East Tennessee History · County by county
The county where Tennessee got its name: Overhill Cherokee towns along the Little Tennessee, a British fort and a federal trading post, a small gold rush in the mountains, a railroad town with a lake underground, a timber town at the forest’s edge, and a TVA lake that covered the old capital of the Cherokee Nation.
Monroe County sits in the southeastern corner of Tennessee, running from the Little Tennessee River valley up into the mountains along the North Carolina line. [S197][S213] It was created in 1819 and named for President James Monroe, and roughly 145,000 acres of it, more than a third of the county’s land, lie inside the Cherokee National Forest. [S197][S204][S228] Few places in the state hold as much of Tennessee’s early story. The Little Tennessee River valley at its northern edge was the heart of the Overhill Cherokee country, and the town of Tanasi there gave its name to the river and, in time, to the state. [S3][S223] The British built Fort Loudoun here in the 1750s; Sequoyah, who gave the Cherokee a written language, was born nearby; and the United States ran a frontier trading post at Tellico Blockhouse in the 1790s. [S4][S11][S200] Later chapters bring a gold rush at Coker Creek, a railroad town at Sweetwater, a timber town at Tellico Plains, and a TVA dam that put the old Cherokee towns under a lake. [S197][S214][S209][S218][S188]
The county counted 46,250 people in the 2020 Census, and the Census Bureau estimated about 49,700 by 2025. [S228] It has four incorporated places. Madisonville is the county seat; Sweetwater is the largest town and reaches across the line into McMinn County; Tellico Plains is a town at the foot of the mountains; and the town of Vonore, on Tellico Lake, also extends into Blount County. [S117][S197] The Census also counts three unincorporated communities as census-designated places: Coker Creek in the mountains, Kahite, the one Tellico Village neighborhood on the Monroe side of the line, and Rarity Bay, which sits in both Monroe and Loudon counties. [S117][S191]
People lived along the Little Tennessee long before the Cherokee. Between about A.D. 1200 and 1600, a farming village of the Mississippian period’s Dallas culture stood at Toqua, with a plaza, rings of palisades and two earthen mounds. The larger mound was rebuilt sixteen times over the generations, often with buildings on top; the smaller one held burials. [S199][S2] (Our chapter 1 tells the wider story of the mound builders.)
By the 1700s the valley belonged to the Overhill Cherokee, whose towns lined the Little Tennessee and its branches. [S3] Traders from South Carolina were already visiting Great Tellico in the late 1600s. [S197] Tanasi rose to political leadership in the early 1700s; a memorial at the site says its civil chief was chosen as the first "Emperor" of the Cherokee Nation in 1721, and that the town’s name was also given to the river it stood on. [S223][S197] Henry Timberlake’s map of 1762 was the first to spell the name as it is spelled today, and in 1796 the new state took Tennessee as its name. [S223] (Our Monroe County story Tanasi, the town that named Tennessee follows that name all the way to the lake.)
Chota, Tanasi’s next-door neighbor, had grown larger by the 1740s and by mid-century was regarded by Native people and Europeans alike as the Cherokee capital. [S198] Its center was a plaza with an eight-sided townhouse, where councils and ceremonies took place, and an open pavilion for summer business. Around them about sixty households, each with a round winter house, a summer house and corncribs, stretched nearly a mile along the river, home to perhaps three to five hundred people. [S198] Some of the best-known Cherokee leaders of the century lived there, among them Old Hop, Attakullakulla, Oconastota, Old Tassel and Hanging Maw. [S198][S3] British traders lived in the town, and colonial envoys came and went. [S198]
Toqua, a few miles upriver, was a smaller Cherokee town; its name is said to mean "place of a mythic great fish." Timberlake’s map showed about thirty-two houses and a council house there. [S199]
War reached the valley more than once. Forces from the new United States destroyed Toqua in 1776 and again in 1780 and 1788, and burned Chota in 1780, though it was rebuilt by 1784. [S199][S198] In 1788 the Cherokee moved their capital south to Ustanali in Georgia. [S198] The Overhill towns dwindled after that: by 1807 only about thirty people lived at Chota, and by 1813 only a single household remained. [S198] The last of the valley was given up in an 1819 treaty. [S198][S3]
In 1756 and 1757, during the war between Britain and France, the colony of South Carolina built Fort Loudoun on the south bank of the Little Tennessee near the mouth of the Tellico River. It was meant to keep the Overhill Cherokee on the British side, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia counts it as the first permanent English settlement in what is now Tennessee. [S4][S197] Its garrison of about two hundred men lived inside a log palisade and relied on Cherokee neighbors for much of their food. [S4]
Relations broke down, and Cherokee warriors besieged the fort in 1760. The starving garrison surrendered on August 9, 1760, under a promise of safe passage back to Charleston. On the march, near where Cane Creek meets the Tellico River a few miles from present-day Tellico Plains, the column was attacked. [S4][S219] The Tennessee Encyclopedia puts the dead at about thirty; the state historical marker says 25 were killed and about 200 taken captive and later ransomed by the colony. [S4][S219] (See chapter 2, and our Loudon County history for how the fort’s name traveled downriver.)
Sequoyah was born at the Cherokee town of Tuskegee, near the fort. [S11][S197] (The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s county entry gives 1760 as the year; other accounts differ, so we leave it at the second half of the 1700s.) As an adult he worked out a syllabary, a set of symbols for the sounds of the Cherokee language, which Cherokee leaders adopted in 1821. Within a few years thousands of Cherokee could read and write in their own language, and a Cherokee newspaper followed in 1828. [S11]
The Sequoyah Birthplace Museum in Vonore has told his story, and the story of the Cherokee in Tennessee, since 1986. [S226][S197] Just outside it is a burial mound where 191 Cherokee people from the Chota and Tanasi area were reburied after their graves were disturbed during the Tellico project. [S223]
After the Revolution, the Overhill Cherokee who remained in the valley sought an alliance with the new federal government to protect themselves from settlers pushing onto their land. [S200] At the request of the Cherokee leader Hanging Maw, territorial governor William Blount agreed in 1794 to build a federal post where the Tellico meets the Little Tennessee, next to the ruins of Fort Loudoun. [S200] Tellico Blockhouse, built in 1794–95, served as both a fort and a government trading house, or "factory," under a 1795 federal plan. At the factory Cherokee hunters could sell furs at fair prices and learn new farming and craft skills, part of the Washington administration’s effort to make them adopt settler ways of life. [S200] Indian agents handed out spinning wheels, looms and cottonseed so Cherokee families could make their own cloth. [S200]
The post was a busy market. A visiting French nobleman, the future King Louis Philippe, wrote at the end of the 1790s that Cherokee families kept it well supplied with game, eggs and fresh fruit. [S200] He also left one of the most detailed descriptions of a Cherokee council house, at Toqua, and his brother’s drawing of that town is the only known picture of an eighteenth-century Cherokee town made at the time. [S199]
Two treaties were made near here. The 1798 Treaty of Tellico moved the boundary south; one of its survey points, a militia muster ground near present-day Greenback, later became a turning point on the Monroe–Loudon county line. [S181] A second land cession was negotiated at the blockhouse in 1805, and the federal agency moved south to the Hiwassee River; the post was abandoned in 1807. [S200] Its foundations have been excavated and partly exposed beside the reconstructed fort at Fort Loudoun State Historic Park. [S200][S192]
Under the 1819 treaty the Cherokee gave up the land south of the Little Tennessee, known as the Hiwassee District, and the Tennessee General Assembly organized it into new counties. [S3][S170][S204] The act creating Monroe and McMinn counties passed on November 18, 1819. Until a courthouse could be built, it said, Monroe’s courts would meet at the house of William Dixon on the south bank of the Little Tennessee, across from the town of Morganton. [S204][S180]
Madisonville became the county seat. Courts met in private homes until 1830, when the first courthouse went up on the square. [S205] That building burned within a few years and a second one followed in 1834. [S205][S204] Federal troops burned the second courthouse in 1864; the third, finished in 1868, was condemned and torn down in 1896. [S205][S206] The current Monroe County Courthouse, designed by the Knoxville firm of Baumann Brothers and dedicated on May 15, 1897, still anchors the square. Its building coincided with plans for a new railroad line between Atlanta and Knoxville through Madisonville, the county’s second railroad. [S205][S197]
The new county drew settlers quickly. White families arrived around Sweetwater in the 1820s, and in 1849 or 1850 a Methodist campground school at Bat Creek became Hiwassee College, near Madisonville. [S209][S201][S222] It started small, with three staff members teaching teenage boys, but its first graduate, David M. Key, became U.S. postmaster general under President Rutherford B. Hayes, and future governor Albert H. Roberts graduated in 1889. [S201]
High in the southeast corner of the county, near the North Carolina line, prospectors were working the streams at Coker Creek as early as 1827, while the land still belonged to the Cherokee Nation. [S214] Placer gold, washed from creek gravel, was found there in 1831, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia counts these as the state’s first major gold mining sites. [S215][S197] Tennessee’s first state geologist, Gerard Troost, found hundreds of miners at work when he visited that year. [S214]
Mining went on in fits and starts for nearly a century, with pans, hoses, dredges, blasting and tunnels. It peaked from 1856 to 1860, when 600 to 700 prospectors, including enslaved and free Black workers, searched the area. [S214] How much gold came out is hard to pin down. An older state marker says $80,000 worth was mined between 1831 and 1854; a newer one says official U.S. Mint records show no more than about $269,000 between 1831 and 1921, while merchants who traded goods for gold guessed close to $2 million by the 1890s. [S215][S214] The old Unicoi Turnpike route, today’s Joe Brown Highway and Tennessee 68, ran through the community. [S213]
Monroe County was divided. A monument on the Madisonville courthouse square honors local men who served in both Confederate and Union units, and each army held the town at different times. [S206] (See chapter 6 for East Tennessee’s divided war.) In June 1863 a Knoxville newspaper praised the young women of Madisonville for raising $118 for sick and wounded Confederate soldiers and called the town as loyal to the Confederacy as any. [S206] One of its sons, John C. Vaughn, a Mexican War veteran, organized the 3rd Tennessee Infantry for the Confederacy, became a brigadier general, was captured at Vicksburg, and in 1865 led the cavalry brigade that escorted Jefferson Davis on his flight from Richmond. [S207][S197]
The railroad made Sweetwater a target. The East Tennessee and Georgia line reached the town in 1852, and trains stopped there to take on water from two big tanks fed by the creek. [S209] The town became a Confederate supply depot, then changed hands when the 45th Ohio Mounted Infantry occupied it in September 1863. [S209][S197] Cavalry fights kept control of the valley shifting all that fall. [S209] In November, Gen. James Longstreet made Sweetwater his headquarters for the move on Knoxville; it was then the northernmost station the Confederates held on the railroad, and a state marker says about 15,000 of his men camped there for four days. [S209][S210] (Our Knox County history follows the campaign to Fort Sanders.)
Under the hills a few miles from town, the Great Craighead Cave, today’s Lost Sea, held deposits of saltpeter, a key ingredient of gunpowder. In June 1861 two partners contracted with the Confederate government to mine it. The operation never came close to the 250,000 pounds promised for 1862, but it shipped several hundred pounds every two weeks until Union troops reached Sweetwater in September 1863 and the miners tore down their works and went home. [S211][S220]
When Gen. William T. Sherman marched up from Chattanooga to relieve Knoxville in early December 1863, his columns crossed the county. On December 7 Union troops occupied Madisonville, where one Illinois soldier remembered families being set to work baking cornbread and cakes for the regiment, a "forced hospitality." [S206] At the Tellico iron works near Tellico Plains, a company founded in 1824 and run in the war years by Elisha Johnson, a Northern-born former mayor of Rochester, New York, had been seized by the Confederacy for its high-grade iron. [S212][S197] Sherman made his headquarters at Johnson’s house from December 9 to 11, tried him for helping the Confederates and acquitted him; Union soldiers then wrecked the works before leaving. [S212] Up the old Unicoi Turnpike, Union cavalry chased a Confederate wagon train toward Georgia, and the Coker Creek gold mines shut down as bushwhackers from both sides preyed on farm families for years. [S213]
The fighting did not end with the campaign. In 1864 Federal soldiers burned the Madisonville courthouse and, with help from residents, pulled down the jail for its building materials. [S206] In February 1865 a detachment of Vaughn’s brigade captured the Union garrison at Sweetwater and burned the depot, but Federal troops held the railroad there until the war’s end. [S209]
Sweetwater grew into the county’s largest town and its industrial center, on the railroad and later the Lee Highway (U.S. 11). [S197] In 1874 Dr. J. Lynn Bachman opened Sweetwater Military College, which became Tennessee Military Institute in 1902, moved to its present site in 1909, and was renamed TMI Academy in 1975. [S216][S197] In 1989 the campus took an unusual turn: Meiji Gakuin, a Christian school in Japan founded by missionaries, opened Tennessee Meiji Gakuin, a high school for Japanese students, described as the first accredited Japanese high school in the United States. It flourished in the 1990s, then lost students as Japan’s economy struggled and families grew wary of sending children abroad after September 11, 2001; its last class graduated in 2007. [S221][S197]
The cave east of town has its own long history. The Lost Sea’s owners say Cherokee artifacts have been found deep inside, along with the tracks and bones of a Pleistocene jaguar discovered in 1939. Settlers stored potatoes in its steady 58-degree air, and Civil War graffiti dated to 1863 survives on the walls. [S220] In 1905 a 13-year-old boy named Ben Sands squeezed through a muddy opening and found a huge underground lake. The cave hosted a dance floor and cockfights after 1915, and moonshiners used other rooms. [S220] The lake, still toured by boat, was an important tourist draw throughout the twentieth century. [S197][S220]
In Madisonville, antebellum houses such as the Cannon-Stickley House, a brick home with a double Greek Revival portico, recall the town’s early years. [S197] Its best-known native is Estes Kefauver, born near the town in 1903. He went to Congress in 1939 as a supporter of TVA, beat Memphis political boss E. H. Crump’s organization in the 1948 Senate race wearing a coonskin cap as his trademark, and in 1950 became a national figure as chairman of the Senate’s televised hearings on organized crime. [S202][S208] He ran for president in 1952, was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1956, and was one of only two Southern senators, with Albert Gore Sr., who refused to sign the 1956 Southern Manifesto against school desegregation. [S202] He died in 1963 and is buried on the family land near Madisonville. [S202][S208]
Hiwassee College grew to six buildings on ninety-five acres by 1893 and came under the Methodist Holston Conference. [S201] After years of trouble with accreditation and money, it closed after its final commencement on May 10, 2019, roughly 170 years after its founding. [S222]
Tellico Plains, where the Tellico River leaves the mountains, grew in the late 1800s and early 1900s as a logging and industrial town. [S197] Much of its growth traces to Charles A. Scott, who came from Johnson County around 1890, sold or gave away much of his 15,000 acres to let the town grow, recruited the Stokely Company, helped pay for schools, and built a columned mansion between 1908 and 1912 that is now on the National Register. [S217][S197]
The big timber came out of the mountains above town. Beginning in 1906, the Babcock lumber interests cut what was then mostly virgin forest in the Tellico Mountains, with chestnut and yellow poplar trees more than 140 feet tall. Shay engines and logging trains worked the Tellico River valley, one route coming down past Bald River Falls. [S218] Logging halted in 1924, and about 44,000 acres of the watershed were sold to the national forest. [S218] The story was common across these mountains: by 1910 the southern Appalachians supplied nearly 40 percent of the nation’s timber, and when the companies moved west they left bare slopes and jobless families. [S203]
The federal government began buying cut-over land in the region in 1912, and in 1936 President Franklin Roosevelt combined the Tennessee portions of several national forests into the Cherokee National Forest, the only national forest in the state. [S203] Young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps planted trees, built trails, fire towers and roads, and left buildings that still stand. The CCC camp at Tellico Plains was restored and serves today as the forest’s Tellico Ranger Station. [S203][S197] (See chapter 9 for the New Deal in the valley.) Bald River Falls, a 90-foot waterfall on Tellico River Road, is one of the region’s best-known falls and draws crowds on weekends. [S225]
The newest road over these mountains opened in 1996. The Cherohala Skyway, named for the Cherokee and Nantahala national forests it crosses, runs more than 40 miles from Tellico Plains to Robbinsville, North Carolina, climbing above 5,400 feet near the state line, and was designated a National Scenic Byway the year it opened. [S224][S197] A county-owned visitor center at its foot in Tellico Plains opened in 2003. [S224]
The Tennessee Valley Authority changed the northern edge of the county more than anything since the treaty era. [S197][S21] TVA started building Tellico Dam near the mouth of the Little Tennessee in 1967, promising industry and jobs. Its plans for a new planned community called Timberlake on Monroe County land, pursued from 1967 to 1975, never fully came about. [S188][S197] The project was slowed for years by a lawsuit over the snail darter, a small fish found in the Little Tennessee in 1973, and by protests over the farms and Cherokee sites the lake would cover. [S190][S188][S197] The Supreme Court sided with the fish in TVA v. Hill in June 1978, but Congress passed an exemption in 1979, and President Jimmy Carter reluctantly signed it that September. [S189][S188][S197] The gates closed on November 29, 1979. [S188] (Our Loudon County history tells the full story of the dam fight.)
Before the water rose, archaeologists raced to learn what they could. The University of Tennessee had dug at Chota in 1939, and returned from 1969 to 1974, recording the townhouses, thirty-seven houses and hundreds of pits and burials. [S198] At Toqua in the 1970s, excavators uncovered the plaza, three palisades and dozens of houses before the site went underwater. [S199] Tellico Lake now covers Toqua, Tanasi and much of the old Overhill valley. [S199][S223][S3] At Chota, TVA covered the central part of the site with fill before the lake was finished; by agreement it is now managed by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Memorials to Tanasi and to the Chota townhouse were placed there in the 1980s. [S198] The Chota memorial’s eight stone pillars stand for the seven Cherokee clans and the nation as a whole. [S223] TVA itself now calls the Tellico story "complicated": the lake took 22,000 acres and never brought the factory jobs it promised. [S188]
The lake brought new neighbors: the Kahite neighborhood of Tellico Village and part of Rarity Bay sit on the Monroe side of the county line. [S117][S191] The county grew by about 7.5 percent between 2020 and 2025, and almost a quarter of its people are 65 or older. [S228] Beyond the mountains, the Skyway and the river, the past is easy to find: the 1897 courthouse in Madisonville, the TMI campus in Sweetwater, the markers on the Tellico Plains square, and the reconstructed Fort Loudoun beside the lake. [S205][S216][S212][S192] For towns, parks and news, see our Monroe County guide, and our Blount County history continues up the Little Tennessee toward the Smokies.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. A.D. 1200–1600 | Dallas-culture village and mounds at Toqua [S199] |
| Late 1600s | South Carolina traders visit Great Tellico [S197] |
| 1721 | Tanasi’s chief chosen first "Emperor" of the Cherokee Nation, per the Tanasi memorial [S223] |
| 1740s–1750s | Chota outgrows Tanasi and becomes the Cherokee capital [S198] |
| 1756–57 | Fort Loudoun built on the Little Tennessee [S4] |
| 1760 | Fort Loudoun surrenders Aug. 9; garrison attacked near Cane Creek [S4][S219] |
| 1762 | Henry Timberlake’s map spells "Tennessee" [S223] |
| 1776–88 | American forces destroy Toqua and Chota; Cherokee capital moves to Georgia in 1788 [S199][S198] |
| 1794–95 | Tellico Blockhouse built [S200] |
| 1798 | Treaty of Tellico [S181] |
| 1805–07 | Land cession at Tellico; federal agency moves to the Hiwassee [S200] |
| 1819 | Cherokee cede the valley; Monroe County created Nov. 18 [S198][S204] |
| 1824 | Tellico iron works founded [S212][S197] |
| 1827–31 | Prospectors at Coker Creek; placer gold found 1831 [S214][S215] |
| 1830 | First courthouse built in Madisonville [S205] |
| 1849–50 | Hiwassee College founded [S222][S201] |
| 1852 | East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad reaches Sweetwater [S209] |
| 1861–63 | Confederate saltpeter mining at Great Craighead Cave [S211] |
| 1863 | Longstreet’s staging area at Sweetwater, November; Sherman at Madisonville and the Tellico iron works, December [S210][S206][S212] |
| 1864 | Madisonville courthouse burned [S205][S206] |
| 1874 | Sweetwater Military College founded (TMI from 1902) [S216] |
| 1897 | Present courthouse dedicated May 15 [S205] |
| 1905 | Ben Sands finds the underground lake [S220] |
| 1906–24 | Babcock logging in the Tellico Mountains [S218] |
| 1908–12 | Charles A. Scott’s mansion built at Tellico Plains [S217] |
| 1936 | Cherokee National Forest established in its present form [S203] |
| 1967 | Tellico Dam construction begins [S188] |
| 1969–74 | University of Tennessee excavations at Chota [S198] |
| 1978 | TVA v. Hill decided June 15 [S189] |
| 1979 | Tellico gates close Nov. 29 [S188] |
| 1986 | Sequoyah Birthplace Museum opens [S226] |
| 1989–2007 | Tennessee Meiji Gakuin on the TMI campus [S221] |
| 1996 | Cherohala Skyway opens [S224] |
| 2019 | Hiwassee College closes May 10 [S222] |
| 2020 | Census counts 46,250 people [S228] |
Start early on the lake at Fort Loudoun State Historic Park near Vonore, where the reconstructed fort and the excavated footings of Tellico Blockhouse sit side by side; the visitor center is open daily, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.. [S192][S200] A short drive away, the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum on Highway 360 is open Monday through Saturday 9 to 5 and Sunday noon to 5; the Cherokee burial memorial is just outside. [S226][S223] Continue to the Tanasi memorial off Bacon Ferry Road and walk the short dirt trail to the Chota memorial on the shore. [S223]
At midday head south to Madisonville to see the 1897 courthouse and the markers around the square, including the Civil War Trails marker and the John C. Vaughn marker; the Estes Kefauver marker is on Tellico Street South near Kefauver Lane. [S205][S206][S207][S208] Then drive to Tellico Plains: the Charles Hall Museum at 229 Cherohala Skyway is free and open 10 to 5 (daily March through December, weekends only in January and February), and the markers outside the Cherohala Skyway Visitor Center next door cover the iron works and the logging days. [S227][S212][S218] If time allows, follow Tellico River Road past the ranger station to Bald River Falls, or take Highway 68 south to the Coker Creek gold markers. [S225][S214][S215] Save Sweetwater and the Lost Sea for another afternoon, along with the Sweetwater Depot marker on Main Street. [S220][S209] Hours change with the seasons, so check before you go.
Visit: Fort Loudoun State Historic Park and Tellico Blockhouse site, Vonore · Sequoyah Birthplace Museum, Vonore · Tanasi and Chota memorials · Monroe County Courthouse, Madisonville · Charles Hall Museum, Tellico Plains · Cherohala Skyway · Bald River Falls · Coker Creek · The Lost Sea, Sweetwater
Every bracketed number on this page links here. Written by My East TN in our own words and checked against each source on 2026-10-28 (ET). Where sources disagree (for example, whether Louis Philippe visited in 1797 or 1799, how many of the Fort Loudoun garrison were killed in August 1760, the year Sequoyah was born, whether Hiwassee College dates from 1849 or 1850, whether Elisha Johnson bought the Tellico iron works in 1843 or 1846 and whether Union troops wrecked it in December 1863 or in 1864, whether Tellico Plains' town builder was Charles Andrew or Charles Abner Scott, and how much gold Coker Creek produced), we give both or leave the exact figure out. We don’t republish encyclopedia or museum text — follow the links for the full articles.
Images: My East TN photos and Studio illustrations only. Corrections: [email protected].