East Tennessee History · County by county
The east bank of the Tennessee where the Hiwassee comes in: a Mississippian town on Hiwassee Island and a Cherokee town where young Sam Houston lived, a federal agency at the mouth of Agency Creek, a county carved from Rhea in 1836 and named for the old Cherokee agent, a seat called Decatur, ferries at Washington and Blythe, nine Cherokee detachments crossing the river in the fall of 1838, a county that voted to secede while its southern district sent men to the Union, steamboat landings and a courthouse rebuilt after fire, TVA lakes over the best bottomland, and cranes that came back to the island.
Meigs County lies on the east bank of the Tennessee River in southeast Tennessee. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says it was created in 1836 from Rhea County, covers 195 square miles, and is bounded on the west by the Tennessee River, while the lower Hiwassee River crosses the south of the county to join it. [S1567] The county takes its name from Return Jonathan Meigs, a Revolutionary War colonel and federal agent to the Cherokees from 1801 until his death in 1823. [S1567][S38]
UT’s County Technical Assistance Service counted 12,758 people in 2020, up from 11,753 in 2010, and lists one incorporated town, Decatur, the county seat. [S1568] Meigs is legally part of East Tennessee: the Tennessee Blue Book lists it in the eastern grand division, and UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service lists Decatur in the East grand division on Eastern time. [S38][S1569]
The county’s story runs from a Mississippian town on Hiwassee Island and a Cherokee town led by John Jolly, through treaties that opened the land north of the Hiwassee, a new county with a seat named for a naval hero, river ferries and steamboat landings, the crossing at Blythe Ferry where nine Cherokee detachments crossed the Tennessee in the fall of 1838, and a Civil War that split the county by district, to TVA’s lakes, the wintering sandhill cranes, and the 2026 dedication of Cherokee Trail of Tears State Park. [S1567][S1570][S1571]
Meigs is a county of ridges and valleys. The encyclopedia describes a series of ridges and valleys running southwest to northeast, with family farms in the valleys, and says the county has fertile bottomland, ample timber and a vein of iron ore. [S1567] Before the TVA lakes, the encyclopedia says, commerce was tied to riverboats at landings such as Cottonport, Pinhook and Breedenton, and ferries crossed both rivers: the Blythe, Washington and Free ferries on the Tennessee and the Russell and Kincannon ferries on the Hiwassee. [S1567]
The first settlements in the Meigs County area, the encyclopedia says, were in the Ten Mile Valley in the north; later families settled near the site of Decatur. [S1567] Besides Decatur, it lists Ten Mile, Big Spring, Peakland, Union Grove, Sewee, Goodfield and East View among the county’s communities. [S1567]
A railroad was expected in the 1840s and 1850s, the encyclopedia says, but one never crossed the county; in the late 1990s Meigs still had neither a railroad nor a U.S. highway. [S1567]
The Tennessee River valley was home to generations of Native Americans, and the encyclopedia says Meigs County contains many prehistoric and Cherokee sites. [S1567] The best known is Hiwassee Island, at the mouth of the Hiwassee River, which the encyclopedia describes as the site of a large Mississippian Period town dating from the eleventh century A.D., with several temple mounds around a plaza. [S1567]
Erin Pritchard, writing for the Tennessee Valley Authority in 2016, says the island was visited by excavators as early as 1885, with digs by John W. Emmert in 1885, Clarence B. Moore in 1913–14 and Mark Harrington in 1919; those early explorations identified as many as twenty-four mounds. [S1572] The largest excavation came in the late 1930s, when the University of Tennessee investigated the site before Chickamauga Reservoir was filled, with labor from the Works Progress Administration. That work focused on the Mississippian village at the north end of the island and found a central plaza, a palisade and a large platform mound; Pritchard says the report gave the Southeast one of its first regional chronologies. [S1572]
In 2015 TVA hired New South Associates to make a geophysical survey of the island, to support its nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. The survey found 649 likely cultural features, among them 129 structures, 356 pits, 39 middens, 26 palisades or palisade segments and 13 historic homesteads, and showed that at least seven palisades had once stood around the Mississippian town, where the WPA crews had found at least one. [S1572] In 2017 TVA dug eight small test units to check the survey and to date five of the palisades, working with eight tribal participants from five federally recognized tribes: the Chickasaw Nation, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the Sac and Fox Nation and the United Keetoowah Band. The radiocarbon dates suggested the village grew over time and peaked in the later Mississippian Dallas Phase, and the island has been determined eligible for the National Register. [S1573] The island is owned by the federal government under TVA’s stewardship and managed for wildlife under an easement with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. [S1573]
The Cherokees later occupied the island. The encyclopedia says that in 1809–10 Sam Houston lived with Oolootek (John Jolly), leader of three hundred Cherokees living on Hiwassee Island, which was also called Jolly’s Island. [S1567] Houston’s own encyclopedia biography says the teenager, uncomfortable with his family near Maryville, often wandered away to live with a band of Cherokees for long periods, and that their leader, Oo-Loo-Te-Ka, became a surrogate father who taught him the language and ways of the Cherokees. [S1574]
Houston went on to the army, Congress and the governor’s office. The biography says that after his marriage to Eliza Allen collapsed, he resigned the governorship and left the state to join his Cherokee friends, who had by then resettled in Indian Territory in today’s Oklahoma. [S1574] The encyclopedia lists John Jolly among the few Cherokee residents who remained in the area after the removal, though it does not give a date. [S1567]
Return Jonathan Meigs arrived in Tennessee in May 1801 to serve as the federal agent to the Cherokee Nation and military agent for the War Department. Samuel D. Smith’s encyclopedia biography says Meigs, from Connecticut and later Ohio, had already received a presentation sword from Congress for his conduct in the Revolution. [S62] The Tennessee Blue Book describes him as a Revolutionary officer who distinguished himself at Sag Harbor and Stony Point, as well as a pioneer of the Tennessee country and longtime Indian agent. [S38]
Smith says Meigs kept his agency at Fort Southwest Point near Kingston from 1801 to 1807, then moved it to Hiwassee Garrison near the mouth of the Hiwassee River. He moved the agency a few miles up the Hiwassee in 1815 and again in 1817, and he stayed at that last post until his death on January 28, 1823. [S62] A state historical marker on Tennessee 58 says the U.S. Agency for the Cherokees stood about a mile east, at the mouth of Agency Creek, from 1816 to 1821, and that on July 8, 1817, Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson, Governor Joseph McMinn and David Meriwether concluded a treaty there with the Cherokee Nation in which important land was ceded. [S1575] Meigs was buried in 1823 in the Garrison Cemetery near the old garrison site in Rhea County, next to his wife Grace and son Timothy. [S62]
In the Hiwassee Treaty of 1817 and the Calhoun Agreement of 1819, the encyclopedia says, the Cherokees ceded to Tennessee the land on the east bank of the Tennessee River north of the Hiwassee. The land south of the Hiwassee stayed in the Ocoee District of the Cherokee Nation and was not opened to white settlement until 1836. [S1567]
The National Register survey of Meigs County, made by the Tennessee Historical Commission between 1979 and 1982, gives a picture of the first settlers. John Stewart (1792–1874), once an apprentice to an overland coach operator, was one of the first settlers in the Hiwassee District, which the nomination says was opened for settlement in 1820; his two-story timber-framed house on Tennessee 58 dates to about 1825. [S1576] James Cowan bought land in November 1820 and built a house and a store on the north bank of the Hiwassee, facing the Cherokee Ocoee District. The store became the center of Cowansville, whose post office opened there in 1831, and Cowan was one of the first white property owners in the Ocoee District, in 1835. His house, built about 1840, is the only two-story "saddlebag" house standing in the county. [S1577]
The early churches were Methodist and Baptist. A marker at the Decatur United Methodist Church says the Methodists became active after 1820, when the Tennessee Conference authorized work among the Cherokees of the Hiwassee District and set up the Hiwassee Circuit, and that a church southwest of present-day Decatur existed by 1827. [S1578] In the far south, a state marker at Georgetown says early nineteenth-century Methodist revivals were held on the farm of Thomas Palmer Jr., and that David Campbell gave land for the Hiwassee Cumberland Presbyterian Campground and Church on October 1, 1844. [S1579] The Mt. Zion congregation, organized by 1845, was one of the county’s oldest; its simple frame meetinghouse in Mt. Zion Hollow is one of the last of its kind in the region. [S1580]
The National Register nomination for the Hastings-Locke Ferry, prepared by Ann Toplovich in 1982, says Conley Hastings established it about 1807, linking the town of Washington, the first seat of Rhea County, with the Cherokee country east of the river. The Locke family took it over about 1820; in April 1839 John Locke, an early settler and surveyor of Meigs County, bought a ferryboat and chains from the estate of Robert Locke; and Solomon Henry and Sons ran it through the 1870s and 1880s. [S1581] A state marker on Tennessee 30 says the ferry later linked the Rhea and Meigs county seats of Dayton and Decatur and ran until a bridge replaced it in 1994. [S1582]
When it was nominated, the ferry was one of only four still operating on the Tennessee River and one of five known in the state, using a flat-bottomed steel barge built in Chattanooga in the 1940s that could carry six cars. [S1581]
Downriver, at the mouth of the Hiwassee, was Blythe’s Ferry. State markers say that around 1809 William Blythe established a ferry there to carry settlers to the west and Cherokees to the east; that it was an important crossing on the Trail of Tears and played a military role in the Civil War; and that it ran until a bridge replaced it in 1994. [S1583] A Chattanoogan.com article reprinted on the Meigs County TNGenWeb site says Blythe married Nancy Fields, daughter of the Cherokee Richard Fields, in Rhea County in 1809; served with the Cherokee contingent under Andrew Jackson against the Creeks in 1814; received a 640-acre reservation in his wife’s right in 1817; and went west with his wife’s people at the removal in 1838. [S1584] The same article says the family owned a mill and two ferry boats, and that the Blythes were enslavers. [S1584]
According to a nomination in the county survey, citizens of eastern Rhea County began petitioning the legislature for a new county in 1827. [S1576] The act that created Meigs County, chapter 34 of the Private Acts of 1835–36, established the county "in honor of Colonel Return J. Meigs, deceased; a patriot and soldier of the American Revolution of 1776," from the part of Rhea County lying south of the Tennessee River, between McMinn County and the river. It ran the line from a point below William Blythe’s on the river, along the Rhea–Hamilton line and the McMinn line, to the mouth of White’s Creek on the Tennessee. [S1585]
The act said the county and circuit courts would meet at the house of John Stewart until other arrangements were made. [S1585] The National Register nomination for the Stewart house says the county’s organizers began their official duties there, and that land near the house was considered for the county seat before the site of Decatur was chosen. [S1576]
The act named six commissioners, James Blevins, James Lillard, William Keer, Andrew Kincannon, John Randals and Elisha Sharp, to find a site within three miles of the center of the county and to acquire at least fifty acres. It directed that a town be laid off there with at least three acres for a public square, and that it be called Decatur, "in honor of the late Commodore Stephen Decatur of the United States navy." [S1585] The encyclopedia says Decatur was laid out in 1836 on fifty acres donated by James Lillard and Leonard Brooks. [S1567] The municipal advisory service lists Decatur’s incorporation act as chapter 237 of the Private Acts of 1837–38, with an incorporation date of December 1, 1838, and a later act in 1905. [S1569]
A Methodist congregation at Union Grove, about a mile and a half west of the courthouse, moved into the new town about the time it was established and reorganized as the Decatur Methodist Church, its marker says. [S1578] The National Register nomination for the church says no permanent building went up until about 1859, when Joseph McCorkle donated lot number 69; by 1860 the Decatur church anchored a circuit of thirteen congregations and chapels, and its frame building is the only church in the county showing the Gothic Revival style. [S1586]
The encyclopedia says Decatur Academy, a secondary school, opened in the 1840s, and that a school for African American children was established in 1869. When the academy closed in 1890, the Holston Conference of the Methodist Church set up a high school that ran until 1910, when Meigs County High School was built. [S1567] The State Library and Archives lists a county school book for 1838 to 1848 among the Works Progress Administration’s transcriptions of early records. [S1585]
The Cherokee Nation south of the Hiwassee was the last piece of the county opened to settlers. [S1567] Panels at the memorial park at Blythe Ferry tell the larger story. One recalls that President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and quotes the Cherokee Phoenix of November 12, 1831, on "a desire to possess the Indian land." [S1587] The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s Trail of Tears entry says a minority group signed the Treaty of New Echota in December 1835, ceding all Cherokee land in the East, and that the U.S. Senate ratified it on May 23, 1836, by a single vote, although the lawful Cherokee representatives protested it through every legal channel. [S12]
General Winfield Scott arrived at New Echota on April 16, 1838, to command what a park panel calls the "Army of the Cherokee Nation," and divided the nation into three military districts. [S1588] His Orders No. 25, reproduced on another panel, told the Cherokees that "the full moon of May is already on the wane" and that before another passed, every Cherokee in those states must be in motion westward. [S1589] The encyclopedia says the roundup began in May 1838 with seven thousand soldiers, and that most of the captives spent the summer in collection camps. [S12]
Over that summer, a panel says, Principal Chief John Ross and other Cherokee delegates negotiated with the War Department, and Cherokee leaders won approval to conduct the remaining parties west themselves. [S1590] The encyclopedia says three groups left by water from present-day Chattanooga that summer and struggled with low water, and that the first overland group left on August 28, 1838. [S12]
The encyclopedia’s Trail of Tears entry says the first overland group was followed by twelve others, each of about a thousand people. [S12] The county entry says most of the area’s own Cherokee residents were removed in 1838, crossing the river in Meigs County at Blythe’s Ferry. [S1567] A park panel says nine detachments, ranging from 729 to 1,766 people each, began crossing at Blythe’s Ferry in October 1838, led by Cherokee conductors Hair Conrad, Elijah Hicks, the Reverend Jesse Bushyhead, Situwakee, Captain Old Fields, Moses Daniel, Chooalooka, George Hicks and Peter Hildebrand, with wagon masters, doctors, mounted guards and contractors helping them. [S1570]
The first two detachments reached the ferry in late August, the same panel says, but stopped because of drought and heat; the first camped on both sides of the river and the second four miles back. Contractors provided rations of sugar, coffee, salt and soap, and the Cherokees hunted and fished. When the weather improved in early October the crossings began, and they went on until mid-November. [S1570] A memorial marker placed by the Alabama-Tennessee Trail of Tears Corridor Committee says about nine thousand Cherokees and Creeks camped at the ferry while waiting to cross, after being held in stockades a few miles back, and quotes Butrick’s journal on people lying "on the naked ground exposed to wind and rain." [S1591] The state’s 2026 announcement of the new state park says thousands of Cherokee and hundreds of Muscogee (Creek) people camped at Blythe Ferry in harsh conditions. [S1571]
Moving thousands of people, about five thousand horses and five hundred wagons across the river was slow, another panel says, and some crossings took three days. [S1592] Letters reproduced on the panels describe the delays. On October 16, 1838, J. Powell wrote from Blythe’s Ferry that by ten in the morning only about twenty wagons had crossed, and that he believed "the proprietors of the Ferry, influenced by the surrounding citizens (for lucrative purposes)" were determined to slow the conductors down. [S1593] On November 12, John Ross reported to Scott that he had found Peter Hildebrand’s detachment camped on the south bank, that four boats ran from dawn to dusk, two of them manned by Cherokees, and that by noon on the day he wrote "all the people were over." [S1592] The corridor committee’s marker says the last detachment crossed on November 12, 1838. [S1591]
A marker that once stood at the park entrance, placed by the Woodmen of the World and a Trail of Tears remembrance motorcycle ride and now reported missing, listed the nine detachments with their wagons and people; its figures add to 492 wagons and 9,839 people. [S1594] It described the old roadbed there as a trench worn by thousands of people, horses and wagons between August and November 1838. [S1594]
One panel says the parties that left Blythe’s Ferry in the early fall carried diseases such as dysentery, measles and whooping cough from the stockades, and that children and elders were buried in unmarked graves along the way; it quotes Evan Jones, writing in the Baptist Missionary of December 30, 1838, that "great numbers of the old, the young and the infirm, will inevitably be sacrificed." [S1595] Another quotes George Hicks, conductor of a detachment, writing at Mouse Creek on November 4, 1838, that "our property has been stolen from us by white men." [S1596] The encyclopedia’s entry on the Trail of Tears estimates that of about fourteen thousand people who set out, more than four thousand died before reaching their destination. [S12] A last panel follows the survivors west, where they settled among the Cherokee Old Settlers, rebuilt their schools, churches and government, and governed themselves under a new constitution. [S1597]
A few Cherokee residents stayed in the Meigs County area, among them John Miller, Richard Taylor, Colonel Gideon Morgan and John Jolly, according to the encyclopedia. [S1567] William Blythe, the article on his family says, went west with his wife’s people. [S1584]
The encyclopedia counts 598 farms in Meigs County in 1850, raising chiefly hogs (twenty thousand head), wheat, oats, corn and potatoes. [S1567] In 1850 the county had 4,480 white residents, 395 enslaved people and 4 free African Americans; by 1860 there were 4,021 whites, 638 enslaved people and 7 free Black residents. [S1567] The Rice-Marler House on Goodfield Valley Road, built in 1856 for Almeda Rice under a steamboat captain named Jones, still had the foundations of a slave cabin 200 yards west of the house when the county was surveyed. [S1598]
When Tennessee voted on secession in June 1861, the encyclopedia says, Meigs County voted 481 for secession and 267 for the Union. The district south of the Hiwassee had the fewest slaveholders and sent most of its men to the Union. [S1567] The county’s war memorial in Decatur lists the Confederate companies of Captains A. J. Lillard, A. F. Boggess, G. W. McKenzie, A. W. Hodge, G. C. Sanduskey and W. W. Lillard, along with a company from the war with Mexico under Captain G. W. McKenzie. [S1599] At the Hiwassee Campground near Georgetown, the state marker says, troops bivouacked during the Civil War. [S1579]
A Civil War Trails marker in Decatur says that after Union Gen. William Rosecrans’s army fell back into Chattanooga following the battle of September 19–20, 1863, Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg sent Gen. Joseph Wheeler’s cavalry to cut the Federal supply line through the Sequatchie Valley. Wheeler’s attempts to cross the Tennessee at fords and shoals failed in the early hours of September 30 until Lt. William G. Allen of the 5th (McKenzie’s) Tennessee Cavalry, a resident of Washington, guided the corps to Kelly’s Shoals, about seven miles southwest of the marker, where Wheeler crossed in the dark. [S1600] Union Gen. George Crook, who chased him, reported that "the rebels crossed last night in heavy force at a ford which they made for themselves." The raid disrupted the supply line only for a while. [S1600]
In 1864, the encyclopedia says, Owen Soloman, acting under the order of Military Governor Andrew Johnson, organized a new county court loyal to the Union. [S1567]
The encyclopedia says farmers resumed their lives after the war, adding apples and peaches, beef cattle and milk cows to their grain crops. In the 1880s they turned more and more to tobacco as a cash crop, from 4,159 pounds in 1880 to 136,791 pounds by 1940. Timber became important too and was floated to Chattanooga until about 1900, when the pine and poplar were virtually logged out. [S1567]
Meigs County counted 814 freedmen in 1870, the encyclopedia says, but the African American population found little opportunity and fell to less than 2 percent of the county by 1990. [S1567] One of the county’s National Register properties records that history: the Andy Wood log house, built about 1890, and the blacksmith shop his son Willie Wood built in 1912. The nomination calls them important buildings for Black history and industry in a county that was 1.8 percent Black in 1980, and says the 1850 census listed twenty-eight blacksmiths in the county. When it was nominated the shop, still without electricity, was the only blacksmith shop operating in Meigs County. [S1601]
The small Gothic Revival law office of Robert H. Smith, a North Carolina native practicing in the county by 1880, was moved off the court square before 1900 and later housed businesses including the Tennessee River Telephone office. [S1602] North of Decatur, the Champion Bridge Company of Wilmington, Ohio, built the iron truss Kings Mill Bridge over Big Sewee Creek in 1884 or 1885; the National Register nomination calls it the oldest bridge in the county, and all that remains of a mill community. [S1603] The county historical society calls it the Henley Mill Bridge, after the mill it stood beside. [S1604] The society also describes the R. H. Johnson stable, built in 1888 to house Tennessee walking horses for a horse farm that ended with Johnson’s death about 1890. [S1604]
With poor roads and no railroad, the National Register survey says, steamboats were the best carriers of goods and travelers between Meigs County and its main markets in Chattanooga and Knoxville. [S1605] Samuel S. Eaves moved to Breedenton with his father in 1880 and became a prosperous merchant whose store, ferry and steamboat landing were important to the area’s commerce. People gathered at his store on Sundays to ride the steamboats, and older residents still remembered waiting there for the Joe Wheeler, the main steamboat serving Meigs County in the early 1900s. [S1605] His house, built in 1909, shows Steamboat Gothic influence; the nomination calls it the largest house in the county and the first with electricity and running water. [S1605]
The Meigs County Bank opened on July 4, 1907, in an office in the courthouse and put up its own building in 1920; the nomination calls it the only banking firm native to the county. [S1606] In the south of the county, the stone Scott Hooper Garage, built in 1928, repaired mule wagons and early automobiles, ground corn and worked as a blacksmith shop. [S1607]
Three brick courthouses have stood on the square in Decatur, the National Register nomination says. The first was completed in 1837 and replaced in 1882. On April 2, 1902, fire gutted the second, leaving only three walls standing. The contractor W. R. Harper drew plans for $50; the Broadway Manufacturing Company of Knoxville, the low bidder, finished the new building in late 1903 or early 1904 on the old foundation, almost duplicating its predecessor, for $7,645. [S1608] The nomination describes a two-story vernacular brick courthouse with a three-and-a-half-story clock tower that "can be seen for miles," and calls it the county’s landmark. [S1608]
The encyclopedia gives 1905 as the date of the present courthouse, and the State Library and Archives records fires at the courthouse in 1904 and 1964. [S1567][S1585] By the time the courthouse was listed on the National Register in 1978, a new city-county building had gone up on the outskirts of Decatur and many county offices had moved there. [S1608]
The Methodist high school in Decatur closed in 1910, when Meigs County High School was built. [S1567] The war memorial on Main Street is dedicated to the county’s men who served in the world wars and carries names from World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. [S1599]
As late as 1940, the encyclopedia says, the county had only one industrial plant, the Decatur Hosiery Mills, established in the late 1930s. [S1567]
The Tennessee Valley Authority built Chickamauga Dam, just north of Chattanooga, between 1936 and 1940; its reservoir stretches fifty-nine miles upriver to Watts Bar Dam. [S1609] Watts Bar Dam, begun in 1939, was finished in January 1942, three weeks after Pearl Harbor. [S78] The encyclopedia says the county’s most productive acres were flooded by the lakes, but that the Tennessee and Hiwassee rivers gained 225 miles of shoreline within the county, bringing fishing, hunting, boating and photography. [S1567]
At the Hastings-Locke Ferry the filling of Chickamauga Lake raised the river about seven feet, the nomination says, from 676 to 683 feet above sea level. [S1581] On Hiwassee Island, TVA’s archaeologist writes, the WPA excavation of the 1930s was made ahead of the reservoir’s filling. [S1572]
The encyclopedia says TVA’s Sequoyah and Watts Bar plants, built in the 1970s south and north of the county, brought residential growth, and that by the 1970s nine companies employed 432 workers in Meigs. [S1567]
The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency’s Hiwassee Refuge covers 6,000 acres, 2,500 of land and 3,500 of water, at the meeting of the Hiwassee and Tennessee rivers on Chickamauga Lake, and includes the 400 acres of Hiwassee Island above water. [S1610] The agency says the first sandhill cranes appeared at the refuge in 1968, when twenty birds were seen resting on their migration south. [S1611] Today, it says, the refuge has the largest winter flock of sandhill cranes in the southeastern United States outside Florida, best seen from November through February with a peak in January, along with an occasional endangered whooping crane. [S1610]
The agency wrote in 2008 that a Sandhill Crane Festival had begun a little more than sixteen years earlier, and that a TWRA educator, Clarence Coffey, and a retired National Park Service employee, Ken Dubke, built it in partnership with the Birchwood School and later the Cherokee Removal Memorial, and that at its peak more than four thousand people came. [S1611] The encyclopedia notes that the area is now the Hiwassee Island Wildlife Refuge, known for the migrating cranes. [S1567]
The encyclopedia, written in the late 1990s, says the Meigs County government, TVA, the National Park Service and the Wildlife Resources Agency planned a monument near the Hiwassee inscribed with the names of the Cherokees removed in 1838, with a walking trail along part of a removal route, and that construction of the memorial and park at the old Blythe Ferry site began in 1998. [S1567]
The National Park Service now lists the site, at 6800 Blyth Ferry Lane in Birchwood, as a historic site on the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, managed by Tennessee State Parks; it calls the ferry landing the place where Cherokee citizens took their last step off their homelands. [S1612] The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail itself was established by Congress in 1987. [S12] On June 2, 2026, Tennessee State Parks dedicated the former county-run Cherokee Removal Memorial Park as Cherokee Trail of Tears State Park, with tribal partners from the Cherokee Nation and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and Remember the Removal bike riders in attendance. [S1571]
The encyclopedia, describing the late 1990s, says tobacco and vegetables were the leading market crops and that beef cattle and dairy herds were still raised. Shaw Industries’ yarn mill was the largest manufacturer, with more than four hundred employees, and the school system was the largest public employer. [S1567] County schools were consolidated in 1997 into two elementary schools, one middle school and one high school, and the Meigs County High School girls’ basketball team won state AA championships in 1994 and 1995. [S1567] The Blythe and Washington ferries, which the encyclopedia calls the last ferries in the eastern Tennessee River Valley, gave way to bridges in the 1990s. [S1567][S1582][S1583]
The census counted 12,758 people in the county in 2020. [S1568] Decatur remains the only incorporated town; the municipal advisory service gives a 2026 estimate of 1,637 residents. [S1569]
The Meigs County Historical Society, founded in 1983, runs the Meigs County Historical Museum and Veterans Courtyard in Decatur, with maps, artifacts and a genealogical library. [S1613] Its list of historical places includes the Mt. Zion Church, the Henley (Kings) Mill Bridge and the R. H. Johnson stable. [S1604]
The county’s National Register properties came largely from a single multiple-resource survey by the Tennessee Historical Commission. Some have not survived: the H. C. Shiflett Barn near Georgetown, a log cantilever barn of about 1866 listed in July 1982, was demolished on October 27, 2016, and later removed from the Register. [S1614]
For researchers, the State Library and Archives lists Stewart Lillard’s Meigs County, Tennessee: A Documented Account of its European Settlement and Growth (1975), Allen’s 1908 Rhea and Meigs Counties (Tennessee) in the Confederate War, census and marriage transcriptions, and Works Progress Administration copies of the first county court minutes, wills and school book. Decatur newspapers survive in scattered issues from 1898. [S1585] The encyclopedia’s suggested reading is Lillard’s second edition of 1982. [S1567]
Visit: Check hours with each site before you go.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1000s | The large Mississippian town on Hiwassee Island, with temple mounds around a plaza, dates from the eleventh century. [S1567] |
| 1801 | Return Jonathan Meigs arrives in Tennessee as federal agent to the Cherokees. [S62] |
| c. 1807 | Conley Hastings opens a ferry across the Tennessee at Washington. [S1581] |
| c. 1809 | William Blythe opens a ferry at the mouth of the Hiwassee. [S1583] |
| 1809–10 | Sam Houston lives with John Jolly’s Cherokee town on Hiwassee Island. [S1567] |
| 1817 | Treaty concluded at the Cherokee Agency on Agency Creek, July 8. [S1575] |
| 1817, 1819 | The Hiwassee Treaty and the Calhoun Agreement cede the land north of the Hiwassee. [S1567] |
| 1823 | Return J. Meigs dies, January 28. [S62] |
| 1831 | A post office opens at James Cowan’s store at Cowansville. [S1577] |
| 1836 | The legislature creates Meigs County from Rhea and names the seat Decatur. [S1585] |
| 1838 | Nine Cherokee detachments cross the Tennessee at Blythe’s Ferry, October to November. [S1570] |
| 1838 | Decatur’s incorporation date, December 1. [S1569] |
| 1844 | David Campbell gives land for the Hiwassee Cumberland Presbyterian Campground, October 1. [S1579] |
| c. 1859 | The Decatur Methodist Church builds on lot 69. [S1586] |
| 1861 | Meigs votes 481 to 267 for secession in June. [S1567] |
| 1863 | Wheeler’s cavalry crosses the Tennessee at Kelly’s Shoals, September 30. [S1600] |
| 1864 | Owen Soloman organizes a Unionist county court. [S1567] |
| 1869 | A school for African American children is established in Decatur. [S1567] |
| 1884–85 | The Kings Mill Bridge is built over Big Sewee Creek. [S1603] |
| 1902 | Fire guts the second courthouse, April 2. [S1608] |
| 1903–04 | The present courthouse is completed. [S1608] |
| 1907 | The Meigs County Bank opens in the courthouse, July 4. [S1606] |
| 1909 | S. S. Eaves builds his house at Breedenton. [S1605] |
| 1910 | Meigs County High School is built. [S1567] |
| Late 1930s | University of Tennessee and WPA crews excavate Hiwassee Island. [S1572] |
| 1940 | Chickamauga Dam is completed. [S1609] |
| 1942 | Watts Bar Dam is completed in January. [S78] |
| 1968 | The first twenty sandhill cranes are seen at the Hiwassee Refuge. [S1611] |
| 1978 | The courthouse is listed on the National Register. [S1608] |
| 1982 | Meigs County’s multiple-resource National Register listings, July 6. [S1614] |
| 1994 | Bridges replace the Washington and Blythe ferries. [S1582][S1583] |
| 1998 | Construction begins on the memorial park at Blythe Ferry. [S1567] |
| 2015–17 | TVA surveys and test-excavates Hiwassee Island with tribal partners. [S1572][S1573] |
| 2020 | The census counts 12,758 people in the county. [S1568] |
| 2026 | Cherokee Trail of Tears State Park is dedicated, June 2. [S1571] |
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: morning mist on an East Tennessee lake, a My East TN photograph and the same banner we use on our Meigs County guide. It is a general lake scene, not a photograph of a specific Meigs County site; no endorsement by Meigs County, the Town of Decatur, Tennessee State Parks or any source on this page is implied. Reused source numbers (S12, S38, S62, S78) match the same sources on our other history pages. Corrections: [email protected].