East Tennessee History · County by county
High on the Cumberland Plateau, Morgan County drew German and Swiss colonists, a famous English experiment, a coal railroad and a state prison, and today it’s some of East Tennessee’s wildest public land.
Morgan County was formed in 1817 on the Cumberland Plateau. It was rough country for farming, so it filled up slowly. Then, one after another, outsiders arrived with big plans: German and Swiss colonists at Wartburg in the 1840s, Thomas Hughes’s English colony at Rugby in 1880, and the railroad and coal companies that came with it. In the 1890s the state built Brushy Mountain prison here. Most of those plans fell short. What lasted was the land: Frozen Head, the Obed, Catoosa and the Big South Fork now make Morgan one of the best places in East Tennessee to get outdoors. [S31][S40]
The General Assembly created Morgan in 1817, the state’s thirty-ninth county. [S31] Most of the land came from Roane County, with a smaller piece from Anderson. [S31][S38] Lawmakers named it for Gen. Daniel Morgan, the Revolutionary War commander who beat the British at Cowpens and later served Virginia in Congress. [S38]
The first county seat was Montgomery. It was named for Maj. Lemuel P. Montgomery of Knoxville, who was killed at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. [S31] At first the county reached diagonally across the Plateau all the way up to the Kentucky line. It shrank as newer counties were formed, including Cumberland in 1855. [S31][S38]
The Cherokee gave up this part of the Plateau in the Third Treaty of Tellico in 1805. [S31][S40] Soon afterward, Samuel and Martin Hall became the first settlers to stay for good. Many of the early families were headed by Revolutionary War veterans who held North Carolina land grants for their service. [S31]
The ground was hard to farm. Less than half of the county’s land was good for crops. The Obed and the Emory rivers ran through the county, but neither one could carry freight boats. So families farmed to feed themselves and not much more, and the county grew slowly. [S31] With few big farms, slavery stayed small here: the 1820 census counted 46 enslaved people, and by 1860 there were 120, held by 25 owners. [S31] Coal changed the picture. It was first dug here in 1819, and by 1860 two small mines were working. [S31]
In 1844, George F. Gerding, a German-born merchant in New York, and Theodore de Cock of Antwerp formed a company to settle European immigrants on the Plateau. [S31][S36] The sources give different figures for how much land the company bought, so we leave the acreage out. The first group of about fifty colonists came from Mainz in 1845, and two more groups came in 1846. [S31] The St. Paul Lutheran congregation remembers Swiss families coming first and Saxon families following. [S41] The settlers named their town for Wartburg Castle in Germany, where Martin Luther translated the New Testament. [S40][S41]
The colonists brought trades with them. They ran a piano company, built furniture, rolled cigars from local tobacco, and planted vineyards and orchards. Among the newcomers were an architect, a trained musician and eight doctors. [S31] But the colony struggled. Settlers fought over land prices, the Reformed and Lutheran churches split, and then the Civil War hit. By 1870 the county had only 57 German-born and 41 Swiss-born residents left. [S31] Their mark is still on Wartburg, though. Gerding gave the land for the town square, a church and a cemetery. [S36] In 1870 the county moved its seat from Montgomery to Wartburg. [S40] Today’s courthouse was built in 1904. [S37]
Like most of East Tennessee, Morgan County voted against secession in 1861, but neighbors still split between the two sides. [S31] Even the Wartburg colony was divided: Gerding sided with the Confederacy, and Lutheran pastor John Wilken was a Unionist. [S37] No big battles were fought here. But on February 2, 1862, Confederate cavalry clashed with the Union Home Guard near Wartburg, and five Home Guard men were killed. [S37] For the rest of the war, soldiers from both armies foraged off the farms and guerrilla bands raided across the Plateau. County government broke down, and many Union families left and never came back. [S31]
In 1880 the Cincinnati Southern Railroad opened through the county from south to north, with branch lines running out to the timber. [S31] Towns grew up along the tracks, including Sunbright, Lancing and Oakdale. Logging and coal took off, and many families went from farming for themselves to working for wages. [S31][S40] The trains also brought tourists. Summer resorts at Deer Lodge and Franklin pulled in summer visitors from places as distant as Louisiana and Wisconsin. [S31]
The same year the railroad arrived, the English author Thomas Hughes, famous for Tom Brown’s School Days, became the public face of a British and Boston land company in the county’s northern corner. [S19][S31] The idea was a model town where young English gentlemen, who had few respectable job choices at home, would work side by side with Americans. [S19] Rugby was formally opened on October 5, 1880, and about 300 people lived there by the next summer. Americans always outnumbered the English. [S19]
Then typhoid broke out in 1881 and killed seven settlers. Most residents left in a panic. The town recovered for a while, but then the Tabard Inn burned. Land sales never met hopes, and the investors in London and Boston tried to manage the town from afar. [S19] Hughes visited many times but never lived at Rugby. [S19] In 1966, local people formed the Rugby Restoration Association. A seventeen-year-old from nearby Deer Lodge, Brian Stagg, helped lead it. Thanks to that work, Historic Rugby is a lived-in village again, with its Victorian church and library still standing. [S19]
In the early 1890s, coal miners in neighboring Anderson County rose up against convict leasing, the system that rented out prisoners to work in private mines. The uprising became known as the Coal Creek War. [S17] In April 1893 the legislature responded by paying for a new state prison at Brushy Mountain, near Petros, on about 9,000 acres. Convicts would no longer be leased out to companies. Instead they would dig coal for the state. [S31][S17] Brushy opened in 1896. [S42][S44] In 1934 it got its tall stone wall, and in 1969 it became mainly a maximum-security prison. [S44] Mining there continued until 1966. [S39]
Brushy closed on June 11, 2009, after 113 years, and its work moved to the Morgan County Correctional Complex. [S42][S44] Morgan County, regional partners and the state then helped a private developer save the old prison. It reopened in 2018 with tours, a museum, a restaurant and a distillery. [S43][S44] The museum even shows the ladder used in James Earl Ray’s escape attempt. [S44]
Much of Morgan County’s best wild country came out of that same history. The state land bought for Brushy in 1893 later became Morgan County State Forest. In the 1930s a Civilian Conservation Corps camp built roads, trails and a bridge there. The state added park facilities in 1971, and in 1974 the forest was made a protected natural area. Today it’s Frozen Head State Park, centered on 3,324-foot Frozen Head Mountain. [S39][S31]
Nearby, the Obed became a unit of the National Park System in 1976. Its park headquarters is in Wartburg. [S45][S40] In 1974, Congress authorized the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area. It was the first park unit to be named both a national river and a national recreation area, and part of it lies in Morgan County. [S46][S40] Add the Catoosa Wildlife Management Area, Lone Mountain State Forest and the Cumberland Trail, and the county’s rugged ground is now its biggest draw for visitors. [S40]
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1805 | Third Treaty of Tellico opens the area; the Halls settle soon after [S31] |
| 1817 | Morgan County created; Montgomery is the first seat [S31] |
| 1819 | First coal mined [S31] |
| 1844–46 | Gerding’s company plants German and Swiss colonists at Wartburg [S31][S36] |
| 1862 | Skirmish near Wartburg, Feb. 2 [S37] |
| 1870 | County seat moves to Wartburg [S40] |
| 1880 | Cincinnati Southern Railroad opens; Rugby founded Oct. 5 [S31][S19] |
| 1893 | State funds Brushy Mountain prison [S31] |
| 1896 | Brushy Mountain opens [S42] |
| 1904 | Present courthouse built [S37] |
| 1966 | Rugby Restoration Association formed [S19] |
| 1974 | Frozen Head protected as a natural area; Big South Fork authorized [S39][S46] |
| 1976 | Obed joins the National Park System [S45] |
| 2009 | Brushy Mountain closes June 11 [S42] |
| 2018 | Brushy reopens for tours [S43] |
Begin at the courthouse square in Wartburg and read the state markers there. Then drive north to Historic Rugby for the Victorian village. Finish with a walk through the old prison yard at Brushy Mountain in Petros, or a hike at Frozen Head next door. Check each site’s hours before you go.
Visit: Morgan County Courthouse markers ↗ · Historic Rugby ↗ · Frozen Head State Park ↗ · Obed Wild & Scenic River ↗
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, on how many acres the Wartburg colony bought), we leave the number 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].