East Tennessee History · County by county
A county carved from the 1819 Hiwassee Purchase: a river town facing the Cherokee Nation, a county seat named for ancient Athens, one of Tennessee’s first railroads, a young legislator from Niota who changed his vote and finished the fight for woman suffrage, a railroad town built in a muddy field, a mill town whose workforce was mostly women, and the night in 1946 when returning GIs took back an election.
McMinn County lies in southeast Tennessee, on the railroad and interstate corridor between Knoxville and Chattanooga, with the Hiwassee River along its southern edge. [S229][S233][S247] The Tennessee General Assembly created it in 1819 from land the Cherokee had just given up in the Hiwassee Purchase, and named it for Joseph McMinn, then the governor. [S229][S231] Its first county seat, Calhoun, faced the Cherokee Nation across the river; within a few years the seat moved north to a new town called Athens. [S229][S233][S239] Railroads made the county: one of Tennessee’s first lines was graded here in the 1830s, and the towns of Riceville, Niota, Englewood and Etowah all grew up beside the tracks. [S229][S246] Two moments put McMinn in the national news. In 1920 Harry T. Burn of Niota changed his vote in the state House and made Tennessee the thirty-sixth and deciding state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, and in 1946 World War II veterans fought a gun battle at the Athens jail to make sure an election was "counted as cast." [S229][S243][S230][S235]
The county counted 53,276 people in the 2020 Census. [S264] It has six incorporated places. Athens is the county seat; Etowah is the old L&N railroad town; Englewood is the old mill town; Niota, once called Mouse Creek, is Harry Burn’s hometown; Calhoun is the first county seat, on the Hiwassee; and Sweetwater reaches across the line from Monroe County. The Census also counts Riceville and Delano, which it shares with Polk County, as unincorporated communities. [S117][S264]
For most of the 1700s the land between the Little Tennessee and the Hiwassee rivers was Cherokee country. The Overhill Cherokee towns stood just to the north along the Little Tennessee, in what is now Monroe County. [S3][S197] (Our Monroe County history tells their story.) After the Treaty of 1805, the federal government opened a road through the district, running from Tellico Blockhouse on the Little Tennessee south toward Georgia, to carry mail and trade. A state marker near Etowah says it had a post stop in McMinn County at Cantrell’s Crossroads, later called Williamsburg. [S260]
In February 1819 a treaty negotiated by Secretary of War John C. Calhoun ceded the rest of the land between the two rivers, which came to be called the Hiwassee District or the Hiwassee Purchase. [S229][S233] From then until the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, the Hiwassee River was the border between the United States and the Cherokee Nation. [S233] That November the General Assembly divided the new land into counties, McMinn and Monroe among them. The act creating the two counties is dated November 18, 1819, in the state archives’ fact sheet for Monroe County; exhibit panels at the Hiwassee River Heritage Center give November 13. [S204][S233]
The new county’s first town and first county seat was Calhoun, on the north bank of the Hiwassee, named for the secretary of war who had made the treaty. [S229][S233] It was laid out at a crossing known as Walker’s Ferry, on one of two reserves the 1819 treaty granted to the Cherokee leader John Walker Jr., where missions, businesses and a ferry already operated. [S233] The Heritage Center’s panels date the town plat to November 1819; the Tennessee Encyclopedia says Calhoun was established in 1820. [S233][S229]
Across the river stood the Cherokee Agency, the federal office that handled the government’s dealings with the Cherokee Nation. [S229][S233] Its longtime agent, the Revolutionary War veteran Return J. Meigs, ran federal trade and diplomacy with the Cherokee for more than twenty years. [S233] In 1823 the post went to the man the county was named for. [S231]
Calhoun’s time as county seat was short. The county needed a more central seat, and in 1823 the courts moved fifteen miles north to Athens. [S229] Calhoun stayed a river town. After the Treaty of New Echota, the federal government turned the south bank of the Hiwassee, opposite the town, into Fort Cass, a huge emigration depot where Cherokee families were held before their forced removal west in 1838. [S233] (That ground is now in Bradley County; the Hiwassee River Heritage Center in Charleston tells its story. [S267])
Joseph McMinn was born in Pennsylvania in 1758 and served in the Continental Army during the Revolution. [S231] A state marker calls him a Quaker. [S234] After the war he moved to what would become Tennessee and farmed in Hawkins County; the Tennessee Encyclopedia says he bought his farm there in 1786, and the marker says he came to the county in 1790. [S231][S234] He served in the territorial assembly and the 1796 constitutional convention, carried a copy of the new state constitution to the secretary of state in Philadelphia, served three times as Speaker of the state Senate, and was governor for three terms between 1815 and 1821. [S231][S234]
After leaving office McMinn bought a farm near Calhoun, and in 1823 he was appointed U.S. agent to the Cherokee. [S231] He died at the Cherokee Agency on November 17, 1824, and was buried near Calhoun. [S231] A state marker at U.S. 11 and Tennessee 163 says his grave lies 500 yards southeast. [S234] Both McMinn County and the town of McMinnville in Warren County carry his name. [S231]
The town of Athens was laid out in 1822 on land acquired from William Lowry and Joseph Calloway. Its first 35 acres bordered Eastanallee Creek, which powered the mills that grew up along it, and a big spring near the center of town supplied water. [S239] Nine commissioners laid out the lots and named the streets, and the legislature gave the town its name on August 23, 1822. Local lore credits commissioner Elijah Hurst with suggesting "Athens" after the ancient Greek city he had read about. [S239][S229] (The Tennessee Encyclopedia says Athens was chartered in 1822; the University of Tennessee’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service lists its incorporation as a city in 1870. [S229][S269])
The county seat moved here in 1823, and the town grew fast. [S229][S239] By 1830 the county had more than 14,000 people, including 1,250 who were enslaved. [S229] A marker at the Athens waterwheel says the 1830 census found 500 people in Athens, with ten stores (three more than Knoxville), four lawyers, four doctors, a printing office, two mills, two silversmiths and academies for boys and girls. [S239]
Much of early Athens was built by the contracting firm of Samuel Cleage and Thomas Crutchfield. Cleage, a builder from Botetourt County, Virginia, came south in 1823 putting up houses and, a state marker notes, taking pay in "gold, notes or Negroes." [S240] The firm built the Planters Bank on the square in 1836 with skilled craftsmen who included enslaved African Americans. [S268] Cleage & Crutchfield also designed the McMinn County courthouse that stood from 1874 until fire destroyed it in 1964, along with nine other East Tennessee courthouses. [S259] Around the square, tradition says, Whigs and Unionists met at McGaughey Corner and Democrats and Confederates at Crawford Corner. [S259]
John Tyler Morgan, born near Athens in 1824, became a Confederate brigadier general and then served thirty years as a U.S. senator from Alabama, where he pushed for a canal across Panama and for development of the Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals. [S261]
McMinn County saw one of Tennessee’s first railroad projects. The Hiwassee Railroad was planned to run 98 miles from Dalton, Georgia, through the county to Knoxville. [S229] The Tennessee Encyclopedia dates the start of construction to 1837; a state marker on a Cleage-built house in Athens says the house was the railroad’s central office in 1836. [S229][S240] A statewide depression stopped the work in 1839 after 66 miles of roadbed had been graded and a bridge built at Calhoun. [S229]
The East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad took up the project in 1849, and Athens was its headquarters until 1855, when the office moved to Knoxville. [S229] New towns grew along the line: Riceville, Sanford and Mouse Creek, now Niota. [S229] The brick depot built at Mouse Creek in 1854 still stands; a plaque calls it the oldest standing depot in Tennessee, and a Civil War Trails marker calls it the only Civil War–era depot left on the East Tennessee and Georgia line. [S242][S241]
Tennessee Wesleyan began in the same decade. The Odd Fellows chartered a women’s college in Athens in 1854 but ran out of money before the building was finished; the Methodist Holston Conference completed it, and Athens Female College opened in what is now called Old College in 1858. [S253][S254] A state marker says the college was organized in 1857. [S252] It later became East Tennessee Wesleyan, Grant Memorial University and U.S. Grant University, took the name Tennessee Wesleyan College under a new charter in 1925, and became Tennessee Wesleyan University in 2016. [S253][S252] The Tennessee Encyclopedia names Old College as one of the county’s antebellum landmarks. [S229]
Like most of East Tennessee, McMinn County was divided. It sent men to both the Confederate and Union armies, and while no major battle was fought inside the county, thousands of troops passed through and people suffered severe hardship. [S229] (See chapter 6 for East Tennessee’s divided war.) The railroad was the reason. It was a vital link between the Upper and Lower South, and both armies wanted it. [S229][S241]
A Union spy reported a Confederate company at Mouse Creek in January 1862. [S241] When Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s Union army moved up the rail line toward Knoxville in September 1863, his men turned the brick Mouse Creek depot into a temporary fort. They knocked out bricks at shoulder height to make gun ports and scribbled their names on the walls of the baggage room; both are still visible. [S242][S241] Ohio and Wisconsin artillery companies garrisoned the depot at different times. In August 1864 Gen. George G. Dibrell’s Confederate cavalry tore up miles of track on both sides of Mouse Creek, but the depot stayed in Union hands until the war ended. [S241] A Union officer passing through wrote that the names Sweetwater and Mouse Creek "speak of everything plentiful and quiet cozy." [S241] (Our Monroe County history follows Longstreet’s army through Sweetwater that November.)
After the war, a lack of money slowed recovery, but by the late 1800s the railroad was bringing growth back. [S229] In 1866 Bethsalem Presbyterian Church, south of Athens, became the first African American church organized in the McMinn, Meigs and Polk area, according to its state marker; it began under a brush arbor and met in a log cabin that doubled as a school. [S257] In Athens, a community of free and educated Black tradespeople called Free Hill had grown up in the 1850s. Its St. Mark A.M.E. Zion Church, built in the late 1860s (1867, says the state marker), is described as the first church erected by and for African Americans in the county. [S255][S256] Urban renewal removed most of Free Hill in the late 1960s, and St. Mark is its only visible reminder. [S256] First United Presbyterian Church, built in 1892 by descendants of formerly enslaved people, sponsored the three-room Athens Academy for Black students. [S258]
Two new towns grew on the railroads after the war. Jellico Junction, later Englewood, became the county’s mill town. [S229] The first spinning mill went up on a nearby farm in 1857, and at least 25 textile mills have operated in Englewood since, making yarn, union suits, women’s hosiery, socks and fashion clothing. [S250] The workforce was mostly women, and for many it was their first public work; early mills also hired children. Most mills were family businesses that hired whole families, and company neighborhoods such as Sock Hill, Yellow Top and Shootin Street each had their own look. [S250] The Englewood Textile Museum, in the town’s old company store, tells the story of the mills and the women who worked in them. [S251][S229]
Etowah was built from nothing by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. Looking for a headquarters between Atlanta and Knoxville on a new, more direct line that would bypass the Hiwassee Gorge, the L&N chose a site about halfway between Knoxville and Chattanooga. [S247] Company engineers laid out the town in a muddy farm field between 1904 and 1906; the Tennessee Encyclopedia dates the town to 1905. [S246][S229] The yellow-pine L&N Depot, finished in 1906, was the first building in the planned town. [S247][S248] White workers’ homes and businesses went up west of the tracks, while many Black employees settled on the east side of the rail yards. [S246] The name, a marker says, probably came from railroad planners who compared the muddy site to the older railroad town of Etowah, Georgia. [S249]
At its peak the Etowah complex had a roundhouse, shops and two depots. [S246] The Tennessee Encyclopedia and the Overhill marker put employment at more than 2,000; the city says more than 2,000 men worked in the shops in 1927, with 250 more working the fourteen passenger trains that moved through town each day, and another marker puts the early workforce at 2,800. [S229][S246][S248][S247] The boom ended fast. In 1928 the L&N combined its divisions and moved the Etowah offices to Knoxville, and by 1931 the shop force had fallen from 2,100 to 80. A downtown marker dates the move of the shops to 1930. [S248][S249][S229] The Etowah Carnegie Library, paid for with an $8,000 Carnegie grant and built on land bought from the L&N, was approved in 1915 and stood by 1916; it is on the National Register. [S262] Passenger service ended in 1968, the depot closed in 1974, and the city restored it in 1981; it now holds the museum "Growing Up With the L&N." [S248]
In the summer of 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote, needed one more state, the thirty-sixth, to become law. [S229][S244] The Tennessee Senate approved it, but the House deadlocked. [S229] The youngest member of the House was Harry T. Burn, born at Mouse Creek on November 12, 1895, and elected in 1918 at 22. [S244] On August 18, 1920, he came to the chamber wearing a red rose, the anti-suffrage symbol, and voted with the opponents to table the amendment. That vote tied. [S244] When the speaker then called the amendment itself, Burn voted aye, breaking the tie and making Tennessee the thirty-sixth state to ratify. [S244][S229][S243]
In his pocket was a letter from his mother, Febb Ensminger Burn, urging him to "be a good boy" and vote for suffrage. [S244][S245] "I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow," he explained the next day, "and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification." [S244] Febb Burn, a graduate of the school that is now Tennessee Wesleyan, helped run the family farm; her husband was stationmaster at the Niota depot. [S245][S241] Harry Burn narrowly won re-election that fall and went on to the state Senate, the State Planning Commission and three state constitutional conventions. [S244][S243] He died in 1977 and is buried in Niota Cemetery, and a state marker on U.S. 11 in Niota tells his story. [S244][S243] A memorial to him and his mother stands on Market Street in downtown Knoxville. [S245]
In 1921 McMinn County got the first concrete highway in Tennessee, a fourteen-mile stretch of the Lee Highway (U.S. 11) between Athens and Calhoun. A short piece of it is still in use. [S229] Two years later Thomas B. Mayfield Jr. took his family’s 45-cow dairy, on a farm east of Athens the Mayfields had worked since 1833, and bought an ice cream factory in town. The Mayfield Creamery came through the Depression, and in the 1950s it became the first dairy in Tennessee to ship milk in refrigerated trucks. [S232] The Depression hit Etowah hardest, because the town depended on one employer. [S229] The National Youth Administration built a scout lodge there to help, and World War II brought a short revival, but the railroad boom was over. [S229]
The county’s most famous day came on August 1, 1946. [S229][S230] For years a courthouse ring led by state senator Paul Cantrell and Sheriff Pat Mansfield, tied to Memphis boss E. H. Crump, had run McMinn County. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says it worked with bootleggers and gamblers, shook down residents and tourists for fees, and rigged elections, while Athens fell behind booming neighbors like Knoxville, Oak Ridge and Chattanooga. [S230] Veterans home from the war organized the GI Non-Partisan League and ran their own slate. [S230] Their headquarters was a former dentist’s office on East Washington Avenue. [S266]
Election day turned violent early. At Precinct 11, in the Athens Water Works building on North Jackson Street, a Black voter named Thomas Gillespie was shot by a deputy when he arrived to vote around 3 p.m. Two GI poll watchers held inside jumped through the plate-glass window to escape. [S236] WLAR announcer Chuck Redfern photographed them from across the street, and Daily Post-Athenian editor Neal Ensminger was on the street when they broke out. [S238][S265] Deputies then carried the ballot boxes to the county jail on White Street and barricaded themselves inside. [S236][S230]
Veterans broke into the National Guard armory for rifles and ammunition, surrounded the jail, and demanded the boxes. When the deputies refused, several hundred men opened fire from the hill across the street. [S230][S235] The shooting went on for hours, and WLAR broadcast through the night, with gunshots audible behind the station’s call sign; Knoxville and Chattanooga stations picked up the broadcast. [S230][S238] The battle ended only when the veterans dynamited the front of the jail and the deputies surrendered. [S230][S229] Crowds were still overturning and burning police cars hours later. [S230] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says that, remarkably, no one was killed. [S229] The state marker dates the battle August 1–2, since it ran through the night. [S235]
Within days the election commission swore in the veterans’ candidates. [S230] The county replaced its old county court government with a council-manager system, the first in Tennessee. [S229] The Tennessee Encyclopedia also notes that many residents were embarrassed at first by the violence and the national headlines, and that the reformers’ Good Government League later had little success against vice and corruption. [S230] Today the county is governed by an elected county mayor and a ten-member county commission. [S264] The jail was sold in 1953; a mural painted in 2017 marks its site. [S237]
After World War II, McMinn County grew quickly. Bowaters, then the world’s largest newsprint producer, was among the companies that built major plants in the area; Tennessee Wesleyan expanded; and dairy farming grew alongside Mayfield. [S229] Mayfield built a new plant in Athens between 1948 and 1950, began selling in Atlanta in 1977, and was bought by Dean Foods in 1990. [S232] Tennessee Wesleyan became a four-year college in 1954. [S252]
The past is close to the surface. Markers on the Athens square trace the Battle of Athens street by street. [S236][S237][S238][S266] Old College still stands at the center of the Tennessee Wesleyan campus. [S253][S254] Niota’s 1854 depot keeps its Civil War gun ports, Englewood keeps its mill-town museum, and the restored L&N Depot is still the center of Etowah. [S241][S251][S248] The McMinn County Living Heritage Museum in Athens covers the county’s history from the Cherokee to the 1940s. [S229][S263] For towns, parks and news, see our McMinn County guide and our Athens guide.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1805 | Treaty opens the federal road through the district [S260] |
| 1819 | Calhoun Treaty cedes the Hiwassee District (February); McMinn and Monroe counties created (November) [S233][S204] |
| 1819–20 | Calhoun laid out at Walker’s Ferry; first county seat [S233][S229] |
| 1822 | Athens laid out and named (August 23) [S239] |
| 1823 | County seat moves to Athens; Joseph McMinn named Cherokee agent [S229][S231] |
| 1824 | Joseph McMinn dies at the Cherokee Agency, November 17 [S231] |
| 1837–39 | Hiwassee Railroad graded, then halted [S229] |
| 1838 | Cherokee held at Fort Cass, across the Hiwassee, before removal [S233] |
| 1849–55 | East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad finishes the line; Athens is its headquarters [S229] |
| 1854 | Brick depot built at Mouse Creek (Niota) [S241][S242] |
| 1857 | First spinning mill near Englewood; Old College finished in Athens [S250][S253] |
| 1858 | Athens Female College opens [S253][S254] |
| 1863 | Burnside’s Union army moves up the railroad (September) [S242] |
| 1864 | Confederate cavalry tears up the track around Mouse Creek (August) [S241] |
| 1866 | Bethsalem Presbyterian Church organized [S257] |
| 1874 | Cleage & Crutchfield courthouse in use [S259] |
| 1904–06 | L&N builds Etowah; depot finished 1906 [S246][S247] |
| 1915–16 | Etowah Carnegie Library built [S262] |
| 1920 | Harry T. Burn’s vote ratifies the 19th Amendment, August 18 [S243][S244] |
| 1921 | First concrete highway in Tennessee, Athens to Calhoun [S229] |
| 1923 | Mayfield Creamery begins in Athens [S232] |
| 1925 | Tennessee Wesleyan College chartered [S253] |
| 1928–31 | L&N moves Etowah offices to Knoxville; shop force falls to 80 [S248] |
| 1946 | Battle of Athens, August 1–2 [S230][S235] |
| 1964 | Fire destroys the 1874 courthouse [S259] |
| 1981 | Restored L&N Depot reopens in Etowah [S248] |
| 2016 | Tennessee Wesleyan becomes a university [S253] |
| 2020 | Census counts 53,276 people [S264] |
Start in Athens. The McMinn County Living Heritage Museum at 522 W. Madison Ave. covers the county from the Cherokee years to the 1940s; its website lists hours Tuesday through Friday 10 to 5 and Saturday 10 to 1. [S263] Then walk the Battle of Athens trail downtown: the Precinct 11 marker at 115 N. Jackson St., WLAR at 110 N. Jackson, the Daily Post-Athenian at 125 N. Jackson, the GI Headquarters at 106 E. Washington Ave., the jail-site mural at 202 N. White St., and the state marker on the hill at White and College streets. [S236][S238][S265][S266][S237][S235] Cross North Jackson to see Old College and the Tennessee Wesleyan marker, then go north to St. Mark A.M.E. Zion Church at 707 N. Jackson, the last landmark of Free Hill. [S252][S253][S256]
At midday drive up U.S. 11 to Niota, where the 1854 depot and its Civil War Trails marker are at Main and Green streets and Harry Burn’s state marker is on U.S. 11 (West Wilson Street) north of Burn Road. [S241][S243] Continue east on Tennessee 39 to Englewood and the Englewood Textile Museum at 101 S. Niota Road; Discover McMinn lists it as free. [S251][S250] Finish in Etowah at the L&N Depot, which the city lists as open Tuesday through Friday 8 to 4:30 and Saturday 9 to 5, and walk to the 1916 Carnegie Library at 723 Ohio Ave. [S248][S262] If you have time, drive south on U.S. 11 to Calhoun to see the Joseph McMinn marker at Tennessee 163, then cross the Hiwassee to the Heritage Center in Charleston. [S234][S233] Hours change with the seasons, so check before you go.
Visit: McMinn County Living Heritage Museum, Athens · Battle of Athens markers, downtown Athens · Old College, Tennessee Wesleyan University · St. Mark A.M.E. Zion Church (Free Hill) · Niota Depot and Harry T. Burn marker · Englewood Textile Museum · L&N Depot and Etowah Carnegie Library · Joseph McMinn marker, Calhoun
Every bracketed number on this page links here. Written by My East TN in our own words and checked against each source on 2026-10-30 (ET). Where sources disagree (for example, whether the act creating the county passed on November 13 or November 18, 1819, whether Calhoun was laid out in 1819 or 1820, when Joseph McMinn came to Hawkins County, when work on the Hiwassee Railroad began, what year Tennessee Wesleyan dates from, when Etowah was founded and how many people the L&N employed there, which was the area’s first Black church, and whether the Battle of Athens is dated August 1 or August 1–2, 1946, and whether Athens dates its charter from 1822 or 1870), we give both or leave the exact figure out. We don’t republish encyclopedia, museum or marker text — follow the links for the full articles.
Hero photo: Old College, Tennessee Wesleyan University, Athens (Nyttend, Wikimedia Commons, public domain). Corrections: [email protected].