Line" used to supply the troops besieged in Chattanooga in 1863. [S1667]
Industry, Beene writes, marked the county’s postwar history. In 1877, she says, James Bowron and associates from England brought enough capital into the valley to develop the iron and coal industries: coal mines opened at Whitwell, coke ovens operated at Victoria, iron ore came from Inman and smelters dominated South Pittsburg. [S1517]
The National Register nomination for the South Pittsburg Historic District tells the story of the company. It says the Southern States Coal, Iron and Land Company, known as the "Old English Company," founded South Pittsburg about 1873 at the site of the Battle Creek community, where Bowron had already built an iron foundry. Bowron persuaded his partners, Thomas Whitwell, a metallurgist; a Quaker banker named Pike; and Joseph Cliff, a firebrick maker, to buy 3,000 acres for a town, and in 1876 the company began building machine shops, foundries, furnaces and houses. The nomination calls Whitwell, formerly Cheekville, a coal mining community; Victoria the site of the coke ovens; and Inman the place of the iron mines, all "Old English Company" towns that were to feed South Pittsburg. [S1668]
The founders died in 1877 and 1878, the nomination says, and American interests bought the company’s holdings. In 1886, under William Bowron, James Bowron’s son, they formed the South Pittsburg City Company, which added 700 acres to the town. [S1668]
The company hired the civil engineer F. P. Clute to plat the town, the nomination says, with separate commercial, residential and industrial sections: north-south streets named for trees in alphabetical order, numbered cross streets, fifty-by-140-foot lots with alleys, and a mule-drawn streetcar on Cedar Avenue to the industrial park. By 1890 more than 3,500 men worked for stove makers, foundries, a pencil-slat mill, hosiery mills and an ice plant. In the first eight months of 1899 the town shipped 3,139 cars of pig iron, and the nomination says its freight receipts were larger than any town on the line except Nashville and Chattanooga. [S1668]
The boom did not last. The nomination says several foundries moved to Birmingham, Alabama, which had rich iron deposits and better railroad connections, and that when the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company left about 1900 the town suffered a recession. The cement plant at nearby Richard City and cheap power from Hales Bar helped revive it, but after World War I the national slump in coal and then the Depression hit hard, and South Pittsburg became more a residential town than an industrial one. [S1668] Beene adds that J. C. Beene installed a small steam plant to serve the city in the early 1890s. [S1517] UT’s directory says South Pittsburg was incorporated under a private act of 1901. [S1685]
One South Pittsburg foundry lasted. Lodge Cast Iron says Joseph Lodge and his wife, Anna, made their home in South Pittsburg in 1877; that he started the Blacklock Foundry in 1896; and that after a fire destroyed it in May 1910, the company was reborn three months later down the road as Lodge. [S1686] Beene calls Lodge one of the state’s oldest manufacturing firms. [S1517] The company says it began seasoning its cookware at the foundry in 2002 and opened a second, 127,000-square-foot foundry in South Pittsburg at the end of 2017. [S1686]
The McNabb nomination describes McNabb Mines, known locally as Shake Rag, on Hicks Mountain above the north bank of the river, where the McNabb Coal and Coke Company, an Indiana corporation registered in Tennessee on February 7, 1882, built a full company town. It calls the place an early example of the coal company town and says it was abandoned about 1910, leaving sandstone ruins that show the boom and bust of the southern coal fields. [S1684]
UT’s directory says Whitwell incorporated as a home-rule city in 1956. [S1687] The county’s museum guide says Whitwell’s Marion County Coal Miners Museum tells the story of coal mining, which began in small amounts in the 1840s in counties including Marion and became a significant Tennessee industry after the Civil War. [S1679] The community marker in South Pittsburg says Orme, another mining town, sat on a branch line of the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway; its mines shut down after a miners’ strike in 1939, and the tracks were taken up for the war effort, leaving the wooden depot. [S1678] UT’s directory says Orme was incorporated in 1935. [S1688]
The encyclopedia’s Kelly Wilkerson writes that representatives of the Dixie Portland Cement Company chose the small town of Deptford, now Richard City, for a southern cement plant because it sat on a major railroad near the Tennessee River. The company bought about six hundred acres and began building the plant in March 1906. It recruited Richard Hardy, a New York insurance company director, to organize the town, and named Tom Mix, the future western movie star, supervisor of labor. [S1689]
Hardy became the company’s president in 1914, Wilkerson writes, and by 1917 the plant employed more than 650 people. Richard City had company-built houses, a hospital, a school, stores, churches, parks and its own water and sewer systems, and what makes it unique in Tennessee, she says, is that all of them, down to the street fences and utility poles, were built of the plant’s own product, cement. In 1926 Hardy led a merger into the Pennsylvania-Dixie Cement Corporation. [S1689] The National Register nomination for Richard City’s Townsite Historic District describes the neighborhood built for the plant’s office workers about 1907, with cement houses, cement utility poles and cement fences along every street front, reached by a one-lane bridge over Poplar Springs Branch. [S1690]
The school was the centerpiece. Wilkerson says the company began building it in 1925 and opened it in 1926 as the Dixie Portland Memorial School, a memorial to the community’s World War I soldiers, at a cost of about $300,000, to designs by the Chattanooga architect Charles Bearden; it was renamed the Richard Hardy Memorial School after Hardy’s death in 1927. [S1689] Its National Register nomination says Hardy meant it as a community center as well as a school, with the community’s first circulating library and an auditorium for movies and concerts, and notes that Richard City is now part of South Pittsburg. [S1691]
Wilkerson says Penn-Dixie ran it until a 1980 bankruptcy; Moore-McCormack bought it and reopened it as Dixie Cement but closed it in 1982 after most workers refused to give up their union, and Vulcan Materials now uses the site. [S1689]
The encyclopedia’s Patricia Bernard Ezzell writes that Hales Bar was the first main-river, multipurpose dam built on the Tennessee. To improve navigation and provide electricity to Chattanooga, the engineer Jo Conn Guild Sr. promoted a privately funded lock and dam; Congress passed an act allowing it; and the Chattanooga and Tennessee River Power Company began construction in October 1905. [S1669] TVA says Congress passed the enabling law in 1904 and that the company was backed by the Chattanooga entrepreneur Charles E. James and the New York financier Anthony Brady. [S1675]
The powerhouse nomination adds detail. It says the company chose a natural river crossing bar on George Hale’s land about five miles east of Jasper, and that it was the first private company allowed to dam a large navigable river in the United States. Work began on October 18, 1905, with W. J. Oliver and Company of Knoxville as contractor; a village grew up on both banks and in 1907 became the Town of Guild, named for Guild after his death that year. Oliver quit in November 1907 as costs mounted and later won $500,000 in a lawsuit; Baillie and Dumary of New York took over in March 1908. [S1670]
The powerhouse nomination says the limestone under the dam was full of seams, cavities and caves. [S1670] Ezzell writes that flooding and the foundation delayed completion until 1913. [S1669] The nomination says the formal opening came on November 13, 1913, when two granddaughters of Anthony Brady turned on the power, and that the whole project cost about $10 million. [S1670] TVA quotes accounts calling the first day of operation "the greatest celebration that Chattanooga has ever known," and says leaks appeared almost at once; a 1931 study found the dam leaking 1,000 cubic feet per second. [S1675] The powerhouse nomination and TVA both describe a "Rag Gang" paid a dollar a day to plug leaks. [S1670][S1671] A marker at the site says the dam’s 41-foot lock lift, opened November 1, 1913, was the highest in the world at the time. [S1692]
In 1922 the power company merged into the Tennessee Electric Power Company, and TVA acquired Hales Bar in August 1939 when it bought that company’s assets. [S1671][S1670][S1675] The powerhouse nomination says children who lived on the lock side of the river walked to the company school through a narrow, dimly lit tunnel under the dam and up a spiral stair through the powerhouse. [S1670] TVA, looking into the ghost stories that cling to the site, says there is no evidence of a collapse or other tragedy in that tunnel, though there were deadly construction accidents and murders in the camps. [S1671]
The highway age reached the county in the 1920s. The National Register nomination for the Marion Memorial Bridge, six miles southeast of Jasper at Haletown, says the legislature designated a toll bridge site there in 1927; the bridge was built in 1929–30 with two 365-foot Parker trusses and served as a toll bridge from 1931 until 1947, shortening the trip between Chattanooga and Jasper and between Chattanooga and Nashville. It names Judge Michael Allison of Chattanooga, a Marion County native, as a leading advocate of a regional highway, and says the Dixie Highway Association was incorporated in 1915 with headquarters in Chattanooga. [S1693] A memorial on Tennessee 27 honors Allison as the association’s president from its organization in 1915. [S1694] A marker in Jasper says the legislature in 1931 named the road from Chattanooga to Jasper "The Will Cummings Highway" for the Hamilton County judge who pioneered permanent road building there. [S1695]
The county’s industrial towns were not always peaceful. A state marker at Third Street and Cedar Avenue says that in January 1927 H. Wetter Manufacturing Company, South Pittsburg’s largest employer and a union shop, closed its stove factory and tried to reopen with non-union labor. The strike split the town, and political rivalries from the last sheriff’s race turned officer against officer. On Christmas night of 1927 a gunfight at that corner killed Sheriff G. Washington Coppinger, Deputy Lorenza A. Hennessey, City Marshals Benjamin Parker and Ewing Smith and Wetter guard Oran H. LarRowe; Police Chief James Connor died the next day. The marker says the governor, Henry H. Horton, sent the National Guard. [S1696]
Another state marker remembers Jobyna Ralston, born Jobyna Raulston on November 21, 1899, who made her stage debut at age nine at the Wilson Theatre in South Pittsburg, became Harold Lloyd’s leading lady in 1923 and co-starred in Wings, the first film to win the Oscar. [S1697]
A state marker says that in 1917 Marion County had no high school for African Americans. Brown McReynolds led a committee to start one; a school opened in rented space in 1918 and burned in 1919; and in 1921 a twenty-two-room school, built with county money, Rosenwald funds and money raised by citizens, opened in South Pittsburg under his name. M. M. Burnett was principal for twenty-five years, the school served students from Marion County and north Jackson County, Alabama, and a fire of unknown origin destroyed it on July 28, 1965. [S1698]
The state’s 2025 marker for Dr. Hiram Beene Moore says he finished his medical degree in 1944, interned at Lincoln Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, and opened a practice at home a year later, treating patients regardless of race. In 1958 he became the first African American named to the city’s Housing Authority; the National Medical Association named him General Practitioner of the Year in 1964; he served on Lodge’s board; and the city named Moore Park for him. He closed his practice in 2002 and died in 2005. [S1699]
A third marker, in front of the American Legion hall, says James T. Fitz-Gerald Jr., born in South Pittsburg in 1920, was shot down over Germany in 1944 and held in Stalag Luft III, and on February 24, 1948, flew Bell’s XS-1 rocket plane to Mach 1.1 to become the second man to break the sound barrier. He died that September after a crash in California. [S1700]
TVA kept fighting Hales Bar’s leaks. The National Register nomination for the Nickajack project says TVA repaired the foundation in 1940–43, but boils later appeared below the dam and leakage reached 2,000 cubic feet per second; another round of repairs in 1962 did not satisfy, and river traffic was outgrowing the old lock. [S1701] TVA quotes a 1963 Knoxville News-Sentinel story saying the agency, after spending more than $3 million on leaks, had decided "to chuck the whole idea" and build a dam it could trust. [S1675]
The nomination says TVA’s board authorized Nickajack on January 9, 1964, and work began that April 1. TVA bought 6,222 acres in 118 tracts; 82 families were displaced, along with two service stations, two restaurants, two taverns, a motel and a boat dock, and 60 graves were moved. [S1701] TVA says the new dam stands on different rock from the cavernous limestone under Hales Bar, that salvageable parts were moved from the old dam, and that the first generating unit went on line on February 20, 1968, while Hales Bar’s spillway was being demolished; only the powerhouse remains. [S1675] The powerhouse was listed on the National Register on November 25, 2008. [S1670]
TVA describes Nickajack as the sixth step in its stairway of locks on the Tennessee, 81 feet high and 3,767 feet long, with a reservoir reaching 46 miles upstream to Chickamauga Dam. [S1672] It says the reservoir partly flooded Nickajack Cave, the old Chickamauga site; that Johnny Cash wrote of wandering into the cave in the 1960s intending to kill himself; and that the cave is now closed to protect endangered gray bats, which pour out of it at dusk from late April to early October. [S1675][S1672] A TVA marker at the dam, now reported missing, said Nickajack was built to replace Hales Bar, which stood on leaking limestone. [S1702]
Up the Sequatchie River near Victoria, Ketner’s Mill is the landmark on our banner. Its National Register nomination says the Ketner family came to America from the Rhineland in 1733, and that David Ketner settled at Ketner’s Cove on Looney’s Creek in the Sequatchie Valley in 1829. His son Alexander Ketner (1831–1921) chose an old mill site on the Sequatchie River with a natural limestone shelf across the bed, built a log cofferdam, and in 1872 built the frame house and brick mill as an addition to an earlier mill of 1824. When the nomination was written, that older mill’s wool-carding house still stood above the turbine bays with its original carding machine. [S1703]
The nomination calls the mill the lone survivor of the many mills built on the Sequatchie and says it closed only once, when Clyde Ketner went into military service in World War II. It describes the iron-and-wood Ketner Bridge downstream as the only bridge across the river on the road to Victoria. [S1703]
Beene writes that the county is now famous for making fireworks, and that its cemeteries hold many soldiers and public men, among them Gen. Adrian Northcut of the Mexican War, Governor and U.S. Senator James B. Frazier, U.S. Senators Hopkins Turney, Foster V. Brown, James Whiteside and Tom Stewart, Congressmen Joe Brown and Sam D. McReynolds, and Judges Sam Polk Raulston and John T. Raulston. [S1517]
The county’s newer towns incorporated after World War II: UT’s directory gives 1962 for Kimball and for Monteagle, 1974 for New Hope and 1976 for Powells Crossroads. [S1704][S1665][S1705][S1706]
Coal mining brought one more disaster. The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration lists an explosion on December 8, 1981, at the Grundy Mining Company’s No. 21 Mine at Whitwell that killed thirteen men. [S1707] The community marker in South Pittsburg remembers the same explosion and the miners’ museum in Whitwell. [S1678]
In 1998, Whitwell Middle School says, its eighth-graders began an after-school study of the Holocaust and, struggling to grasp six million deaths, asked their teachers, Sandra Roberts and David Smith, whether they could collect something; Principal Linda M. Hooper agreed if they found an object with meaning, and they chose the paper clip, a symbol of silent resistance to the Nazi occupation of Norway. More than 30,000 letters and over 30 million paper clips arrived. The Children’s Holocaust Memorial holds 11 million clips in an authentic German transport car, and another 11 million fill a monument to the children of the Holocaust. [S1708]
The county government’s museum guide lists the Jasper Museum of History on Phillips Avenue, the South Pittsburg Heritage Museum run by the South Pittsburg Historic Preservation Society on Cedar Avenue, the Marion County Coal Miners Museum in Whitwell, the Sam (Bud) H. Werner Military Museum in Monteagle and the Marion County Veterans Memorial Park at Whitwell’s ballpark. [S1679]
Visit:
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1560 | Soldiers of Tristán de Luna’s expedition are thought to reach the chiefdom of the Napochies. [S1517] |
| 1779 | Dragging Canoe moves the Chickamaugas west of Lookout Mountain to the Lower Towns. [S1666] |
| 1789 | Col. James Brown’s boat is attacked; Joseph Brown is taken captive. [S1517] |
| 1792 | Dragging Canoe dies on February 29. [S1666] |
| 1794 | Ore’s expedition, guided by Joseph Brown, destroys Nickajack and Running Water. [S1666][S1673] |
| 1805 | The first white settlers are thought to arrive in the lower valley. [S1517] |
| 1805–08 | The Federal-Georgia Road is built. [S1676] |
| 1817 | Marion County is created from Indian lands; the first court meets at John Shropshire’s house. [S38][S1517] |
| 1819–20 | The county seat moves to Jasper, on land from Betsy Pack. [S1517][S1677] |
| c. 1835 | John Kelly builds the ferry at Kelly’s Ferry. [S1667] |
| 1838 | The Bell detachment crosses at Kelly’s Ferry on October 21 and passes through Jasper. [S1549] |
| 1852 | Jasper is incorporated. [S1664] |
| 1857 | Two Marion districts go to the new Sequatchie County. [S1515] |
| 1862 | Maxey shells Fort McCook at Battle Creek on August 27. [S1680] |
| 1863 | Union divisions cross the Tennessee at Shellmound and Battle Creek, August 29–September 2. [S1682][S1680] |
| c. 1873–77 | The Old English Company founds South Pittsburg. [S1668][S1517] |
| 1882 | The McNabb Coal and Coke Company registers in Tennessee. [S1684] |
| 1896 | Joseph Lodge opens the Blacklock Foundry. [S1686] |
| 1905 | Work begins on Hales Bar Dam. [S1669][S1670] |
| 1906 | Dixie Portland begins its cement plant at Richard City. [S1689] |
| 1913 | Hales Bar Dam opens on November 13. [S1670][S1675] |
| 1921 | McReynolds High School opens in South Pittsburg. [S1698] |
| 1926 | The Dixie Portland Memorial School opens at Richard City. [S1689] |
| 1927 | The Christmas night gunfight in South Pittsburg. [S1696] |
| 1931 | The Marion Memorial Bridge begins service as a toll bridge. [S1693] |
| 1939 | TVA acquires Hales Bar. [S1669][S1675] |
| 1964 | Work begins on Nickajack Dam. [S1701] |
| 1968 | Nickajack’s first unit goes on line; Hales Bar’s spillway is demolished. [S1675] |
| 1981 | Thirteen men die in an explosion at the No. 21 Mine at Whitwell. [S1707] |
| 1982 | The Richard City cement plant closes. [S1689] |
| 1998 | Whitwell Middle School students begin the Paper Clips Project. [S1708] |
Every bracketed number on this page links here. Written by My East TN in our own words and checked against each source on 2026-10-31 (ET). Where sources disagree, we list each version in the section Where the sources disagree, above, with its source. We don’t republish encyclopedia, museum or marker text — follow the links for the full articles.
Hero: an AI-assisted color illustration of Ketner’s Mill on the Sequatchie River, the same banner we use on our Marion County guide. Our records describe it as an AI redraw based on public-domain Historic American Buildings Survey photographs of the mill (HABS TN-47, Library of Congress), with a utility pole, signal and wires removed, the season changed to autumn and the rubble on the far bank replaced with grass. It is not a photograph and its details are not exact. It is not an official image of Ketner’s Mill, and no endorsement by the Ketner family, Marion County or any source on this page is implied. Reused source numbers (S38, S1510, S1511, S1515, S1517, S1549) match the same sources on our other history pages. Corrections: [email protected].