East Tennessee History · County by county
Tennessee’s southeastern corner: a Cherokee Beloved Woman’s last home on the Ocoee, a federal road and a removal fort, a copper strike that turned the hills red and sent Georgia to the Supreme Court, a wooden flume that still makes electricity, a railroad that loops over itself in the Hiwassee Gorge, and a river that hosted the Olympics.
Polk County fills the southeastern corner of Tennessee, bordered by Georgia and North Carolina. Most of its 436 square miles lie in the Chilhowee and Unaka mountains, and about 150,000 acres of it belong to the Cherokee National Forest. [S270] Three rivers shaped its story: the Hiwassee along the north, the Ocoee through the middle, and the Conasauga in the southwest. [S270] This was Cherokee country until the treaties of 1819 and 1835, and Nancy Ward, the Cherokee "Beloved Woman," spent her last years and is buried near the Ocoee south of Benton. [S270][S271][S274] The General Assembly created Polk County in 1839 and named it for Gov. James K. Polk; its seat, Benton, began in 1840 at a stock stand on the Old Federal Road. [S270][S280]
In 1843 a prospector looking for gold found copper instead near what became Ducktown, and the Copper Basin grew into the largest metal mining district in the Southeast before 1900. [S286][S297] Smelter fumes and timber cutting stripped the hills around Ducktown and Copperhill to a red "moonscape" that took generations to heal. [S270][S273][S297] In the twentieth century the Ocoee was put to work for electricity. [S303][S306] In 1996 it hosted the Olympic canoe and kayak slalom, the first Olympic whitewater on a natural river. [S309]
The county counted 17,544 people in the 2020 Census. [S285] It has three incorporated places: Benton, the county seat; Ducktown, the old mining town; and Copperhill, on the Georgia line across from McCaysville. [S285][S281] The Census also counts unincorporated communities including Ocoee, Farner, Conasauga and Delano, which it shares with McMinn County. [S117]
People have lived in what is now Polk County for at least two thousand years, back to the Woodland period. [S270] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto camped in 1540 near Columbus, a trading town on the Hiwassee. [S270] By the 1700s this was Cherokee land, south of the Overhill towns on the Little Tennessee. [S3] (Our Monroe County history tells the Overhill story.) The name Ocoee comes from the Cherokee language; TVA translates it as "apricot vine place." [S307]
Ducktown carries a Cherokee name too. The county government says it comes from a Cherokee village recorded as "Ducktown" on 1799 annuity rolls, traditionally credited to a leader called Chief Duck. [S281] Copper was no secret to the first people here: the U.S. Geological Survey notes that Native Americans used copper from the basin long before settlers "rediscovered" it. [S297]
Around 1800 David McNair, a Scottish trader who married Delilah Vann, the daughter of a Cherokee chief, built a home in the southwest corner of the county near a grove that was a Cherokee council ground and the end of the portage between the Ocoee and Conasauga rivers. He led a company in the Cherokee regiment during the War of 1812, and he and his wife are buried near the house site. [S279] The state marker for McNair’s Stand has been reported missing. [S279]
From 1819 until 1835 the Hiwassee River was the boundary between the United States and the Cherokee Nation, so nearly all of Polk County stayed Cherokee land for a generation after the counties to the north were opened. [S233][S270]
Nanyehi, known to settlers as Nancy Ward, was born at Chota, the Overhill Cherokee town on the Little Tennessee. The Tennessee Encyclopedia gives her birth year as 1738; the Overhill heritage marker at her grave says only "the 1730s," "according to legend." [S271][S275] Her mother was of the Wolf Clan, and Attakullakulla, the peace chief of Chota, is said to have been her mother’s brother. [S271][S275]
At the battle of Taliwa against the Creeks in 1755 her husband was killed. According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia she picked up his rifle and led a charge, and for that the clans named her Ghighau, or "Beloved Woman," with a seat on the Council of Chiefs, leadership of the Women’s Council, and power over the fate of prisoners. [S271] She later married the English trader Bryant Ward, whose surname she kept. [S271][S274]
Ward became known to settlers as a peacemaker. The Tennessee Encyclopedia credits her with warning John Sevier of coming attacks and with saving Lydia Bean from being burned at the stake; she kept Bean at her home, learned dairying from her, and is said to have brought cattle and dairying to the Cherokee. [S271][S276] At treaty talks on the Long Island of the Holston in 1781 she spoke for peace on behalf of the women of both peoples, a rare thing in a treaty council, and she spoke again at Hopewell in 1785. [S271] The state marker near her grave, written in an older style, calls her a "loyal friend of white settlers" who "repeatedly prevented massacres." [S276]
How and when she came to the Ocoee depends on the source. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the Hiwassee Purchase of 1819 forced her to leave Chota and that she settled on the Ocoee near present-day Benton, where she ran an inn on the Federal Road. [S271] The Overhill marker says that after Chota was destroyed again and again in the 1770s and 1780s, she and her kin moved south of the Hiwassee and settled at Amoiah, near today’s Benton, where she ran an inn and stock pen at Womankiller Ford. [S275] It adds that on May 2, 1817, a Women’s Council led by the elderly Ward, or her representative, presented an address to the Cherokee National Council meeting at Amoiah, demanding an end to land cessions, since by tradition the land belonged to Cherokee women and their children. [S275]
Both sources agree she died in 1822; the marker cites a great-grandson who attended her funeral. [S271][S275] She is buried on a hill south of Benton beside her son Five Killer and her brother Long Fellow. In 1923 the Nancy Ward Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution put a monument on her grave. [S271][S274] The gravesite is on the National Register of Historic Places, and the National Park Service lists it as managed by the state of Tennessee. [S274] The county government’s history of Benton still gives her a place in the town’s founding story. [S281]
The Federal Road, opened through the Cherokee Nation after the Treaty of 1805, carried mail and trade from the Tennessee Valley south toward Georgia, and its path crossed today’s Polk County from north to south. [S260][S270] Benton itself would later grow at a stock stand on that road. [S270]
At what is now Old Fort, in the south of the county, the army built a post on the road, known as Fort Marr or Fort Morrow. Here the sources disagree. A National Park Service study of Trail of Tears routes calls it the 1814 stockade at Fort Morrow; the Polk County Chamber says it was built around 1814 as a supply depot for Andrew Jackson’s campaigns against the Creeks and regarrisoned in 1837. [S278][S314] The state marker says the fort was built in 1837 to gather the Cherokee Nation for its forced removal west. [S277]
In 1838, troops at the fort collected Cherokee families from their homes in Tennessee and took them to the internment camps at Fort Cass, on the Hiwassee near Charleston, to await removal on the Trail of Tears. [S314] (Our McMinn County history tells the Fort Cass story from across the river.) One corner blockhouse survived. The state marker says it was taken down in 1932 and rebuilt in the yard of the high school at Benton; the Chamber says it now stands at the Gee Creek ranger station of the state park near Delano. [S277][S314] The Park Service notes that the blockhouse is not in its original location. [S278]
The better-known Unicoi Turnpike, the removal road from Fort Butler in Murphy, North Carolina, to Fort Cass, ran north of Polk County, through Tellico Plains in Monroe County. [S278] (See our Monroe County history.) A U.S. Forest Service sign on the Old Copper Road says that some Cherokee who hid in these mountains to escape removal later helped build that road. [S290]
After the 1835 removal treaty, the Treaty of New Echota, ended the last Cherokee claims in Tennessee, settlers moved in. [S270][S233] Acting on a petition from about 100 citizens, the legislature created Polk County from parts of Bradley and McMinn counties on November 28, 1839. [S270] It was named for James K. Polk, who had just been elected governor; a state marker on U.S. 411 at the Georgia line notes that Polk went on to become the eleventh president. [S270][S280] David Ragen, as acting sheriff, held the first election after the county was divided into seven civil districts. [S270]
On February 4, 1840, voters chose McKamy’s stock stand on the Old Federal Road as the permanent county seat and named it Benton for Thomas Hart Benton, the U.S. senator from Missouri. [S270][S281] James McKamy and John F. Hannah laid out 223 lots, which sold at auction for $11,386, much of which was never collected. [S270] (Benton County, in West Tennessee, is a different place, though it was first named for the same senator.) Benton has been the county seat ever since; it was incorporated in 1915. [S281][S282]
In the 1840s Rosine Parmentier, with a New York partner, bought about 50,000 acres in the remote Sylco Mountains and invited French, German, Italian and Austrian families to settle a colony called Vineland. Plans for a winemaking industry never paid off, and most colonists moved on; the Tennessee Encyclopedia notes that family names from the colony still turn up in the county. [S270] The county’s first newspaper, the Ducktown Eagle, appeared in 1858, and the Polk County News has published in Benton for more than a century. [S270]
In August 1843 a prospector named Lemmons, looking for gold along a branch of Potato Creek, found red oxide of copper instead. Disappointed, he moved on; he never found his gold. [S286] A Tennessee Overhill marker calls the find "one of America’s richest copper reserves." [S295] In 1847 A. J. Weaver leased the spot, dug 90 casks of ore, and sent them by mule 70 miles to the railroad at Dalton, Georgia, for sale to the Revere smelting works near Boston. [S287][S270] In 1850 T. H. Callaway opened the Hiwassee Mine there, the first in the Ducktown district and Tennessee’s first deep copper mine. [S287][S273] A rebuilt brick chimney from about 1854 marks the site on Tennessee 68. [S287]
Hauling ore across the mountains was the problem. Between 1851 and 1853 workers cut the Copper Road through the Ocoee River gorge to the railroad at Cleveland, 33 miles away. [S273][S289][S290] Mule and ox teams took two days for the trip, and the Halfway House inn at the mouth of Greasy Creek, near Reliance, marked the overnight stop. A state marker there says four-mule teams were usual, with a load limit of 500 pounds of copper per animal. [S288][S314] By the end of 1853 eleven mines were running, and in 1854 the first smelter was built at the Hiwassee mine. [S273]
High costs soon thinned the field to five mines, and consolidation followed. [S273] In 1860 investors formed the Burra Burra Copper Company, named for a famous Australian mine, which combined the Hiwassee mine with others and owned five thousand acres, most at Turtletown. Its board hired Julius E. Raht, a young German engineer, as superintendent. [S273] Raht went on to combine many claims into the Union Consolidated Mining Company and to run several of the basin’s companies. [S270][S272]
Like most of East Tennessee, Polk County was divided. It sent five companies to the Confederate army and two to the Union. [S270][S300] Ducktown’s mines made it strategically important: the Tennessee Encyclopedia says the county supplied 90 percent of the South’s copper. [S270] Mining continued under Confederate control until 1863, when the railroad at Cleveland fell to the Union army and the mines shut down until the war ended. [S273][S300]
No battles were fought in the county, but the guerrilla war was brutal. [S270] In November 1864 John P. Gatewood, a Confederate partisan from Georgia, led his gang through Polk County robbing and killing Unionists, ending in the so-called Madden Branch Massacre near the Georgia line. [S300] The Tennessee Encyclopedia dates the raid to November 29, 1864, and counts at least sixteen dead. [S270]
On the night of February 15, 1865, a small band of local Confederate scouts under Capt. Phillip L. Bible was attacked as it camped on Chilhowee Mountain. The Civil War Trails marker at the courthouse speaks of nine men who lost three; a Forest Service sign at the campsite spoke of seven, with one killed, one wounded and one captured. [S300][S301] The attackers were Union mounted infantry, perhaps hunting the guerrillas who had killed three men on the Conasauga the day before. [S301][S300] A stone at the site reads that a Confederate soldier named Haney "was killed here." [S300][S301]
After the war the mines boomed. From 1865 to 1878 they produced 24 million pounds of copper, and about fifty square miles of the basin were cut over for timber to build mines and fuel smelters. [S270][S272] The Burra Burra company employed some 160 men and boys, but it ran into debt in the 1870s; it was foreclosed in 1875 and sold two years later for $25,000. [S273]
Rail service and new methods brought the next boom. The county government says Copperhill was founded in 1890 and first called McCays, after its twin across the river, McCaysville, Georgia; it took the railroad’s name, "Copper Hill," in 1911 and was incorporated in 1913. [S281][S283] After 1891 the companies roasted ore in open heaps. [S270] Each roast heap at Burra Burra burned 65 cords of wood over 60 to 90 days, and the roast yards covered 14 acres. [S291] The sulfur fumes killed vegetation for miles, rain washed the bare soil into the streams, and by the early twentieth century a red "moonscape" surrounded Ducktown and Copperhill; the Tennessee Encyclopedia counts some 32,000 acres stripped by 1900. [S270][S273][S297]
The newly formed Tennessee Copper Company began sinking a new shaft at Burra Burra in 1899, and the site became the surface headquarters for its mining for the next three-quarters of a century. [S292][S272] Open roasting ended after pyritic smelting arrived in 1903, but the fumes now came from tall chimneys and drifted into Georgia. [S291][S298] Georgia sued, and in 1907 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Georgia v. Tennessee Copper Co., ruled that a state could stop a company in another state from sending "noxious gas" over its land. [S298] The county government notes that copper smelting and later sulfuric acid production left the hills bare for generations. [S281]
A railroad finally reached the basin through the Hiwassee River Gorge. The first route, opened in 1890, climbed Bald Mountain on steep switchbacks; in 1898 engineers replaced them with a loop that crosses over its own track. With a nearby double "S" curve, the design gave the line its nickname, the Hook and Eye. [S313][S314] The Chamber notes that a 19-mile section of this "Old Line" corridor is on the National Register. [S314]
At Reliance, where the railroad crosses the Hiwassee, the Reliance Historic District, on the National Register since 1986, includes a railroad watchman’s house from 1891, the Higdon Hotel built for railroad crews and travelers after the L&N bought its right of way in 1888, the late-1880s Vaughn-Webb house, and the Hiwassee Union Church and Masonic Lodge of about 1899, along with stone walls and a Cherokee fish weir. [S314] In 1906 the L&N finished a new line closer to Benton, through a community then called Murny. Landowner William Hinton "Bear" Lawson gave the railroad a right of way across his farm, and the station that grew there is still called Benton Station. [S302]
The Ocoee’s steep drop drew power companies early. Work on Ocoee No. 1, at Parksville, began in 1910, and within about eighteen months it was sending electricity to Chattanooga, the first hydroelectric power the city received. [S303][S305] A company town for a workforce that reached 1,500 grew up at the site, and quarry crews worked around the clock. [S303][S305] The dam’s own markers disagree on details: one gives its height as 110 feet, another as 135 feet, and they date its completion to late 1911 or to 1912. [S303][S304][S305] A TVA marker at the dam calls it TVA’s oldest plant, and its lake is known as Parksville Lake or Lake Ocoee. [S304][S314][S297]
Ocoee No. 2, begun in 1912 and generating power by October 1913, solved a different problem. Its dam is only 30 feet high, so engineers built a wooden flume on a shelf carved into the mountainside to carry the water nearly five miles downstream with a drop of only 19 feet, then let it fall more than 250 feet through steel pipes to the powerhouse. [S306][S308] TVA notes that a new aluminum plant in Blount County needed the power. [S306] TVA bought both plants in 1939. [S303][S306] It built Ocoee No. 3 upstream during World War II, using a tunnel instead of a flume; TVA dates its completion to 1942, and the National Register nomination for the flume gives 1943. [S307][S308] TVA also runs one hydro plant on the Hiwassee. [S270]
The flume ran until 1976, when TVA shut it down for safety. Preservationists fought to save it, it was listed on the National Register, and TVA rebuilt it with treated wood by 1983. [S306] While the flume was out of service, the river ran in its old bed and a whitewater rafting business grew up on the Middle Ocoee. Under an agreement reached in 1984, TVA now releases water into that channel on scheduled days for recreation. [S306]
Reclaiming the Copper Basin took most of a century. Cooperative replanting by TVA, the soil conservation service, the copper companies and other agencies began in the 1930s. [S297] In 1941 the Tennessee Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution planted a 34-acre memorial forest near Ducktown on U.S. 64. [S299] In 1942 the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Cherokee National Forest began a memorial forest of about 103 acres nearby. The Civil War Trails marker says 115,000 trees were planted; the Chamber describes it as a memorial to 115,000 Tennesseans who fought for the Confederacy. [S300][S314]
Mining went on as the land recovered. Part of the Burra Burra workings caved in in 1925, leaving a collapse that is still visible from the museum grounds. [S293][S296] The Tennessee Copper Company closed the Burra Burra mine in June 1958, its marker says; the Tennessee Encyclopedia says 1959, after more than 15.6 million tons of ore. [S292][S272] The Burra Burra mine office, used until 1975, became the home of the Ducktown Basin Museum in 1982, and the mine site has been on the National Register since 1983. [S294][S296] The last mines in the basin closed in 1987. [S272][S295] Ducktown itself was not incorporated as a city until 1951. [S284][S281]
The red hills are mostly green again. The U.S. Geological Survey says thousands of acres have been treated and replanted, and that the bare ground left at the Burra Burra site preserves a piece of the old "moonscape" for visitors. [S297] The county government credits reforestation since the 1980s with bringing the landscape back. [S281]
When Atlanta hosted the 1996 Summer Olympics, the canoe and kayak slalom went to the Ocoee Whitewater Center, on the Upper Ocoee between Dams No. 2 and No. 3, now run by the Forest Service. [S306][S309] Builders reshaped about 1,500 feet of the riverbed to sharpen its rapids, using limestone to counter acid runoff from the pyrite rock. [S297] The Forest Service calls it the world’s first Olympic whitewater event on a natural river. [S309] The road along the gorge, U.S. 64, also has a first: it is part of the Ocoee Scenic Byway, the first national forest scenic byway in the country. [S310]
The center’s building burned on April 26, 2022; no one was hurt, and the trails and parking areas have reopened. [S309] Tennessee State Parks, which began managing the Ocoee and Hiwassee rivers in 1984, split them into two parks in 2025: Ocoee River State Park and Hiwassee Scenic River State Park. [S311][S312] In 1968 the Hiwassee became the first river managed under Tennessee’s State Scenic River program. [S312]
The county’s history is close to the road. Nancy Ward’s grave sits beside U.S. 411 south of Benton. [S274] The courthouse grounds in Benton hold the Civil War Trails marker and the county’s war memorials. [S300] On U.S. 64, the Ocoee No. 1 markers stand at Sugarloaf Mountain Park, the flume can be seen from the highway, and the last restored stretch of the Old Copper Road starts at the Whitewater Center. [S303][S306][S289] In Ducktown, the Burra Burra site keeps its mine buildings, and the Tennessee Overhill heritage trail links its story to sites in McMinn and Monroe counties. [S296][S295]
Most of the county is still national forest, and the rivers draw paddlers from around the world. [S270][S311] Excursion trains of the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum run from Delano through the Hiwassee Gorge and over the Hook and Eye loop. [S313] For towns, parks and news, see our Polk County guide.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 1800 | David McNair builds his stand near a Cherokee council ground [S279] |
| 1805 | Treaty opens the Federal Road through the Cherokee Nation [S260] |
| 1814 | Post built at Old Fort, by the Park Service and Chamber accounts [S278][S314] |
| 1817 | Women’s Council address to the Cherokee National Council at Amoiah, May 2 [S275] |
| 1819 | Treaty makes the Hiwassee the border with the Cherokee Nation [S233] |
| 1822 | Nancy Ward dies near present-day Benton [S271][S275] |
| 1835 | Treaty of New Echota ends Cherokee claims in Tennessee [S270] |
| 1837–38 | Fort at Old Fort used to gather Cherokee for removal [S277][S314] |
| 1839 | Polk County created, November 28 [S270] |
| 1840 | Benton chosen as county seat, February 4 [S270] |
| 1843 | Copper found on Potato Creek, August [S286] |
| 1850 | Hiwassee Mine opens [S287][S273] |
| 1851–53 | Copper Road built to Cleveland [S273][S289] |
| 1860 | Burra Burra Copper Company organized [S273] |
| 1863 | Mines close as Union army takes Cleveland [S273][S300] |
| 1864 | Gatewood’s raid through Polk County, November [S270][S300] |
| 1865 | Fight at Capt. Bible’s camp, February 15 [S301] |
| 1890 | Railroad reaches the basin; Copperhill founded as McCays [S313][S281] |
| 1898 | Hiwassee Loop replaces the Bald Mountain switchbacks [S313] |
| 1899 | Tennessee Copper Company begins the Burra Burra shaft [S292] |
| 1906 | L&N opens Benton Station line [S302] |
| 1907 | Georgia v. Tennessee Copper Co. decided [S298] |
| 1910–12 | Ocoee No. 1 built at Parksville [S303][S305] |
| 1913 | Ocoee No. 2 and its flume start generating; Copperhill incorporated [S306][S283] |
| 1915 | Benton incorporated [S282] |
| 1923 | DAR monument placed on Nancy Ward’s grave [S271][S274] |
| 1939 | TVA buys the Ocoee plants [S303][S306] |
| 1941–42 | DAR and UDC memorial forests planted; Ocoee No. 3 built [S299][S300][S307] |
| 1951 | Ducktown incorporated [S284] |
| 1958–59 | Burra Burra mine closes [S292][S272] |
| 1968 | Hiwassee becomes Tennessee’s first state scenic river [S312] |
| 1983 | Rebuilt Ocoee flume back in service; Burra Burra site on National Register [S306][S296] |
| 1987 | Last Copper Basin mines close [S272][S295] |
| 1996 | Olympic canoe and kayak slalom on the Ocoee [S309] |
| 2020 | Census counts 17,544 people [S285] |
| 2022 | Ocoee Whitewater Center building burns, April 26 [S309] |
| 2025 | Ocoee River State Park created [S311] |
Start in Benton. The Nancy Ward Gravesite is on U.S. 411 south of town, with the state marker on Old Highway 411 nearby. [S274][S276] In town, the Civil War in Polk County marker stands on the courthouse grounds at Benton Station Road and Ward Street, and the Historic Benton Station marker is at Benton Station Road and Depot Street. [S300][S302] If you have time, drive south on U.S. 411 to the Marr’s Fort marker at Old Fort. [S277] The surviving Fort Marr blockhouse is listed by the Chamber at the state park’s Gee Creek ranger station, 404 Spring Creek Road, Delano; the state says the Gee Creek Campground will close for renovation from spring 2027 to an expected reopening in summer 2028, so check with the park first. [S314][S312]
At midday head east on U.S. 64, the Ocoee Scenic Byway. [S310] Stop at Sugarloaf Mountain Park for the Ocoee No. 1 markers, then the Halfway House marker near Reliance, and watch for the flume along the gorge. [S303][S288][S306] At the Ocoee Whitewater Center the Forest Service lists the grounds as open in daylight year-round; the Old Copper Road trail starts there, 2.4 miles one way to the dam by the Forest Service sign. [S309][S290] (The Chamber describes the restored stretch as 5 miles.) [S314]
Finish in Ducktown. The Discovery of Copper marker is at Tennessee 68 and U.S. 64, and the Hiwassee Mine chimney is on Tennessee 68 just south of Burra Burra Street. [S286][S287] The Ducktown Basin Museum at 212 Burra Burra St. lists hours of 10 to 4:30 daily except Sunday and Wednesday, early March to late December, but its website also posts notices about a renovation closure, so call 423-496-5778 before you go. [S296] From there it is a short drive to downtown Copperhill. Or ride the rails: the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum’s Hiwassee Loop trips leave from Delano, with this year’s season ending November 22, 2026. [S313] Hours change with the seasons, so check before you go.
Visit: Nancy Ward Gravesite, Benton · Civil War Trails marker, Polk County Courthouse · Fort Marr blockhouse, Hiwassee Scenic River State Park · Ocoee No. 1 markers and the Ocoee flume, U.S. 64 · Old Copper Road trail, Ocoee Whitewater Center · Hiwassee Mine stack and Ducktown Basin Museum, Ducktown · Reliance Historic District · Hiwassee Loop trains, Delano
Every bracketed number on this page links here. Written by My East TN in our own words and checked against each source on 2026-10-30 (ET). Where sources disagree (for example, whether Nancy Ward was born in 1738 or sometime in the 1730s and whether she moved to the Benton area before or after the 1819 treaty, whether Fort Marr was built in 1814 or 1837, whether its blockhouse was moved to Benton in 1922 or 1932, how many men were in Capt. Bible’s camp in 1865, whether the Burra Burra mine closed in 1958 or 1959 and whether its headframe survives, how long the restored stretch of the Old Copper Road is, how tall Ocoee Dam No. 1 is and whether it was finished in 1911 or 1912, and whether Ocoee No. 3 was finished in 1942 or 1943), we give both or leave the exact figure out. We don’t republish encyclopedia, museum or marker text — follow the links for the full articles.
Hero image: autumn morning on an East Tennessee lake (My East TN), the same image as our Polk County guide. Corrections: [email protected].