East Tennessee History · County by county
Big South Fork country on the Kentucky line: sandstone rock shelters used for thousands of years, a creek its settlers named No Business, a county named in 1849 for the general who took Mexico City, a courthouse where Andrew Johnson denounced secession and a county court that answered Tennessee’s secession with its own, a sixteen-year-old who fought off a raider with an axe, the railroad that made Oneida, a short line that crossed the river on a second-hand iron bridge, a sandstone jail that burned in 1922 and was the scene of a lynching in 1933, a family of congressmen, and the wild river that was never dammed.
Scott County lies on the Cumberland Plateau against the Kentucky line. The Tennessee Encyclopedia describes beautiful country with poor soil for farming and a small population, blanketed by forest, with the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area in its western section. [S1385] The General Assembly created the county in 1849 from parts of Anderson, Campbell, Fentress and Morgan counties, and the Tennessee Blue Book says it was named for Winfield Scott, the War of 1812 soldier who commanded U.S. troops at Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo and Molino del Rey in the Mexican War. [S38] Its seat is Huntsville. [S1385]
UT’s County Technical Assistance Service counted 21,850 people in 2020 and lists three incorporated towns: Huntsville, Oneida and Winfield. [S1386] Unlike Fentress and Pickett next door, Scott is in the East grand division and on Eastern time. [S1387]
Its story runs from Ice Age hunters in sandstone rock shelters to a county so loyal to the Union that its court declared its independence from Tennessee, to a railroad boom that built Oneida almost overnight, to a family that sent a father and son to Washington, to a river that Congress decided to protect rather than dam.
Wind and water cut the plateau’s sandstone and shale into overhangs and shelters, and the encyclopedia says Paleoindians visited them during the last Ice Age, followed by later Native American peoples. [S1385] The Park Service dates human occupation of the upper Cumberland Plateau to about 12,000 years ago, when nomadic hunters and gatherers lived off the game and plants. About 1,000 years ago, it says, farming offered a steadier food supply, but the thin plateau soils were poor for crops, and most groups moved to the broad river valleys. Some kept hunting and gathering on the plateau, and villagers from the river bottoms came up to add game and wild plants to their corn, beans and squash. By the late 1700s, the Park Service says, Cherokee people were known to be in the area. [S1388]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s entry on the Big South Fork, written by Sen. Howard Baker Jr., counts about 4,000 rock shelters inside the recreation area and says the Park Service lists 8,000 archaeological sites there. Baker describes heavy activity between 12,000 and 7,000 years ago, including mussel gathering and burning of forest to clear ground, and then a long gap of some two thousand years when human life in the area all but disappeared. By about A.D. 900 to 1000, he writes, people had left the plateau for farming towns along the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, returning only to hunt. [S1323]
The Park Service says longhunters were exploring the Big South Fork and its streams by 1780, and that several permanent homesteads stood there by 1800. Most settlers came from Virginia and North Carolina, of English and Scotch-Irish descent, and they kept to the creek and river bottoms, where the only fertile land was. Place names such as Troublesome, Difficulty and No Business, the Park Service notes, leave little doubt how rugged the country was. [S1326] Fur trappers are reputed to have made their base on Station Camp Creek, and the Park Service’s history page says pioneer settlers were coming onto the upper plateau by 1810. [S1388]
No Business was one of those settlements. The Park Service says Richard Slaven became its first permanent settler in 1796. By local oral tradition he was a Revolutionary War veteran with a land grant. Homesteads along No Business Creek were tied together by churches, stores and one-room schools, and the community counted 300 or more people at its peak in the late 1800s. Crabtrees, Blevinses, Boyatts, Burkes, Slavens and Millers lived there. Isolation, a lack of land and work, and the decline of logging and mining wore it down, and many young men who left for World War II did not come back to farm. The last resident, Dewey Slaven, left in September 1960. [S1389]
Elsewhere on the plateau, the encyclopedia says, settlers in the early 1800s carved small self-sufficient farms from the forest. Because the farming was poor, enslaved and free Black people made up no more than 2 percent of the county’s people before the Civil War, and industry was limited to independent grist mills and whiskey making. [S1385] At the courthouse in Huntsville, a marker raised in 1976 by the Scott County Bicentennial Committee lists twelve American Revolutionary War soldiers honored by the county, among them Daniel Blevins, James Chitwood, Timothy Sexton and Dennis Trammel. [S1390]
The encyclopedia says the General Assembly made Scott County in 1849 from parts of Anderson, Campbell, Fentress and Morgan and named it for Gen. Winfield Scott, whose Mexican War victories were fresh in the public mind. [S1385] Two state markers on U.S. 27 make the same point at the county’s edges. One, at the Morgan County line near Elgin, says Scott was established in 1849 and honors the general as a veteran of the War of 1812, commander of the southern thrust into Mexico City, chief of staff of the Army until 1862 and military adviser to the President until his death. [S1391] The other, a two-sided Tennessee and Kentucky marker on U.S. 27 near Winfield, repeats that tribute. [S1392] UT’s CTAS also gives 1849 as the year the county originated. [S1386]
The seat, Huntsville, was named for an early hunter, the encyclopedia says. The first county election came in March 1850 and the first court that July. The first courthouse went up in 1851, and later courthouses replaced it in 1874 and again in the twentieth century. [S1385]
The town’s legal start is harder to pin down. The encyclopedia says Huntsville was incorporated in 1965. [S1385] UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service lists an incorporation date of May 1, 1965, but also cites a private act of 1855–56 as its incorporation act. MTAS puts Huntsville in the East grand division, on Eastern time. [S1387]
Scott Countians were strongly Unionist. The encyclopedia says U.S. Sen. Andrew Johnson denounced secession in a speech at the Huntsville courthouse on June 4, 1861. [S1385] A state marker in front of the courthouse adds that at the election four days later, Scott County voted against separation by the largest percentage margin of any county in Tennessee, a claim the encyclopedia makes too. [S1393]
When the state left the Union anyway, the county answered in kind. According to the marker, the county court later in 1861 passed a resolution seceding from Tennessee and forming the Free and Independent State of Scott. [S1393] The encyclopedia calls it a protest resolution. [S1385] Baker’s encyclopedia entry on the Big South Fork explains the politics: hardscrabble farmers who could not grow cotton and did not rely heavily on slaves sent more men to the Union army than to the Confederacy. The world, he adds, little noted these passionate politics; on most maps of the era this country was simply "wilderness." [S1323]
A Tennessee Civil War Trails marker outside the Museum of Scott County tells what that choice cost. As war approached in 1861, it says, people in remote Scott County mostly wanted to be left alone, until Johnson’s speech and the vote set them against secession. In September 1861 a Confederate soldier forced his way into the home of the noted Unionist Hiram C. Marcum to look for him. His 16-year-old daughter, Julia Marcum (1844–1936), fought the intruder off with an axe and lost an eye and a finger. She recovered well enough to teach school for a time, but her wounds eventually left her unable to work. After she petitioned Congress, she was granted a military pension in 1885. [S1394]
The same marker says guerrilla fighting went on for much of the war. It quotes a December 1861 report in the Louisville Journal of a skirmish near the headwaters of Buffalo Creek in which four Confederates were killed and Capt. Duncan’s Home Guards lost no one, and Confederates captured Larkin Cross and Ransom Conover and hanged them in an apple orchard. Confederates later routed the Home Guard at Huntsville but were beaten at Brimstone. The marker says Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside’s Army of the Ohio essentially ended the Confederate threat in August 1863. [S1394] The encyclopedia agrees that no major battles were fought inside the county. [S1385]
After the war, the railroad opened the county. The encyclopedia’s Scott County entry says the Cincinnati Southern, connecting Chattanooga and Cincinnati, opened Scott to timber, mining and New South industry. It dates the line once to the 1870s and once to the early 1880s, and says Oneida became a way station on it. [S1385] The National Register form for the O&W Bridge says the City of Cincinnati began building the railway in 1869 and finished it in 1880: 336 miles with 27 tunnels and 105 bridges, crossing from Kentucky into Scott County and running southwest through Morgan County to Chattanooga. [S1395] The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s railroads entry says the Southern Railway acquired the Cincinnati Southern in 1895. [S566]
According to the same National Register form, Winfield (once known as Chitwood), Oneida, Helenwood, New River and Glenmary grew up along the line in Scott County and by the 1880s were trading centers for logging, mining and coke making. [S1395] The encyclopedia says Oneida shipped timber, coal, farm products and livestock, Huntsville lived mostly by lumbering, and Robbins by making brick. Extraction of natural resources drove the county’s towns and economy until the Great Depression. [S1385]
Robbins also had a minister. The encyclopedia says Barton Chapel there memorializes the social and humanitarian work of the Rev. William E. Barton, who began his ministry in Robbins in 1885. [S1385]
Oneida’s own beginnings are as tangled as Huntsville’s. The encyclopedia says it was incorporated in 1913. [S1385] MTAS lists a 1905 incorporation act and an incorporation date of February 1, 1905, with a charter by private act in 1917. [S1396] Winfield is much newer as a town: MTAS gives its incorporation date as February 1, 1983. [S1397]
Within a generation, short lines were branching off the main line toward timber and coal deeper in the backcountry. The Oneida and Western Railway was chartered on August 5, 1913, by the Tennessee Stave and Lumber Company to reach the coal and timber along the Big South Fork, the National Register form says. Construction began in 1914 and reached the river by June 1915. The line reached East Jamestown by 1921 and Jamestown by 1930, but never its planned end at Albany, Kentucky. [S1395]
Building it was brutal work. The form describes a stretch called the Big Cut, roughly 100 feet long, 30 feet wide and 90 feet deep, cleared largely by hand. Crews of local mountaineers and African Americans drilled the sandstone in pairs, one holding the drill and turning it a quarter turn after each blow while the other swung the sledge, and Italian laborers worked on the line as well. In 1921, it says, water boys earned fifteen cents an hour and section hands twenty-five cents, for a ten-hour day. For many mountaineers it was their first job that paid wages. [S1395]
The railroad changed Oneida. The form says the town went from a hamlet of about 500 people in 1916 to about 3,000 by 1923, with hotels, stores, a bank, a newspaper called The Scott County News, an electric plant and factories making hardwood flooring, tool handles, wagon spokes and hosiery. Oneida was headquarters both for the O&W and for the Tennessee Railway, another short line into the mountains of eastern Scott and Anderson counties. [S1395]
The O&W also carried people out into the world. The form says that as many as six round trips a day crossed the river in the late 1920s, hauling timber, coal, livestock, limestone and barite out and mail and manufactured goods in. During World War I recruits from Jamestown rode it to Oneida to catch the main line to training, among them Alvin C. York. [S1395] Its stops included the Zenith coal mine, which the form says was the scene of violent labor struggles in the 1930s. [S1395]
Then the business faded. The encyclopedia says the line, and the county, suffered badly in the Depression. [S1385] Cars and trucks took its passengers and freight; a company that bought it in 1942 hoped to haul materials for a planned TVA dam on Wolf Creek in Fentress County, but World War II stopped the project. A coal company that bought the line after the war applied to abandon it in February 1953. Passenger and mail service ended June 30, 1953, and the last service ran on March 2, 1954. [S1395] The encyclopedia gives 1953 as the year the line was dismantled. [S1385] The right of way became county roads, and Scott County still keeps its section to White Oak Creek. [S1395]
The O&W crossed the Big South Fork about seven miles west of Oneida on a second-hand iron bridge. The National Register form says the 200-foot Whipple truss, bought from the Nashville Bridge Company and first built somewhere else at some point between 1847 and 1900, was set over the river in 1915. It was the first bridge over the Tennessee section of the Big South Fork and the only one until the Army Corps of Engineers built a concrete bridge at Leatherwood Ford in the 1980s. Trains crossed it at eight miles an hour. The form calls it the only known Whipple truss in Tennessee. [S1395]
The Park Service says the bridge was first built in the 1880s, taken down between 1913 and 1915, reassembled on the O&W, and used as a railroad bridge until 1954. Today it serves visitors inside the recreation area. [S1398] Scott County maintains it, and its deck was replaced with wood planking in 2017. [S1395]
The most striking building in Huntsville is its old jail. The encyclopedia calls it the oldest building still standing in the town and says its fortress design was the work of the Chattanooga architect J. G. Barnwell. [S1385] Its 1974 National Register nomination describes red sandstone blocks five by four by three feet, cut from nearby quarries and dressed at the town spring, hauled in by oxen and lifted into place by mules, under a castellated roofline. It dates the building to 1907. A 1922 fire gutted the second floor, and a third floor for maximum-security cells was added during the rebuilding. The first floor held living quarters for the sheriff and jailer. The nomination calls the jail the only visual reminder of the years when Scott County began to tap its coal and timber, and apparently one of the first buildings in the county designed entirely by an architect. [S1399]
The Town of Huntsville tells the dates differently. It says the jail was built in 1904 from sandstone quarried from the New River gorge behind it, and served as the county jail for more than 100 years until the county left it in 2007 for a new justice center. [S1400] The 1974 nomination, written while the building stood empty, says its use was discontinued in 1963. [S1399] In 2017 the county turned the building over to the town, which pledged to restore it and open it to the public, and in 2018 the state gave the town a $50,000 tourism enhancement grant toward the work. [S1400]
The jail is also tied to one of the darkest stories in Big South Fork country, a story the Park Service says is still debated in some circles. In April 1933, it says, five young men from No Business rode a Stearns Coal and Lumber Company log train to the Rock Creek logging camp, just over the line in Pickett County. Jerome Boyatt, 22, got into a fight with his uncle, and the camp superintendent had the train held so the young men could be arrested. Pickett County Sheriff George Winningham and two deputies, one of them his son Floyd, arrived near dark. What happened next is still debated, but when the shooting stopped Deputy Floyd Winningham was dead, the sheriff was mortally wounded, and Jerome Boyatt had escaped into the woods. [S1401]
A posse searched No Business for a month. The Boyatt family was taken to Byrdstown; Jerome’s father, Ransom Boyatt, was allowed to go home and was found dead soon after, and the Scott County coroner ruled that he died at the hands of persons unknown. Jerome surrendered on May 22 and was held in the Scott County Jail. Near midnight on June 8, about twenty-five masked men took him and another prisoner, Harvey Winchester, from the jail, drove them to the woods near Helenwood and killed them. Five men died in all, and the Park Service says no one was ever charged in the deaths of Ransom and Jerome Boyatt or Harvey Winchester. [S1401]
The encyclopedia calls Howard Baker Jr. the best-known name from Scott County. [S1385] His father, Howard H. Baker Sr., was born in Somerset, Kentucky, in 1902 to a family long prominent in the region. His grandfather George Washington Baker was a Unionist during the Civil War, and his father, James F. Baker, was a lawyer and newspaper publisher in Huntsville, where the family returned in 1909. Howard Baker Sr. practiced law in Huntsville, won a term in the General Assembly in 1928, chaired the Scott County Republicans for sixteen years, and ran for governor in 1938 and the U.S. Senate in 1940 and lost both. Elected to Congress from the Second District in 1950, he served until his death on January 8, 1964. In 1956, the encyclopedia notes, he refused to sign the Southern Manifesto against the Supreme Court’s school desegregation ruling. [S1402]
Howard Baker Jr. was born in Huntsville on November 15, 1925. He served as a PT boat officer in the Navy in World War II, practiced law in Scott County, and turned to politics after his father’s death. After losing a 1964 special election, he won a Senate seat in 1966, becoming the first popularly elected Republican senator in Tennessee history. He was vice chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee, where he asked, "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" He went on to serve as Senate minority and majority leader and, in 1987 and 1988, as President Ronald Reagan’s White House chief of staff. [S1403] The encyclopedia says the Big South Fork recreation area was developed under legislation he sponsored. [S1403]
Other Scott Countians went to Congress too. John J. Duncan Sr. was born on a Scott County farm, got his start in politics working on Howard Baker Sr.’s 1954 campaign, served as mayor of Knoxville, and represented the Second District from 1964 until his death in 1988. [S1404] The encyclopedia also names Millard Caldwell, a congressman who later became governor of Florida. [S1385]
One Scott Countian won the nation’s highest military honor. Joseph S. Cecil was born at New River on January 11, 1878. As a first lieutenant in the 19th U.S. Infantry at Bud Dajo in the Philippines on March 7, 1906, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society says, he carried a wounded man and the body of a soldier killed beside him to shelter under close-range fire, at the head of a column about to make an assault. The medal was presented in 1913. He rose to colonel, died in 1940 and is buried at Arlington. [S1405] A memorial to him stands in front of the courthouse. [S1406]
Baker’s name turns up once more in Huntsville. At the Museum of Scott County, a marker beside the bell of the battleship USS Tennessee says the bell went back into service in 1988 when the Trident submarine USS Tennessee was commissioned at New London, Connecticut, with Howard Baker Jr. as the commissioning speaker. [S1407]
The Big South Fork of the Cumberland drains 1,382 square miles in Scott, Fentress, Pickett and Morgan counties and in Kentucky, according to Baker’s encyclopedia entry. He calls it one of the few rivers in the eastern United States never dammed for power or flood control. The Army Corps of Engineers first proposed a dam in 1933, and the Senate authorized one several times in the 1950s and 1960s, but the House never agreed. [S1323]
Instead, Congress authorized the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area on March 7, 1974. The Park Service says it was the first unit of the National Park System to be both a national river and a national recreation area, and that its boundaries allow for 125,000 acres, about 116,000 of them now owned by the Interior Department. [S46] Baker’s entry gives a smaller figure, 106,000 acres, and notes that the Army Corps of Engineers planned and built the area, which the Park Service manages. [S1323]
The park took in older public land too. Scott State Forest, in Scott and Fentress counties, is surrounded by the recreation area; the state Division of Forestry says most of it was bought at a tax-delinquent sale in 1938, and it covers about 2,823 acres. [S1408] Elsewhere in the county, the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency’s North Cumberland Wildlife Management Area spreads across about 205,000 acres of Morgan, Scott, Anderson, Campbell and Claiborne counties, land the agency warns still holds the hazards of old deep and strip mines. [S361]
In the fall of 1999, teachers at Scott High School proposed building a history museum on the school grounds with student labor only and no school or tax money, the Museum of Scott County says. Vocational students learned to build in logs and put up the first building; college-track students researched and gathered the exhibits. It opened in May 2003, and thirteen more buildings have been added since, including a World War II memorial museum, a children’s museum and a frontier village. [S1409] The museum says its exhibits trace the county from prehistoric to modern times, that it holds the annual Heritage Festival on the last Saturday of September, and that admission is free. [S1410]
Visit: Check hours with each site before you go.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 10,000 BC | Hunters and gatherers are living on the upper Cumberland Plateau, the Park Service says, about 12,000 years ago. [S1388] |
| 1780 | Longhunters are exploring the Big South Fork by this date. [S1326] |
| 1796 | Richard Slaven settles on No Business Creek. [S1389] |
| 1849 | The General Assembly creates Scott County, named for Gen. Winfield Scott. [S1385] |
| 1850 | The first county election (March) and first court (July) at Huntsville. [S1385] |
| 1861 | Andrew Johnson speaks against secession at Huntsville on June 4; the county court later declares the Free and Independent State of Scott. [S1393] |
| 1861 | Julia Marcum, 16, fights off a Confederate intruder in September. [S1394] |
| 1869–1880 | The Cincinnati Southern Railway is built through Scott County, by the National Register form’s dates. [S1395] |
| 1885 | The Rev. William E. Barton begins his ministry at Robbins. [S1385] |
| 1904 or 1907 | The sandstone county jail goes up in Huntsville; sources differ on the year. [S1400][S1399] |
| 1906 | Lt. Joseph S. Cecil of New River earns the Medal of Honor at Bud Dajo, March 7. [S1405] |
| 1913 | The Oneida and Western Railway is chartered, August 5. [S1395] |
| 1915 | The O&W Bridge is set over the Big South Fork. [S1395] |
| 1922 | Fire guts the jail’s second floor; a third floor is added. [S1399] |
| 1925 | Howard Baker Jr. is born in Huntsville, November 15. [S1403] |
| 1933 | Jerome Boyatt and Harvey Winchester are taken from the Scott County Jail by a mob and killed, June 8. [S1401] |
| 1938 | The state buys most of what becomes Scott State Forest at a tax-delinquent sale. [S1408] |
| 1950 | Howard Baker Sr. is elected to Congress. [S1402] |
| 1954 | The last O&W train runs, March 2. [S1395] |
| 1960 | Dewey Slaven, the last resident of No Business, leaves in September. [S1389] |
| 1966 | Howard Baker Jr. is elected to the U.S. Senate. [S1403] |
| 1974 | Congress authorizes the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, March 7. [S46] |
| 2003 | The student-built Museum of Scott County opens in May. [S1409] |
| 2017 | Scott County transfers the old jail to the Town of Huntsville for restoration. [S1400] |
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: when the Cincinnati Southern Railway was built (the Tennessee Encyclopedia’s Scott County entry says both "in the 1870s" and "in the early 1880s"; the O&W Bridge’s National Register form says construction ran from 1869 to 1880); when Oneida was incorporated (1913 in the encyclopedia; UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service lists a 1905 act and a February 1, 1905, incorporation date, and a 1917 charter); when Huntsville was incorporated (1965 in the encyclopedia and MTAS, which also lists an 1855–56 private act); when the Oneida and Western stopped running (the encyclopedia says the line was dismantled in 1953; the National Register form says passenger and mail service ended June 30, 1953, and all service on March 2, 1954, and the Park Service says the bridge carried trains until 1954); when the O&W Bridge went up over the Big South Fork (1915 in the National Register form; the Park Service says it was dismantled from its first site from 1913 to 1915 and reassembled, and the form says only that it was first built sometime between 1847 and 1900, while the Park Service says the 1880s); when the Old Scott County Jail was built (1907 in its 1974 National Register nomination; 1904 according to the Town of Huntsville) and when it stopped being a jail (1963 in the nomination, written when it stood empty; 2007, when a new justice center opened, according to the town); how big the Big South Fork recreation area is (106,000 acres in the encyclopedia; the Park Service says its boundaries allow for 125,000 acres, about 116,000 of them now federally owned); and how large the Museum of Scott County’s campus is (two acres on its home page, three and a half on its About page). We also note that Joseph S. Cecil’s Medal of Honor citation names him Josephus S. Cecil, and that the encyclopedia’s Scott County entry dates from 2017 and its jobs and population figures from the 1990s and 2000, so we leave those out. We don’t republish encyclopedia, museum or marker text — follow the links for the full articles.
Hero: the same banner we use on our Scott County guide. Banner image is an AI-assisted artistic rendering inspired by the Big South Fork near Leatherwood Ford; not a photograph. No endorsement by any source on this page is implied. Reused source numbers (S38, S46, S361, S566, S1323, S1326) match the same sources on our other history pages. Corrections: [email protected].