East Tennessee History · County by county
The long valley between the Tennessee River and Walden Ridge: land the Cherokees gave up in 1805, a federal garrison near the mouth of the Hiwassee, a county created in 1807 and named for John Rhea, a first seat at Washington with a Crutchfield courthouse, ferries to the Cherokee Nation and the removal road of 1838, a county that sent most of its soldiers to the Confederacy, a railroad that made Dayton and Spring City, coal mines and blast furnaces at Dayton, a red-brick courthouse where the Scopes Trial was held in 1925, a college named for Bryan, and TVA lakes that covered Rhea Springs.
Rhea County lies in southeast Tennessee, in the valley between the Tennessee River and the Cumberland Plateau. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the General Assembly formed it on December 3, 1807, from part of Roane County, and that it later gave up land to Hamilton County and, in 1836, to Meigs County. [S27] The Tennessee Blue Book says the county was named for John Rhea (1753–1832), a Revolutionary War soldier who served in the North Carolina and Tennessee legislatures and in Congress. [S38]
UT’s County Technical Assistance Service counted 32,870 people in 2020, up from 31,809 in 2010, and lists three incorporated towns: Dayton, the county seat, Graysville and Spring City. [S1615] Rhea is legally part of East Tennessee: the Blue Book lists it in the eastern grand division, and UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service lists Dayton in the East grand division on Eastern time. [S38][S1616]
The county’s story runs from a federal garrison near the mouth of the Hiwassee and a first county seat at Washington, through river ferries, the Cherokee removal of 1838 and a Civil War in which most of its soldiers went south, to a railroad that bypassed the old seat and built Dayton and Spring City, coal mines and blast furnaces at Dayton, the red-brick courthouse where John T. Scopes was tried in July 1925, Bryan College, and the TVA lakes and the Watts Bar plants that reshaped the north end. [S27][S1617][S1618]
Goodspeed’s 1887 history of East Tennessee describes Rhea County as divided between the valley of East Tennessee and the Cumberland table-land, with a line of broken knobs along the river and a narrow valley between them and Walden’s Ridge running the whole length of the county. It names White Creek, Clear Creek, Big and Little Richland, Sale Creek, Muddy Creek and the Piney River as the main streams, and says that, like the other counties Walden’s Ridge crosses, Rhea is rich in coal, iron and limestone. [S1619]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s Edward T. Luther describes Walden Ridge as the narrow southeastern part of the Appalachian Plateau, eight to ten miles wide and generally rising to about 2,000 feet, running from Cumberland and Roane counties south to the Tennessee River gorge. [S1511] The state’s 1807 act drew Rhea’s western line along the top of the mountain that divides the waters of the Sequatchie from those of the Tennessee, leaving in Rhea all the streams that run through it. [S1620]
Two old routes met in the valley. A state marker at Dayton says the place called Smith’s Crossroads was the junction of the Kiuka War Trace, later the Black Fox Trail, which led to the Cumberland, and the main north-south Indian trail. [S1621] The National Register nomination for the Broyles-Darwin House describes the same crossroads as the meeting of an east-west "Indian Road," heavily traveled by the Cherokees, and the north-south "Valley Road." [S1622]
Settlers began moving into the valley bottomland, the encyclopedia says, once the Cherokees gave up their claim to it in 1805. [S27] Goodspeed puts it the same way: in 1805, by treaty, the Cherokees relinquished all right and title to the lands. [S1619]
Samuel D. Smith’s encyclopedia biography of Return Jonathan Meigs, the federal agent to the Cherokees, says Meigs kept his office at Fort Southwest Point near Kingston from 1801 to 1807 and then supervised moving the agency and the government’s trading "factory" from Tellico Blockhouse to a new post named Hiwassee Garrison, near the mouth of the Hiwassee River. He served there as both Cherokee agent and military agent until 1813, when the federal soldiers were withdrawn, and in 1815 he moved the agency a few miles up the Hiwassee. [S62]
Goodspeed tells it differently. It says an Indian agency was set up on the Tennessee River in the southern part of the county after the 1805 treaty, with a fort covering about two acres, and that it was used until 1819, when the agency moved to the site of Charleston in Bradley County. [S1619] When Meigs died in 1823, Smith writes, his remains were brought to the "Garrison Cemetery" near the Rhea County site of the old Hiwassee Garrison and laid beside those of his wife Grace and son Timothy. [S62]
The National Register nomination for Blythe Ferry, at the mouth of the Hiwassee, says William Blythe, a Cherokee, was authorized to run a ferry there in 1809, and that it carried people and supplies between Rhea County’s white settlements west of the Tennessee and the Cherokee territory to the east, and linked Hiwassee Garrison in Rhea County with the federal Indian agency on the Meigs side. [S1623] Farther upriver, a state marker on the Rhea side says Conley Hastings set up a ferry about 1807 between the town of Washington and the Cherokee territory east of the river; it later joined the county seats of Dayton and Decatur, and a bridge replaced it in 1994. [S1624]
The state library’s fact sheet reprints the 1807 act that created the county, Chapter 9 of that year’s acts, "to reduce Roane County to constitutional limits, and to form two new and distinct counties south-west of the same": Rhea and Bledsoe. It names Thomas Moore, Joseph Brooks and John Henry as commissioners to choose a place for holding court, makes Rhea part of the district of Hamilton, organizes its militia as the thirtieth regiment of the state, and gives the date of passage as November 30, 1807. [S1620]
The commissioners chose the home of William Henry at Big Spring, north of present-day Dayton, the encyclopedia says, and the house served as the county courthouse until October 1812. [S27] Goodspeed says the county court was organized there on January 25, 1808, with James Campbell as chairman, Daniel Rawlings as clerk and Miller Francis as sheriff, and that the first jail, a log building twelve feet square, was built on Henry’s farm by Robert Gamble for $38.75. [S1619]
Caneta Skelley Hankins’s encyclopedia biography says he was born in northwest Ireland in 1753 to a Scottish Presbyterian minister, came as a child to Pennsylvania and then to the country near present Blountville, earned a degree at Princeton in 1780, and voted in the North Carolina House of Commons to ratify the U.S. Constitution. He sat on the constitutional committee of 1796 and, except for 1815–16, served in the U.S. House from the early 1800s until 1823. [S1625] Hankins writes that he believed the removal of the native tribes was sound policy, and that he upheld the legal rights of slaveholding states while calling slavery a great moral evil. He died in 1832 and is buried in Blountville. [S1625] A state marker near Graysville adds that he fought at King’s Mountain. [S1626]
The legislature named commissions in 1809 and 1811 to set up a county seat to be called Washington, the encyclopedia says, and the town, now Old Washington, was laid out in 1812 near the head of Spring Creek on land donated by Judge David Campbell and Richard Green Waterhouse. Lots were surveyed and sold on May 21 and 22, 1812, and contracts went to James C. Mitchell for the courthouse, John Moore for the jail and Adam W. Caldwell for the stocks and pillory. [S27]
Goodspeed gives the details. On February 12, 1812, it says, the county commissioners met at Judge Campbell’s house at the head of Spring Creek and decided to put the seat there; sixty-nine lots sold for $1,984.25; Mitchell’s courthouse was a two-story frame building thirty feet square, built for $936.25; and Moore’s jail was a double-walled log building with small stones packed between the walls. [S1619] It says Judge Campbell died soon after the town was laid out and was buried near the creek. [S1619] A Daughters of the American Revolution memorial in Old Washington Park gives his dates as 1750–1812 and calls him a Revolutionary War soldier, a major from Virginia, and the first clerk of Washington County, Virginia. [S1627]
A brick courthouse followed. The encyclopedia says it was designed by the craftsman Thomas Crutchfield and finished in December 1832. [S27] Goodspeed says Crutchfield, a contractor, completed it in 1833, and that he built similar courthouses for at least eight East Tennessee counties. [S1619]
Washington was the center of the county’s political life and a busy market. The encyclopedia lists ten stores, three taverns or hotels, a branch of the State Bank, a newspaper called The Valley Freeman, blacksmiths and cabinetmakers, a turner, saddlers and harness makers, a tannery and three large cotton gins. [S27] Goodspeed says the only church in the town before the Civil War was a large hewed-log building put up by the Presbyterians and shared by all denominations and by the Tennessee Academy, and that a large brick church built in 1833 was destroyed by a tornado before it was finished. [S1619]
The county grew quickly. The encyclopedia gives 2,504 people in 1810, 4,215 in 1820 and 8,186 in 1830. Then it lost ground: Meigs County was formed from Rhea in 1836, and Chattanooga was founded a few years later, so that by 1840 Rhea had only 3,985 people and by 1860 only about 1,000 more. [S27] Goodspeed says Washington flourished until the division of 1836 and then began a decline from which it never recovered. [S1619] A small marker from the Rhea County Historical and Genealogical Society now stands at the old town site, calling it the first county seat of Rhea County. [S1628]
In 1838 the federal government forced the Cherokees from their homeland, and their road west crossed Rhea County. The Blythe Ferry nomination says the ferry carried removal parties across the Tennessee on the "Trail of Tears," and that in an October 15, 1838, letter to John Ross a Dr. John Powell complained of the Blythes’ slowness in ferrying their fellow Cherokees and the supply wagons. [S1623] The revised nomination says Blythe Ferry carried nine Cherokee detachments across the river in 1838 and that nearly ten thousand Cherokees crossed there as they left their eastern homeland. [S1623]
From the ferry the detachments crossed the Rhea County valley. The state marker at Dayton says the Trail of Tears crossed the Tennessee Valley at Smith’s Crossroads in 1838, coming from Blythe’s Ferry. [S1621] A plaque at Market Street and Florida Avenue in Dayton notes a Trail of Tears sign on Highway 30 west at the edge of town. [S1629]
On the eve of the Civil War, the encyclopedia says, Rhea County had 4,377 white residents and 615 enslaved people. [S27] Goodspeed lists a Rhea County Cavalry company, under a Captain Waterhouse, among the East Tennessee companies that went to the Mexican War in 1846. [S1619]
The Broyles family’s land became the core of Dayton. The Broyles-Darwin nomination says Stephen Sanders Decatur Broyles bought three hundred acres around Smith’s Crossroads in 1857, when there was only a store and post office at the crossroads, and with his brother Onslow G. Broyles bought more than 5,000 acres on Walden’s Ridge just to the west. He built his house near the crossroads around 1860, perhaps with the local carpenter John W. Foust. [S1622] A marker on the house says it is the oldest within the Dayton city limits. [S1630]
Goodspeed says delegates from every East Tennessee county except Rhea gathered for the East Tennessee Convention at Greeneville on June 17, 1861. [S1619] The encyclopedia says that although the county had only 435 men of military age, more than 700 men served in the Confederate army, while about 100 left the state to join the Union army. [S27]
The Broyles-Darwin nomination says William Perry Darwin, a Washington merchant, formed Company C of the Confederate cavalry at Washington in the fall of 1862, and that Stephen Broyles served in it as a private. [S1622] A Civil War Trails marker at Spring City says Confederate authorities in 1862–63 ordered three Rhea County cavalry companies to patrol the passes of Walden Ridge between Emory Gap and Sale Creek, to keep Federal forces out of the Tennessee Valley. [S1631]
No large battles were fought in the county, the encyclopedia says, but it was under constant pressure, minor skirmishes were common, troops of both armies crossed it, and various officers used the courthouse at Washington as a headquarters in 1863. [S27] The Broyles-Darwin nomination says the teenage William Tipton "Tip" Broyles, who ran the family farm during the war, hosted the Confederate general Joseph Wheeler there on the night of September 30, 1863, before Wheeler’s raid on a Federal wagon train in the Sequatchie Valley the next day. [S1622] The Blythe Ferry nomination says a company of the 5th Tennessee Infantry (USA) was stationed at the ferry for more than a year to guard the mouth of the Hiwassee. [S1623]
The Spring City marker tells the story of the Spartans. In the summer of 1862, it says, thirty young, socially prominent women organized a nonmilitary unit, with Mary McDonald, then 28, as captain and her sister-in-law Caroline McDonald as first lieutenant. A mounted soldiers’ aid group, they carried food and clothing to the men patrolling the passes, and the marker says some historians believe they carried out limited espionage for the Confederacy. [S1631]
In April 1865, the marker says, Capt. John Walker of the 6th Tennessee Infantry (USA), himself a Rhea County native, had the women arrested, marched them to the Tennessee River and sent them by riverboat to Chattanooga. There Gen. James B. Steedman ordered them released once they signed oaths of loyalty to the United States and reprimanded Walker. The women were not prosecuted, but the marker says they suffered from Union partisans during Reconstruction, most left the county within a few years, and five moved to Texas. Capt. Mary McDonald Sawyer died in 1914 and is buried in Buttram Cemetery in Dayton. [S1631]
After the war Stephen Broyles nearly lost his land to creditors, the nomination says; the case was settled in 1868 when Tip Broyles took on his father’s debts and kept the farm in the family. [S1622]
The encyclopedia says the Cincinnati Southern Railway was built in the mid-1880s along the west side of the Tennessee River, bypassing Washington entirely, and that the lack of a railroad led to the old seat’s decline. [S27] The Broyles-Darwin nomination dates it earlier: it says the railroad began buying land through the valley in 1875 and opened in 1880. [S1622] Goodspeed, writing in 1887, says the line passed four miles west of Washington and that the damage of the war and the coming of the railroad had sealed the town’s fate. [S1619]
The encyclopedia names Evensville, Graysville, Roddy (once Prestonville) and Pinnine as railroad towns, and Grandview, Paine Springs, Morgan Springs, Ogdon, Morgantown, Salem and Carp as settlements away from the line. [S27] Goodspeed says Spring City was laid out when the railroad was built, on land owned by Jonathan and Edley Caldwell, and that a narrow-gauge railroad over Walden’s Ridge to the table-land added to its importance. Evensville, it says, took its name from its first merchant, J. S. Evens, who began business in 1878. [S1619]
The crossroads that became Dayton had several names. The state marker says it was named for the pioneer William Smith, a New England teacher and merchant who settled there in 1820. [S1621] Goodspeed says a firm called Smith & Cozby, which had been selling goods at Hiwassee Garrison, opened a store at the crossroads in 1813 or 1814, and that "Billy" Smith stayed on for many years. [S1619]
The Broyles-Darwin nomination says the name was changed from Smith’s Crossroads to Dayton in 1878 when the railroad company threatened to call the place Sequatchie: Tip Broyles and his brother Boston tore down the railroad’s sign and burned it, and Tip helped the postmaster, W. B. Benson, petition the government to rename the town Dayton. [S1622] The marker says it was named Sequatchie with the coming of the railroad in the late 1870s and soon renamed Dayton. [S1621] The encyclopedia says only that the town was known as Smith’s Cross Roads until 1877–78. [S27]
The Broyleses laid out the town. Stephen and Tip Broyles, the nomination says, subdivided and platted the family farm between about 1875 and 1890 into the streets, homes and commercial district of what is now south Dayton, naming some streets for men who had served with Stephen in the cavalry. In 1887 Stephen sold a lot to the town on condition that it be used "only for a school or the worship of the almighty God," and the Dayton city school still stands on it. [S1622] The James Robert Darwin family, owners of Darwin Dry Goods, bought the Broyles house in 1908; during the Scopes Trial, a marker says, the Darwins boarded two reporters there. [S1622][S1630]
On March 14, 1885, the encyclopedia says, Dayton’s residents voted 120 to 13 to incorporate, with Thomas N. L. Cunnyngham as the first mayor and William B. Benson as the first recorder. [S27] UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service lists Dayton’s charter and incorporation act as Private Acts of 1903, chapter 229, with an incorporation date of December 1, 1903. [S1616]
The encyclopedia says English capitalists, seeing the coal, iron and limestone of Rhea County, organized the company in 1883–84, and that by 1887 two furnaces were each turning out about a hundred tons of pig iron a day. [S27] Goodspeed, writing at the time, says the work of building blast furnaces, opening mines and laying railroads for coal, iron and limestone began in 1884 under a company of English capitalists whose principal it names as "Sir Titus Salts," that the first furnace went into blast on February 9, 1886, and that a second followed about April 1, 1887. [S1619] It calls Dayton one of the most remarkable towns in the state, grown in three years from a small village to a city of more than 3,000. [S1619]
The state marker calls the investors Scottish industrialists who developed the coal and iron in the 1880s. [S1621] The nomination for the Dr. Walter Thomison House says the Dayton Coal and Iron Company was established in 1883 and produced its first usable pig iron in 1886, and that Thomison was its head company doctor for forty-seven years. [S1632] A marker at his house adds that he was also the local surgeon for the Southern Railway and the attending physician to William Jennings Bryan at his death. [S1633]
The mines lay in the gorges of Walden Ridge. The state’s page for Laurel-Snow State Natural Area says logging and deep mining took place there in the late 1800s and early 1900s, that mining remnants can still be seen near the parking area, and that part of Richland Creek was dammed as the Dayton Reservoir, once the town’s water supply. [S1634] The Cumberland Trail Conservancy says the Richland and Dixon Slope mines were dug for coal there, that the nearby Nelson Mine was also owned by the Dayton Coal & Iron Company, and that gas explosions at the Nelson Mine killed four men in 1889, twenty-eight in 1895 and sixteen in 1902. It says the company went bankrupt in 1913, and that long lines of the company’s coke ovens remain along the creek south of the trailhead. [S1635]
In 1889, the encyclopedia says, Rhea Countians voted to move the county seat from Washington to Dayton. A new jail was finished in 1890, and the new brick courthouse, designed by W. Chamberlin & Co. of Knoxville, in 1892. [S27]
The National Register nomination for the courthouse says it was built in 1890–91 to designs by W. Chamberlin and Company, a Knoxville firm, by the Chattanooga contractors William Dowling and J. R. Taylor, and that it blends the Romanesque Revival and Italian Villa styles. It describes a red-brick building of 70 by 120 feet on a limestone foundation, with a three-story main block, a larger two-story rear wing holding the second-floor circuit courtroom, a clock tower at the northeast corner topped by an open, arcaded, octagonal lantern, and a lower tower at the southeast corner. [S1617] The Broyles-Darwin nomination says that after the courthouse opened in 1891, Dayton’s business center moved north of Richland Creek. [S1622]
Before then, the same nomination says, the three-story brick Dayton Masonic College, built on three acres Tip Broyles gave the Masonic lodge in 1884, served as the county court as well as the city school. [S1622] Goodspeed says the college opened in 1885 with Creed M. Fulton as president. [S1619] The state library notes fires at the Rhea County courthouse in 1869 and 1927. [S1620]
At the north end of the county, the encyclopedia says, Sulphur Springs, renamed Rhea Springs in 1878, was settled early on the bank of the Piney River and became a resort with "healing" waters and a large hotel. The railroad passed it by and it dwindled. [S27] Goodspeed says T. T. McWhirter founded a newspaper, the News, at Rhea Springs in 1877 and moved it to Spring City in 1880. [S1619]
Spring City took Rhea Springs’ place as the leading town of the north end, the encyclopedia says, and unlike most railroad towns it kept growing after the 1930s, mostly because of Watts Bar Dam and, later, the nuclear plant. [S27] UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service lists the town’s incorporation act as Private Acts of 1953, chapter 64, with an incorporation date of February 1, 1953. [S1636]
Missions and churches built some of the county’s early schools. A state marker at Grandview, on Walden Ridge, says the American Missionary Association founded Grandview Normal Institute in 1884 to prepare students from the hill country of East Tennessee for college, Christian work or teaching; better public schools led it to close as a boarding school in 1919, though it stayed open for some years as a high school. [S1637]
At Graysville, a marker on the Seventh-day Adventist church grounds says Adventists organized a church there on September 8, 1888, and started a school on February 20, 1892, above J. W. Clouse’s store, with G. W. Colcord as principal. The administration building went up in 1893 and the school was named Graysville Academy; later called the Southern Industrial School and the Southern Training School, it moved after a 1915 dormitory fire to a site near Ooltewah named Collegedale, where it became Southern Junior College. After the fire a school continued at Graysville under the old name; it ran as a boarding school from 1931 until its dormitories closed in February 1939, and the last academy building was torn down in 1974. [S1638] UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service lists Graysville’s incorporation date as December 1, 1917. [S1639]
Goodspeed adds that Evensville was the seat of the Tennessee Valley College, opened in 1881 under Prof. W. E. Stephens. [S1619]
In 1925 the Tennessee General Assembly passed a bill introduced by Representative John W. Butler of Macon County that made it illegal to teach "any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." George E. Webb writes in the encyclopedia that Governor Austin Peay signed it quickly but said he saw it as a protest against irreligious tendencies and doubted it would be an active statute. [S26] The courthouse nomination says the act set a fine of $100 to $500, and that state officials made no attempt to enforce it. [S1617]
The American Civil Liberties Union thought the act unconstitutional and offered to back a Tennessee teacher in a test case. Learning of the offer, Webb writes, civic leaders in Dayton decided to pursue such a case to draw publicity to their town. [S26] A marker on Main Street says the first local plans for the trial were made at F. E. Robinson’s drug store by Robinson, George Rappleyea and others. [S1640] The courthouse nomination calls Rappleyea a New York mining engineer who opposed the law and says the group arranged with John Thomas Scopes, a 24-year-old Dayton science teacher, to violate it deliberately. [S1617]
Webb says the boosters asked Scopes, a football coach and science teacher at the high school, whether biology could be taught without evolution; Scopes said he did not think so, since the state-approved textbook discussed it, and told them he had used the book in a review session that April. [S26] A marker at the site of Rhea County High School says Scopes coached football, basketball and baseball there in 1924–25 and taught mathematics, physics and chemistry. [S1641] By the end of May, Webb writes, a special grand jury called by Judge John T. Raulston had indicted him. [S26]
The trial brought the world to town. The courthouse nomination says more than 100 reporters came, H. L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun the best known among them, and that within a few days more than 10,000 visitors filled the streets of a town of about 1,800 people. [S1617] The encyclopedia’s county entry says Dayton grew from about 1,800 people to about 5,000 at the height of the trial. [S27]
Markers along Market Street mark where the visitors stayed and worked. The loft of Bailey Hardware served as the press hall where many of the 120 reporters worked and slept, one says, and W. C. Bailey also owned the boardinghouse where Scopes lived. [S1642] Scopes’s father and the columnist Bugs Baer stayed at that boardinghouse during the trial. [S1643] John Morgan Furniture, in business since 1909, rented its second-floor living quarters to reporters from periodicals such as Harper’s Weekly. [S1644] The Aqua Hotel next to Robinson’s drug store housed or fed Arthur Garfield Hays, Dudley Field Malone, John R. Neal, Judge Raulston, Bryan and Darrow. [S1640] The Rogers family moved out of their house so that Bryan and his family could stay there. [S1645]
The trial ran from July 10 to 21, 1925, in the courthouse, a state marker says: William Jennings Bryan assisted the prosecution, and Clarence Darrow, Arthur Garfield Hays and Dudley Field Malone the defense. [S1646] Webb adds that the ACLU defense team included the Knoxville attorney John Randolph Neal, with Darrow, Malone and Hays as outside volunteers, and that the prosecution included the Tennessee attorney general, Thomas Stewart, and a local lawyer, S. K. Hicks. [S26] A marker in Dayton says the office of James W. McKenzie belonged to the grandson of B. G. McKenzie and nephew of J. G. McKenzie, both prosecuting attorneys at the trial. [S1647]
The courthouse nomination describes the courtroom jammed with spectators, a judge who opened each day with a prayer over the defense’s objections, and a ruling that the Butler Act was constitutional. [S1617] Judge Raulston excluded the defense’s expert testimony on the scientific status of evolution and its harmony with the Bible, Webb writes, and the prosecution focused on Scopes’s violation of the act. [S26]
The dramatic climax came on July 20. The nomination says Judge Raulston moved court that day to the north lawn of the courthouse because of the heat and the crowd, let the defense experts read their testimony into the record for appeal, and then saw Hays ask Bryan himself to take the stand; Bryan testified for an hour and a half. [S1617] Webb says Darrow called Bryan as an expert on the Bible, and that during the ninety-minute examination Darrow showed that Bryan’s knowledge of the Bible was imperfect and that he did not believe every passage could be taken literally. [S26]
On July 21 the jury returned a guilty verdict. The nomination says it deliberated only nine minutes; Webb says less than ten. Judge Raulston fined Scopes the minimum $100. [S1617][S26]
Bryan stayed in Dayton. A marker at the First United Methodist Church says he made his last public appearance there at morning worship on Sunday, July 26, 1925, when he was asked to lead in prayer. [S1648] He died that day at the Rogers house, another marker says. [S1645][S1649]
The ACLU appealed. In January 1927, Webb writes, a divided Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that nothing in the Butler Act violated the state or federal constitution, but reversed Scopes’s conviction because the Tennessee Constitution required that any fine over fifty dollars be set by a jury, and it strongly recommended that the state not retry the case. The law stayed on the books until the legislature repealed it in 1967. [S26]
Webb argues that the antievolution campaign actually gained strength from the trial: antievolution laws passed in Mississippi and Arkansas over the next few years, and publishers deleted the topic from biology textbooks. [S26] The courthouse nomination, written in the 1970s, takes the opposite view: that the trial helped check the antievolution movement and aided academic freedom, and that a string of states repealed their antievolution measures. [S1617] As for Scopes, both sources say he went on to study geology at the University of Chicago. [S26][S1617]
While he was in Dayton, the encyclopedia’s William L. Ketchersid writes, Bryan spoke of his hope for a Christian school in the town, and that after his friend George Washburn suggested a college in Dayton, Bryan pledged $25,000 toward it. After Bryan’s death a Bryan Memorial Association raised money; ground was broken in May 1927, and pledges reached $700,000 before the 1929 crash halted construction. William Jennings Bryan University opened on September 30, 1930, holding classes at Rhea Central High School, and held its first graduation in 1934. [S1650]
The 1930s and 1940s were hard; Ketchersid says faculty were sometimes paid only in food from local merchants and students. In the 1960s, under President Theodore Mercer, the school won accreditation from the Southern Association and changed its name to Bryan College. [S1650] A state marker on U.S. 27 calls Bryan a non-sectarian, independent liberal arts college, opened in 1930. [S1651]
The college used several Dayton buildings. A marker says the old Rhea County High School building, where Scopes taught, was used by Bryan University from 1930 to 1935. [S1641] Another says Cedar Hill, built in 1929 by Dr. Walter Agnew Thomison and local businessmen as Dayton’s first hospital, was leased by the university from 1932 to 1938 as a women’s dormitory and dining hall, then run as a tourist home by the trial juror Jess Goodrich and his wife Rose, and owned again by the college from 1967 to 1984. [S1652]
The courthouse was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976, the historical society says. [S1653] Its National Register nomination describes a $100,000 restoration plan to keep county offices there, restore the upstairs courtroom and put a Scopes trial museum in the basement. [S1617] The Rhea County Historical Society says a courthouse renovation of more than $1 million in 1979 restored the second floor to its 1920s appearance and built the museum in the basement, and that the museum was remodeled in 2018 with new flooring and exhibits. [S1654] A statue of Bryan stands on the courthouse grounds near the southeast entrance, with quotations from his speeches; its marker says it was erected in 2005 by the Friends of Bryan College. [S1655] In front of the courthouse, a veterans memorial erected by the Dayton Junior Chamber of Commerce lists the county’s dead from World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. [S1656]
TVA says Chickamauga Dam, just north of Chattanooga, was built from 1936 to 1940 and that its reservoir stretches 59 miles upriver to Watts Bar Dam. [S1609] Watts Bar Dam, TVA says, was begun in 1939 and completed in January 1942, three weeks after Pearl Harbor, and supplied power for the war effort, including the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge. [S78]
The dam’s National Register nomination says it stands at mile 530 of the Tennessee in Rhea and Meigs counties, about ten miles from Spring City, and takes its name from Watts Island, a sandbar at the site. Work began on July 1, 1939; the reservoir began filling on January 1, 1942; the lock opened on February 16, 1942; and the first power unit went into service on February 11, 1942. [S1618] It says the project bought 110,145 acres and displaced 832 families in Rhea, Meigs, Roane and Loudon counties, and that 591 graves from seventeen cemeteries were moved, while 511 graves were left in place. [S1618]
The lake covered Rhea Springs. The encyclopedia calls the construction of Watts Bar Dam the final blow to the old resort, which was flooded in 1941. [S27] Spring City, the nomination says, had 1,569 people in 1940; in March 1941 it joined Rhea County in a planning commission that worked with TVA on a marina and with the county school board to relocate schools, building new schools for both Black and white students. [S1618]
After the dam was finished, TVA says, a Michigan man bought the construction workers’ housing in 1950 and started what became Pete Smith’s Watts Bar Resort, drawing northern visitors to the lake. [S78] The nomination says Tennessee 68 was rerouted across the top of the dam in the mid-1960s, linking Spring City and U.S. 27 with Interstate 75. [S1618] One of the dam’s four original turbines, built by Baldwin Locomotive Works, now stands by the highway; a TVA marker says it was set there in 2014 when a modern turbine replaced it, and that each original unit weighed nearly 1.3 million pounds and gave 42,000 horsepower. [S1657]
TVA’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant stands on 1,700 acres at the northern end of Chickamauga Reservoir near Spring City. Unit 1 began commercial operation in May 1996 and Unit 2 in October 2016, which TVA calls the first new nuclear generation in the nation in the twenty-first century. [S1658] The encyclopedia lists TVA’s Watts Bar facility as a major employer along with La-Z-Boy, Robinson Manufacturing, Kayser-Roth and Suburban Manufacturing. [S27]
The old mining lands on the ridge became a natural area. The state says Laurel-Snow State Natural Area covers 2,259 acres on Walden Ridge, where Morgan, Henderson, Laurel and Richland creeks cut deep gorges; it is named for Laurel Falls, 80 feet high, and Snow Falls, 35 feet, and includes Buzzard Point and the Bryan Overlook. It was designated in 1973, and its trail was the first National Recreation Trail designated in Tennessee. [S1634] The Cumberland Trail Conservancy says the paper company Bowater later set the land aside as a "pocket wilderness" and built the trails, and that the state acquired it when Bowater sold most of its Tennessee lands. [S1635]
UT’s County Technical Assistance Service counted 32,870 people in Rhea County in 2020. [S1615] The encyclopedia gave 28,400 in 2000. [S27]
Two Rhea County lives are marked in recent years. A Tennessee Music Pathways marker in Spring City says the session pianist Hargus "Pig" Robbins was born there on January 18, 1938, lost his sight as a small child, studied piano at the Tennessee School for the Blind, played on thousands of Nashville sessions, including Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, and entered the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2012. [S1659] A 2024 state marker in Dayton says Pvt. W. G. Harding DaVault, a Rhea Central High School student who died fighting in Germany in 1944, was identified by DNA after 76 years and brought home in 2021, and that he was one of 75 Rhea County service members killed in World War II. [S1660]
The Rhea County Historical Society, formerly the Rhea County Historical & Genealogical Society, collects the county’s records and artifacts, publishes books and cemetery records, and runs the Rhea Heritage and Scopes Trial Museum in the courthouse basement. [S1661] The state library’s fact sheet lists published county histories by Bettye J. Broyles, Thomas J. Campbell and Valentine C. Allen, among others, and microfilm of the county’s records, including marriages and a deed index from 1808. [S1620]
Visit:
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1805 | The Cherokees give up their claim to the valley by treaty. [S27] |
| c. 1807 | Conley Hastings opens a ferry across the Tennessee at Washington. [S1624] |
| 1807 | The agency moves to Hiwassee Garrison near the mouth of the Hiwassee. [S62] |
| 1807 | The General Assembly creates Rhea County from Roane. [S27][S1620] |
| 1808 | The county court is organized at William Henry’s house at Big Spring. [S1619] |
| 1809 | William Blythe is authorized to run a ferry at the mouth of the Hiwassee. [S1623] |
| 1812 | Washington is laid out on Spring Creek; lots sell May 21–22. [S27] |
| 1832–33 | Thomas Crutchfield’s brick courthouse is finished at Washington. [S27][S1619] |
| 1836 | Meigs County is formed from Rhea. [S27] |
| 1838 | Cherokee detachments cross at Blythe Ferry and through Smith’s Crossroads. [S1623][S1621] |
| 1861 | Rhea sends no delegates to the East Tennessee Convention at Greeneville. [S1619] |
| 1862 | The Rhea County Spartans organize. [S1631] |
| 1865 | Union troops arrest the Spartans in April. [S1631] |
| 1877–78 | Smith’s Crossroads becomes Dayton. [S27][S1622] |
| 1878 | Sulphur Springs is renamed Rhea Springs. [S27] |
| 1880 | The Cincinnati Southern opens through the valley, by the Broyles-Darwin nomination’s date. [S1622] |
| 1884 | Grandview Normal Institute is founded. [S1637] |
| 1885 | Dayton residents vote to incorporate, March 14. [S27] |
| 1886 | The first Dayton furnace goes into blast, February 9. [S1619] |
| 1889 | Voters move the county seat to Dayton. [S27] |
| 1890–91 | The new courthouse is built in Dayton. [S1617] |
| 1893 | Graysville Academy’s administration building is built. [S1638] |
| 1913 | The Dayton coal and iron company goes bankrupt. [S1635] |
| 1925 | The Scopes Trial, July 10–21; Bryan dies in Dayton, July 26. [S1646][S1645] |
| 1927 | The Tennessee Supreme Court reverses Scopes’s conviction. [S26] |
| 1930 | William Jennings Bryan University opens, September 30. [S1650] |
| 1939 | Work begins on Watts Bar Dam, July 1. [S1618] |
| 1940 | Chickamauga Dam is completed. [S1609] |
| 1941–42 | Watts Bar Lake fills and covers Rhea Springs. [S27][S1618] |
| 1953 | Spring City is incorporated. [S1636] |
| 1967 | The legislature repeals the Butler Act. [S26] |
| 1972 | The courthouse is listed on the National Register. [S1617] |
| 1973 | Laurel-Snow State Natural Area is designated. [S1634] |
| 1976 | The courthouse is designated a National Historic Landmark. [S1653] |
| 1996 | Watts Bar Nuclear Unit 1 enters commercial operation. [S1658] |
| 2016 | Watts Bar Unit 2 enters commercial operation. [S1658] |
| 2018 | The Scopes Trial Museum is remodeled. [S1654] |
| 2020 | The census counts 32,870 people in the county. [S1615] |
Every bracketed number on this page links here. Written by My East TN in our own words and checked against each source on 2026-10-31 (ET). Where sources disagree, we list each version in the section Where the sources disagree, above, with its source. We don’t republish encyclopedia, museum or marker text — follow the links for the full articles.
Hero: an AI-assisted illustration of the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, the same banner we use on our Rhea County guide. Our records describe it as an AI redraw made with reference to public-domain photographs (Calvin Beale for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and JW Fisher) and Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) photographs by GWC2025 and HrAtsuo on Wikimedia Commons. It is not a photograph and its details are not exact; the Bryan statue, memorials, flags and signs on the real lawn are left out. No endorsement by those photographers, Rhea County, the City of Dayton, the Rhea County Historical Society or any source on this page is implied. Reused source numbers (S26, S27, S38, S62, S78, S1511, S1609) match the same sources on our other history pages. Corrections: [email protected].