County by county · A Middle Tennessee neighbor on Central time
Tennessee’s least populous county, on the Kentucky line in upper Middle Tennessee: the Obey and Wolf river hills where the state’s first Civil War fight broke out at Travisville, a county made in 1879 and named for a Wilson County legislator who ended up in Tombstone, a seat named for a Unionist colonel, a courthouse that burned with every record in 1934, a sharecropper’s son from a log cabin who became the longest-serving Secretary of State and the Father of the United Nations, log rafts to Nashville, a CCC park built of stone in a cut-over forest, the lake that drowned the best farmland in 1943, and some of the darkest night skies in the East.
Pickett County lies along Tennessee’s northern border with Kentucky, on the Cumberland Plateau in what the Tennessee Encyclopedia calls upper Middle Tennessee. It was established in 1879 from parts of Overton and Fentress counties, and its seat is Byrdstown. [S1330] The Tennessee Blue Book lists it among the counties of the middle grand division and says it was named for Howell L. Pickett, a Wilson County legislator and attorney who later moved to Arizona. [S38] UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service puts Byrdstown in the Middle grand division and on Central time, [S1358] so Pickett keeps the same clock as Fentress County next door, an hour behind Knoxville.
It is the smallest county in Tennessee by population. UT’s County Technical Assistance Service counted 5,001 people in 2020, the fewest of the state’s 95 counties, [S1359] and lists Byrdstown as its only incorporated town. [S1360] The county’s story is short but crowded: a Civil War skirmish that opened the fighting in Tennessee, a courthouse fire that wiped out its records, a log-cabin boy who became the "Father of the United Nations," a Depression-era park built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and a federal lake that took a quarter of its people.
We’re including Pickett with our East Tennessee county histories because it shares the northern plateau, the Big South Fork country and much of its story with Fentress and Scott counties. It is not an East Tennessee county, and we don’t call it one.
The encyclopedia gives the county 240 square miles, with the Obey and Wolf rivers running through its western half. [S1330] That figure is larger than the one implied by UT’s county profile, which lists 30.68 people per square mile in 2020, or about 163 square miles of land. [S1360] The land is hilly, but it supported farms growing corn, wheat, oats and grass and raising livestock. [S1330] The east end of the county rises onto the sandstone plateau of the Big South Fork country. The encyclopedia’s Big South Fork entry, by Sen. Howard Baker Jr., counts Pickett among the Tennessee and Kentucky counties drained by the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River. [S1323] The west end drops toward the Highland Rim, the region where Tennessee State Parks places the Cordell Hull birthplace, among oak, tulip poplar, black walnut and beech woods. [S1361]
People lived here long before there was a county. The state Division of Forestry counts 46 known archaeological sites on Pickett State Forest alone. [S1362] The National Park Service says longhunters were exploring the Big South Fork and its streams by 1780 and that several homesteads stood there by 1800, mostly settled by families of English and Scotch-Irish descent from Virginia and North Carolina, who kept to the creek and river bottoms. [S1326] Tennessee State Parks says the land that is now Pickett CCC Memorial State Park was a sparsely settled wilderness, held by people who had obtained land grants from North Carolina. [S1363]
Before the Civil War, the hills along the Obey gave the country one of its best-known hunting dogs. The encyclopedia says the Pickett County area was home to Tennessee Lead, a black-and-tan hound of the 1850s acquired by George W. Maupin of Madison County, Kentucky. Maupin made him the foundation sire of all Walker, Trigg and Goodman foxhounds. [S1330] A state marker on Tenn. 111 tells a sharper version. Near the marker in November 1852, it says, a horse trader stole the hound out of a deer chase, took him to Madison County and sold him to Maupin. [S1364] The marker stands at Monroe, in neighboring Overton County, so the dog may have come from either side of a county boundary that did not yet exist.
Tennessee’s first Civil War fight took place in what is now Pickett County. A state marker at Travisville says that on September 29, 1861, Union troops of the 1st Kentucky Cavalry and the Home Guards of the Houstonville Cavalry attacked a Confederate camp there. The 100 Confederates refused to surrender, lost four men under fire, and retreated into the hills. [S1365]
A Civil War Trails marker at the Travisville Cemetery fills in the background. Confederate Gen. Felix K. Zollicoffer had moved hard to control the Kentucky border. After mounted bands took Federal forage and supplies, Union Col. William A. Hoskins marched his 12th Kentucky Infantry to Albany, Kentucky, and joined with local Home Guards to protect Unionist families. Told that Confederates were camped near the Methodist church at Travisville, thirteen miles away, Hoskins sent Capt. John A. Morrison and a company of the 1st Kentucky Cavalry to scout the camp and take it if they could. Four Confederates were killed and four captured. The prisoners were taken back to Kentucky and freed after swearing allegiance to the United States, and Morrison’s men became the first Union troops to cross into Tennessee after the war began. [S1366]
The same marker says one of the dead, James M. Saufley, a graduate of a Louisville law school, is buried in the cemetery. A Unionist’s postwar memoir claimed a secessionist uncle talked him into joining the Confederate camp, and that James Ferguson, a brother of the guerrilla Champ Ferguson, allegedly shot him. [S1366]
A state park marker at Pall Mall, in Fentress County, says the Confederates at Travisville were about 100 soldiers from Camp McGinnis, a training camp at Pall Mall, who had raided into Kentucky, stolen hundreds of pounds of gunpowder from Federal troops, and stopped to camp at the Travisville Methodist Church on Caney Creek, thinking they had outrun pursuit. The same marker, listing the personal violence that followed across these hills, says that "Uncle Billy" Hull, the father of the future Secretary of State Cordell Hull, was shot in the face and left for dead. He lived, the marker says, to track down and kill the men who had tried to murder him. [S1324]
The war in these hills turned into a fight between neighbors. A state marker on Tenn. 111 in Byrdstown says New Hampshire native Dr. Jonathan D. Hale and John F. Jouett built Hale’s Mill, a grist mill and sawmill on the Wolf River near Byrdstown, in 1845. Hale was a Unionist, and his example helped persuade many Overton County men to join the Union army. On September 15, 1862, Champ Ferguson’s band, which included Confederate soldiers, burned the mill. A U.S. military commission later ordered the citizens it held responsible to pay for the damage. The marker calls the episode an example of how bitterly Tennesseans were divided. [S1367]
The man the county seat is named for took the same side. The encyclopedia says Col. Richard Byrd of Kingston struggled to keep Tennessee in the Union and joined the Union army when the state seceded. [S1330]
The encyclopedia says Lem Wright and Howell L. Pickett, legislators from Wilson County, led the move to organize a new county in 1878, and that it was established in 1879 from sections of Overton and Fentress. [S1330] The Tennessee State Library and Archives cites the act as Chapter 34 of the Acts of Tennessee of 1879. [S1368] UT’s County Technical Assistance Service also gives 1879, [S1360] as does a double state marker on U.S. 127 near Forbus, which says Pickett was a state representative from Wilson County in 1879 who later moved to Arizona and practiced law at Tombstone. [S1329] The Blue Book gives his dates as 1847 to "after 1909" and says he continued his career in law and politics in Arizona. [S38]
Not every source agrees on the year. The courthouse’s National Register nomination says the legislature created the county from the northern parts of Fentress and Overton in an 1879 bill that was later found defective, and that a second, valid bill passed in 1881. It describes Pickett as a young Lebanon attorney who helped push the bill through. [S1369] The encyclopedia’s Fentress County entry also says Pickett County was established in 1881, and that until then Fentress had formed the state line with Kentucky. [S1317] We use 1879, the year most sources give, and note the 1881 bill.
The new seat was nearly named for the other sponsor. The encyclopedia says it was to be called Wrightsville, after Lem Wright, but support swung at the last minute to Colonel Byrd, and the town became Byrdstown. [S1330] Kingston, Byrd’s hometown, is the seat of Roane County, so Pickett’s county seat carries the name of an East Tennessee Unionist.
The National Register nomination says the first county court and county commissioners met in a church at Smyrna, and that land was bought near Smyrna, in Byrdstown, for a courthouse and jail. Before the courthouse was finished, the court moved into the Arch Miller building on the square. That two-story frame store, built in 1880–82, has simple brackets and a cupola that give it an Italianate look. It has always had shops on the ground floor, and its second floor later housed the Byrdstown Masonic Lodge. [S1369]
Byrdstown was incorporated in 1917. [S1330] UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service dates its incorporation to November 1, 1917, under Chapter 815 of the Private Acts of 1917, and lists a current charter from 2002. The town counted 803 people in 2010. [S1358]
The first courthouse was finished in 1890, according to the National Register nomination. It was a brick building on a limestone foundation. Pharaoh Morgan laid the foundation, Tom Ray and his son laid the brick, and Tom Babb and Buchanan Matheny did the carpentry. The jail was built of vertical wooden planks nailed together, and steel cages replaced it in 1898. [S1369]
In 1934 the courthouse burned, and the nomination says it took all of the county’s records with it. [S1369] The state library also notes the 1934 fire. Its list of the oldest Pickett County records it holds on microfilm suggests how little survived: tax books from 1932, wills from 1933, and marriages, deeds and court minutes beginning in 1934 and 1935. [S1368]
The county rebuilt quickly. The nomination says the Quarterly Court sold $40,000 in bonds and that the new courthouse was finished in 1935. A building committee chaired by S. S. Parris hired the Nashville firm of Marr and Holman as architects, with Nile E. Yearwood of Nashville as contractor. The new building was faced with Crab Orchard stone, a local stone from the eastern Highland Rim, over brick and cast concrete. The nomination suggests the concrete was a guard against another fire. [S1369]
The courthouse was built in the depths of the Depression, but the nomination says Pickett County did not get federal Public Works Administration or Works Progress Administration money for it, although its people were likely candidates for such aid. Instead of the modern styles many New Deal buildings used, the county chose a plain Colonial Revival design: a two-story hipped-roof building with a cupola, a dentiled cornice and a pilastered front door. The town grew up around it unevenly, so the "square" has sides of different lengths that don’t meet at right angles. A marble monument to Pickett County veterans of the world wars stands at one corner. [S1369] The encyclopedia notes that the courthouse is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. [S1330]
Pickett County’s most famous son was born before the county existed. Cordell Hull was born on October 2, 1871, to William and Elizabeth Riley Hull, in a small log cabin near what is now Byrdstown. [S1370] The Nobel Foundation’s biography says he was the third of five sons, and that his father was a farmer and later a lumber merchant. [S1371] Pickett County itself was not formed until eight years later. [S1330] The encyclopedia’s Hull entry, by Jonathan G. Utley, says he was born to a poor family in the isolated "Mountain Section" of upper Middle Tennessee and was taught first at home, then in free schools, and later, as the family’s income grew, in private schools. [S1372] Tennessee State Parks calls him a sharecropper’s son. [S1361]
The Nobel biography says Hull was the only one of the five boys who cared about books and that he wanted to be a lawyer. He began in a one-room school that his father built at nearby Willow Grove. He then studied at Montvale Academy in Celina, the Normal School at Bowling Green, Kentucky, and the National Normal University at Lebanon, Ohio, and earned a law degree from Cumberland University at Lebanon, Tennessee, in 1891. He opened a law practice in Celina before he turned twenty. [S1371] The State Department’s historian says he was admitted to the bar in 1892. [S1373]
Politics came first for him. The encyclopedia says he gave his first political speech at sixteen, against the protective tariff. [S1372] He served in the Tennessee House from 1893 to 1897, then left to be a captain in the Fourth Tennessee Regiment in the Spanish-American War. He returned to practice law in Gainesboro and in 1903 was appointed judge of the Fifth Judicial District, earning the nickname "Judge," which even his wife used. [S1371] A state marker near the birthplace notes that he was in the General Assembly at 21. [S1374]
The encyclopedia and the State Department historian both say Hull was elected to Congress in 1906. [S1372][S1373] The Nobel biography gives 1907, which may count from when he took his seat, and says he represented the Fourth District until 1931, except for two years as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He served eighteen years on the House Ways and Means Committee and wrote the first federal income tax bill in 1913, as well as the revised act and the federal and state inheritance tax law of 1916. [S1371] The encyclopedia calls the 1913 law "progressive but not too radical." [S1372]
The encyclopedia says World War I changed Hull’s thinking. He had seen the tariff as a local issue, but he came to believe that world peace depended on nations having free access to the world’s raw materials and markets. He lost his seat in the Republican landslide of 1920, became chairman of the Democratic National Committee, won back his seat in 1922, and was elected to the Senate in 1930, where he backed Franklin Roosevelt. [S1372] The State Department historian adds that Hull sought the Democratic vice presidential nomination in 1928. [S1373]
Roosevelt appointed Hull Secretary of State on March 4, 1933, and the State Department says he served until November 20, 1944, longer than anyone else in the job. [S1373] The sources count his years differently: the encyclopedia calls it an eleven-year tenure, [S1372] the Nobel biography says almost twelve years, [S1371] and the state marker says twelve. [S1374] Tennessee State Parks gives his term as 1933 through 1948, which does not match the State Department’s dates. [S1361]
The encyclopedia says Hull spent the first half of his time as secretary pushing free trade and the Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America. After a humiliating start at the London Economic Conference of 1933, he steered a reciprocal trade agreements program through Congress that moved the country away from high tariffs. At the Montevideo conference that winter he won over Latin American critics by pledging that the United States would not meddle in other nations’ affairs. He was so popular that he might have been the Democratic nominee in 1940 if Roosevelt had not run for a third term. [S1372] The Nobel biography adds that after 1936 he called for rearmament and collective security, and warned the military well before Pearl Harbor to be ready for surprise attacks. [S1371]
Hull’s efforts with Japan failed. The encyclopedia says he would not accept Japan’s plans for Asia, and when diplomacy broke down, war followed. During the war Roosevelt handled most foreign policy himself, and Hull, secretly ill with tuberculosis, helped build support in Congress for the United Nations, [S1372] while his main work in those years went into a blueprint for a postwar peace organization. [S1371] He resigned in late November 1944 because of his health, but he still served as a senior adviser to the American delegation at the United Nations conference in San Francisco in 1945. [S1371] For his work in founding the United Nations he received the 1945 Nobel Peace Prize. [S1372]
Hull and his wife had no children. The encyclopedia gives her name as Rose Frances Witz Hull, [S1370] and the Nobel biography as Rose Frances Whitney, whom he married in 1917. [S1371] The encyclopedia says Hull spent his last years in a Washington apartment and never went back to Tennessee or to the mountains he came from. He died on July 23, 1955, and was buried in the crypt of the National Cathedral. [S1372] The state marker says he was 83. [S1374]
The state marker on Tenn. 111 notes that Hull’s birthplace stands north of the road, [S1374] and the Cordell Hull Birthplace State Park now preserves it. The encyclopedia says the twenty-acre site was acquired by the Tennessee Historical Commission in 1990 and placed under the state parks division in 1997, and that the log cabin was rebuilt in 1952 and again in 1995. It is the only site in Pickett County directly tied to Hull. He left most of his belongings to his niece, Katherine Hull Ethridge, on the understanding that they would go to the Friends of Cordell Hull in Byrdstown once there was a proper place to keep them. The Friends and the state finished a museum for the collection in 1996. [S1370]
Tennessee State Parks tells the story differently. It says the park was established in 1979 on former farmland the state bought in 1954, which the Association of Cordell Hull and the Historical Commission managed before it became a state park. It calls the one-and-a-half-story cabin the building believed to be Hull’s birthplace. [S1361] Its park page describes the cabin as recreated and the park as 55 acres, with a library and archives. [S1375] Bunkum Cave, at the end of a trail in the park, has a mouth about 100 feet wide and 50 feet tall, with a stream inside, and is closed from September through April to protect hibernating bats. [S1361]
Without a railroad, the encyclopedia says, Pickett County relied on its rivers. From the 1870s to the 1930s, many Pickett Countians worked in logging and rafting. Farmers cut trees in remote parts of the county, hauled them to the riverbank with mules or oxen, and floated them downstream. Rafting outfits such as the Kyle family’s business at Celina, in Clay County, hired dozens of Pickett County men to take the logs down the Cumberland to Nashville, where the lumber was milled. Steamboats on the Cumberland let towns as far east as Byrdstown ship goods to and from markets downstream. [S1330]
In the early twentieth century, timber companies bought big tracts to clear-cut. [S1330] Among them was the Stearns company of Michigan. The encyclopedia’s Stearns entry says that by 1899 its agents had bought land including the "Big Survey," thirty thousand acres in Scott, Pickett and Fentress counties in Tennessee and Wayne County, Kentucky. [S1338] When the rafting and steamboat days ended, the encyclopedia says, Pickett lost its link to the rest of Middle Tennessee until trucks and state highways arrived after World War I. [S1330]
The Pickett park and forest grew out of that cutover land. The encyclopedia’s park entry, by Claudette Stager, says the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company acquired forest land in Pickett and Fentress counties in 1910, logged it until 1933, and then deeded it to the State of Tennessee. Gov. Hill McAlister (the encyclopedia spells it McAllister) declared it a state forest on December 13, 1933. [S1376] Stager’s 1986 National Register nomination for the park gives the same 1910 date and says the company handed the land over once logging was no longer worth it. [S1377] Tennessee State Parks says the company bought the land in 1900 as part of its Big Survey and ran a logging camp and railroads across it. [S1363]
The state Division of Forestry dates the forest differently. It says the forest began with the 1933 Stearns donation but became a state forest in 1935, and that by then most of the marketable timber was gone and the land had been burned and grazed again and again. [S1362] The encyclopedia’s state forests entry says CCC crews established Pickett State Forest in 1933, with 15,887 acres in Pickett County. [S1354] Its park entry says the park and forest together hold close to twelve thousand acres of reforested land. [S1376] The forest also reaches into Fentress County, and the Division of Forestry says its eastern side borders the Big South Fork. [S1362]
The Civilian Conservation Corps made the park. The encyclopedia’s CCC entry, by Ruth D. Nichols, says President Roosevelt signed the law creating the corps on March 31, 1933, as the first New Deal agency. It put young, single, jobless men to work planting trees, fighting fires and erosion, building roads and developing parks. Tennessee’s CCC boys earned thirty dollars a month, twenty-five of which went to their families or was held for them until discharge, and more than seventy thousand Tennesseans served before the corps ended in 1942. [S1378] It notes that Tennessee’s first CCC company made its headquarters in 1933 at a camp named for Cordell Hull, in Unicoi County. [S1378]
The National Register nomination says CCC Company 1471 was organized at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, in 1933, camped first near Cookeville in Putnam County, and moved to Pickett on May 21, 1934. [S1377] The encyclopedia says the company built a dam and a twelve-acre lake, twenty-two miles of roads, telephone lines, trails, a lodge, picnic areas and cabins for the new Pickett Forest State Park, as well as fire towers and ranger stations in the forest. The National Park Service drew the plans, using native stone and wood so the buildings would fit the landscape. A 1937 Interior Department master plan shows picnic grounds, camps, cabins, trails and shelters, many of which still stand. [S1376] Tennessee State Parks credits two CCC companies, 447 and 1471, with the work. [S1363]
The encyclopedia describes the buildings from about 1934 to 1942 as one-story, gable-roofed structures of coursed stone with wood trim, many with large stone fireplaces. [S1376] Work stopped after the late 1930s and did not resume until the early 1950s, when more cabins and a superintendent’s house were built. In 1949, about 1,000 acres of developed park were transferred to the Division of State Parks. [S1377] The nomination called the park an exceptionally complete collection of rustic park architecture designed by the National Park Service and built by the CCC. [S1377] The encyclopedia says it is one of the most intact CCC landscapes in the state. [S1330]
Tennessee State Parks says the park was formally dedicated in May 1941, and that Alvin C. York of neighboring Fentress County gave the keynote address. In the early 1940s, U.S. Rep. Al Gore Sr. and his family visited with a Life magazine photographer, and the photos were used to promote the young park; they now hang in its cabins. The park was later renamed Pickett CCC Memorial State Park to honor the men who built it. In 2020 the CCC cabins were restored, and the CCC Museum, the linen house and a picnic shelter have also been worked on. [S1363] The park now covers 922 acres, and its museum includes recorded interviews with former CCC workers about building it. [S1379]
The biggest change in Pickett County’s history came from the water. Floods had long battered the Upper Cumberland, and in 1943 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Obey River to make Dale Hollow Lake. [S1330] The Corps says Congress authorized the project in the Flood Control Act of 1938. It awarded the contract on December 30, 1941, and construction began on March 2, 1942. With other civil works stopped by the war, the dam was rushed to completion on October 20, 1943, and the lake was filled by May 7, 1944. The powerhouse was put on hold and finished later, with generators added in 1948, 1949 and 1953. The dam stands on the Obey about three miles east of Celina, in Clay County, but the lake spreads into Clay, Pickett, Overton and Fentress counties in Tennessee and Clinton and Cumberland counties in Kentucky. At its top flood-control level it backs water 61 miles up the Obey and has 620 miles of shoreline. [S1380]
Pickett County paid a heavy price. The encyclopedia says that in 1943 it lost most of its best farmland and a fourth of its people to the reservoir. [S1330] Elsewhere on the lake, the Tennessee State Museum tells the story of Willow Grove, which it calls "the town that drowned." The town sat on Iron Creek, named for the willows that grew there, and had churches, a store, a school and a grist mill. In 1942 the government bought the land, tore down the buildings and moved the people out, and on July 18, 1942, the community held a last picnic before the water rose. The museum says the lake was named for the Dale family, who owned the land where the dam stands. [S1381] Willow Grove was also where Cordell Hull’s father had built the school his son first attended. [S1371]
The lake also brought electricity and visitors. The encyclopedia says the cheap power from Dale Hollow Dam, along with new highways, a large female labor force and the absence of unions, drew clothing factories such as OshKosh B’Gosh Children’s Apparel and Dale Hollow Apparel. [S1330] In 1955, the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency says, D. L. "David" Hayes caught a smallmouth bass at Dale Hollow that weighed 11 pounds, 15 ounces. It is still the state and world record. [S1382] The county’s chamber of commerce now calls Byrdstown the southeastern gateway to the lake. [S1383]
The east end of the county stayed wild. The encyclopedia says Pickett State Park and Forest adjoins the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area. [S1330] Next door in Fentress County, the 3,000-acre Pogue Creek Canyon State Natural Area borders parts of Pickett State Forest. The Nature Conservancy bought the canyon to save it from development and sold it to the state in 2006. [S1355]
In May 2015 the International Dark Sky Association named Pickett State Park and Pogue Creek Canyon a Silver-tier International Dark Sky Park, to be known together as the Pickett-Pogue International Dark Sky Park. The state said the park had rehabilitated the small amount of lighting on the two properties with a Clean Tennessee Energy Grant and, with the Barnard-Seyfert Astronomical Society and the University of Tennessee, built a program of night-sky hikes, camps and star parties. [S1384] Tennessee State Parks says Pickett was the first state park in the Southeast to earn the designation. [S1379]
UT’s county profile counts 5,001 people in Pickett County in 2020, down from 5,077 in 2010, [S1360] and the encyclopedia gave 4,945 for 2000. [S1330] UT’s statewide table shows the county had 4,548 people in 1990 and the fewest people of any Tennessee county in each census from 1990 through 2020. [S1359] The 1935 courthouse is still the seat of county government, as its National Register nomination noted in the 1990s, [S1369] and the encyclopedia points visitors to the county’s two great outdoor places, Dale Hollow Lake and Pickett State Park. [S1330]
Pickett’s history sites are all a short drive from Byrdstown, which keeps Central time. [S1358] A day might include:
Visit: Our Pickett County guide has parks, places and local news, with hours in Central time.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1845 | Hale’s Mill built on the Wolf River near Byrdstown [S1367] |
| 1852 | Tennessee Lead stolen from a deer chase near Monroe, November [S1364] |
| 1861 | Affair at Travisville, the first Civil War fight in Tennessee, September 29 [S1365] |
| 1862 | Champ Ferguson’s band burns Hale’s Mill, September 15 [S1367] |
| 1871 | Cordell Hull born in a log cabin, October 2 [S1370] |
| 1879 | Pickett County created from Overton and Fentress counties [S1330] |
| 1881 | Second county bill passes, per the courthouse nomination [S1369] |
| 1890 | First courthouse completed in Byrdstown [S1369] |
| 1899 | Stearns agents have bought the Big Survey lands [S1338] |
| 1906 | Hull elected to Congress [S1372] |
| 1913 | Hull writes the federal income tax law [S1371] |
| 1917 | Byrdstown incorporated, November 1 [S1358] |
| 1933 | Hull becomes Secretary of State, March 4; Stearns land declared a state forest, December 13 [S1373][S1376] |
| 1934 | Courthouse burns with the county’s records; CCC Company 1471 arrives at Pickett, May 21 [S1369][S1377] |
| 1935 | New courthouse completed [S1369] |
| 1941 | Pickett State Park dedicated, with Alvin C. York speaking, May [S1363] |
| 1942 | Work begins on Dale Hollow Dam, March 2; Willow Grove’s last picnic, July 18 [S1380][S1381] |
| 1943 | Dale Hollow Dam completed, October 20 [S1380] |
| 1944 | Dale Hollow Lake filled, May 7; Hull leaves office, November 20 [S1380][S1373] |
| 1945 | Hull receives the Nobel Peace Prize [S1372] |
| 1949 | About 1,000 acres of developed park go to the state parks division [S1377] |
| 1955 | Hull dies, July 23; record smallmouth caught at Dale Hollow [S1372][S1382] |
| 1979 | Cordell Hull Birthplace State Park established, per Tennessee State Parks [S1361] |
| 1995 | Birthplace cabin rebuilt [S1370] |
| 1996 | Cordell Hull museum completed [S1370] |
| 2015 | Pickett-Pogue named an International Dark Sky Park, May [S1384] |
| 2020 | Pickett’s CCC cabins restored [S1363] |
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 say so on the page and give each version: whether Pickett County dates from 1879 (the Tennessee Encyclopedia’s Pickett County entry, the Tennessee Blue Book, a state marker, the Tennessee State Library and Archives and UT’s County Technical Assistance Service) or 1881 (the encyclopedia’s Fentress County entry, and the courthouse’s National Register nomination, which says the 1879 bill was found defective and a second bill passed in 1881); how large the county is (240 square miles in the encyclopedia, while UT’s figure of 30.68 people per square mile for 2020 works out to about 163); whether Tennessee Lead, the foxhound sire, came from the Pickett County area (the encyclopedia) or from near Monroe in Overton County, where the state marker stands; whether Cordell Hull won his House seat in 1906 (the encyclopedia and the State Department historian) or 1907 (the Nobel biography, which may be counting from when he took his seat); whether he served as Secretary of State eleven years (the encyclopedia), almost twelve (the Nobel biography), twelve (a state marker) or, as Tennessee State Parks puts it, from 1933 through 1948, when the State Department dates his service from March 4, 1933, to November 20, 1944; whether his wife was Rose Frances Witz (the encyclopedia) or Rose Frances Whitney (the Nobel biography); whether the birthplace park dates from 1979 (Tennessee State Parks, which says the state bought the land in 1954) or from 1990 and 1997, when the Tennessee Historical Commission acquired it and the parks division took it over (the encyclopedia), and whether it covers 20 acres (the encyclopedia) or 55 (Tennessee State Parks); whether the Stearns company bought the Pickett park land in 1910 (the encyclopedia and the park’s National Register nomination) or 1900 (Tennessee State Parks), with the encyclopedia’s Stearns entry dating the Big Survey purchases to 1899; whether Pickett State Forest dates from December 1933 (the encyclopedia’s park entry) or 1935 (the state Division of Forestry), and whether it holds close to 12,000 acres (the encyclopedia’s park entry) or 15,887 acres in Pickett County (its state forests entry); and whether the park was built by CCC Company 1471 (the encyclopedia and the National Register) or by Companies 447 and 1471 (Tennessee State Parks). We also note that Hull was born in 1871, eight years before Pickett County existed; that Dale Hollow Dam itself stands in Clay County; that the governor who declared the state forest, Hill McAlister, is spelled McAllister in the encyclopedia; and that Pickett is a Middle Tennessee county on Central time. We don’t republish encyclopedia, museum or marker text — follow the links for the full articles.
Hero art: our AI-assisted photo-real illustration of Arch Lake at Pickett CCC Memorial State Park, reused from our Pickett County guide. Its layout was guided by public-domain USDA NAIP aerial imagery; the bluff, trees and bend of the lake are idealized rather than traced from any photograph, the natural arch that gives the lake its name is not pictured, and it is not a photograph. It is not an official Tennessee State Parks image, and no endorsement by Tennessee State Parks, TDEC or any source on this page is implied. Reused source numbers (S38, S1317, S1323, S1324, S1326, S1329, S1330, S1338, S1354, S1355) match the same sources on our other history pages. Corrections: [email protected].