East Tennessee History · County by county
The middle of a valley so straight it shows up from the air: Cherokee country named for a chief called Sequachee, the first Bledsoe County seat at Old Madison, a county the legislature created in 1857 by moving districts through Hamilton County first, a farm on Coops Creek renamed Dunlap, a wagon road the Cherokee climbed in November 1838, a Union supply train burned in 1863, 268 beehive ovens at the foot of Fredonia Mountain, a stone community building raised by young relief workers in the Depression, and a brick courthouse built for $12,000.
Sequatchie County sits in the middle of the Sequatchie Valley, a long, narrow trough that splits the southern Cumberland Plateau, with Walden Ridge on one side and the main body of the plateau on the other. [S1511] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the General Assembly created it on December 9, 1857, and named Dunlap the county seat. [S1510] It is the youngest and smallest of the three counties in the valley, at about 250 square miles, according to the City of Dunlap, with Bledsoe County to the north, Marion to the south, Hamilton to the east and Grundy and Van Buren to the west. [S1512]
UT’s County Technical Assistance Service counted 15,826 people in 2020, up from 14,112 in 2010, and lists one incorporated town, Dunlap. [S1513] Although our site covers it with its East Tennessee neighbors, the state places Sequatchie in its Middle Grand Division, and Dunlap keeps Central time. [S38][S1514]
Its story runs from a legislative detour that left the county’s legality in doubt until 1870 to a Trail of Tears camp, a burned Union supply train, and a coal-and-coke boom whose bust, the Tennessee Encyclopedia says, made the Great Depression seem to start early. [S1510][S1515]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia calls the Sequatchie Valley a "long, arrow-straight scenic slash" into the Appalachian Plateau. It runs about two hundred miles southwest from Cumberland County, Tennessee, to Blount County, Alabama, though only the northeastern seventy-five miles lie in Tennessee. On average it is only about five miles wide, and it is roughly 1,000 to 1,500 feet deep. Its straightness, the encyclopedia notes, is hard to see from the bottom but obvious on a map or from the air. [S1511]
Walden Ridge forms the valley’s southeast wall. It is a narrower piece of the plateau, about eight to ten miles wide and generally rising to about 2,000 feet. The wider, more cut-up country northwest of the valley is the Cumberland Plateau proper. [S1511] Sequatchie County takes in a slice of all three. From the courthouse lawn in Dunlap, the 1979 National Register nomination notes, the plateau can be seen rising both east and west of the valley floor. [S1515] Besides Dunlap, the Tennessee Encyclopedia names the communities of Daus, Fredonia, Cartwright, Cagle, Mount Airy and Lone Oak. [S1510]
The valley floor drew farmers. The encyclopedia describes the land as highly attractive for agriculture, and for most of the nineteenth century people here raised corn, cattle, sheep, hogs and poultry, mostly for themselves and local markets, with a few prosperous farms on the valley floor. [S1510] The mountains on either side held something else: coal, which would shape the county’s twentieth century. [S1516]
The name is Cherokee. The Tennessee Blue Book links it to a Cherokee word, "sequachee," probably meaning "opossum, he grins or runs," and says it was also the name of a Cherokee chief for whom the valley is named. [S38] The City of Dunlap adds that Chief Sequachee signed a treaty with the colonial government of South Carolina, and cautions that historians who have studied the Cherokee language differ over the exact meaning of the word. [S1512]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s Marion County entry says the Native people of this part of the valley built their towns on the rivers and that later settlers kept the Indian names Tennessee and Sequatchie. It says the Cherokee dominated the area in the later 1700s and early 1800s. [S1517]
When Tennessee became a state in 1796, the Sequatchie Valley was part of Roane County. [S1517] Treaties with the Cherokee kept settlers out of much of it. In Bledsoe County, at the valley’s upper end, explorers praised the soil in 1795, but settlers generally stayed away until after the Third Tellico Treaty of 1805. [S1518] Bledsoe County, created in 1807, took in the whole valley on paper, but the lower end remained closed to white settlement. [S1517]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia dates the first European settlement in what is now Sequatchie County to 1806. [S1510] Its Marion County entry says the first white settlers in the lower valley are thought to have been Amos Griffith and William and James Standifer, in 1805, while the area was still part of Roane County. [S1517]
The first seat of Bledsoe County was not at Pikeville but at a place called Madison, inside what is now Sequatchie County. A Tennessee Historical Commission marker on U.S. 127 near Dunlap, at Madison Drive, says Bledsoe’s first county seat stood there, with a log jail on a small hill to the southeast. Its first court included Jno. Tollet, Jno. Narramore, Jesse McKinney, Michael Rawlings, Jos. Hoge, Jas. Standiver, Timothy Hixon, Wm. Christian and Jno. Durgin. [S1519] The county seat moved in 1816, when Charles Love sold thirty acres on Sequatchie Creek for $110.25 to found Pikeville. [S1518]
The marker spells one justice’s name Standiver; the Tennessee Encyclopedia spells the family name Standifer. [S1519][S1517]
Sequatchie County was born in an unusual way, and the paperwork explains why sources disagree about where its land came from.
According to the 1979 National Register nomination for the Sequatchie County Courthouse, on September 21, 1857, the General Assembly took the First and Second Civil Districts of Marion County and the Tenth Civil District of Bledsoe County and annexed them to Hamilton County. Then, on December 9, 1857, it detached those same districts from Hamilton and created Sequatchie County out of them. [S1515]
The nomination says the two-step move got around the Tennessee Constitution of 1835, which barred taking part of a county to form a new one if that left the old county below its required size, 625 square miles, or population. The constitution did not forbid moving land from one county to an adjoining one, so the legislature moved the districts to Hamilton first. [S1515]
Bledsoe County objected. On February 18, 1858, Benjamin F. Bridgeman of Bledsoe sued to stop the new county from organizing. In September 1860, the Tennessee Supreme Court threw out the suit because the county had already been organized before it was filed, but it also ordered a survey to find out whether the legislature had illegally shrunk Bledsoe’s area or population. The Civil War interrupted the case. [S1515]
The question was settled by the next constitution. The Tennessee Constitution of 1870 recognized Sequatchie as a constitutional county, and, the nomination says, it added a line that "No part of Bledsoe County shall be taken to form a new county or a part thereof or be attached to any adjoining county." [S1515]
That history is why the county’s parentage reads differently depending on where you look. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says Sequatchie was created "from a section of Hamilton County." [S1510] The county government says two districts of Marion and one of Bledsoe. [S1520] The City of Dunlap says territory belonging to Hamilton, "or rather that which formerly was a part of Bledsoe and Marion." [S1512] The Tennessee Blue Book lists Hamilton, Marion and Warren counties. [S38] We found no other source naming Warren, and we note it as the Blue Book’s version.
The new county court first met in January 1858, the county government says, to appoint officials. [S1520] The City of Dunlap says that first court met at the home of Joel Wheeler in the Fillmore community on the first Monday of January, and then chose a more central spot for a county seat. [S1512]
The court voted to put the seat on the farm of William Rankin on Coops Creek. [S1520] The town grew from forty acres bought by the county commissioners. [S1520] On June 12, 1858, the City of Dunlap says, the name was officially changed from Coops Creek to Dunlap, in honor of William Dunlap of Knox County, who had supported the creation of Sequatchie County in the legislature. [S1512] A Civil War Trails marker in the county’s Veterans Memorial Park calls the William Rankin house the first dwelling built in Dunlap. [S1521]
The 2005 National Register nomination for the Hill Road says the community formed before the Civil War at the junction of the Hill Road and the Sequatchie Valley Road. [S1522] It stayed small. When the coke ovens were nominated to the National Register in 1985, the form put Dunlap’s population at about 3,600. [S1516]
Dunlap is the county’s only incorporated town. [S1513] UT’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service lists its incorporation act as Private Acts 1909, chapter 312, with an incorporation date of December 1, 1909, and its current charter as Private Acts 1941. [S1514] The City of Dunlap says it was first incorporated as the Town of Dunlap and became the City of Dunlap in 1941, with a mayor-commissioner form of government. [S1512]
Long before there was a Dunlap, a wagon road climbed the plateau here. The Hill Road was built in the 1820s to connect McMinnville with the Sequatchie Valley, the National Register nomination says, and may have been built by Benjamin J. Hill, a Warren County planter. It appears on an 1835 postal route map. By the late 1830s, it was one of only a few roads over the Cumberland Plateau passable by wagons. In the valley it met the Poe Road, which crossed Walden Ridge to the Tennessee River. [S1522]
In the fall of 1838, two detachments of Cherokee being forced west used the road. [S1522] The Trail of Tears, the Tennessee Encyclopedia says, ran from May 1838 to March 1839 and was the federal government’s final, forceful effort to remove the Cherokee from their land in upper Georgia and southeastern Tennessee. [S12]
The nomination, drawing on research by Duane H. King and Benjamin C. Nance, says both detachments left a camp near Joseph Vann’s plantation, northeast of Ross’s Landing in Hamilton County. About 850 people under conductor James Brown left on October 26, 1838; about 1,029 under conductor Richard Taylor followed on November 1. They crossed the Tennessee River near the vanished town of Dallas, climbed Walden Ridge near Daisy, followed Poe’s Trace across the ridge and came down into the Sequatchie Valley along the route of today’s Henson Gap Road. [S1522]
Brown’s group appears to have camped in the valley and climbed the plateau around November 1 or 2. Taylor’s group came five or six days behind. With it traveled the missionary Daniel S. Butrick, who kept a journal. Butrick described coming down into the valley on November 6 and compared it to the Vale of Sodom; he was dismayed by the cursing of white residents and by attempts to sell liquor to the Cherokee. [S1522]
The detachment camped at the foot of the escarpment and started up the Hill Road on November 7. Butrick wrote that the mountain was "long and steep and difficult to ascend, yet all succeeded in getting up safely." That night it rained and snowed. On November 9 the detachment came down off the plateau and camped on the Collins River in Warren County, then went on through McMinnville and Nashville on what became known as the northern route. Brown’s detachment reached Indian Territory on March 5, 1839; Taylor’s arrived and disbanded on March 24. [S1522]
The county government says the Taylor detachment numbered about 1,000 people with about sixty wagons pulled by mules and oxen, and that it camped and traveled through the place now called Coke Ovens Park. [S1520] The park says the Taylor detachment camped at the site. [S1523]
About 4,800 feet of the old roadbed survives on the face of the plateau about a mile northwest of downtown Dunlap, ten to fifteen feet wide and sunk as deep as twelve feet in places, climbing from about 900 to 1,380 feet above sea level. It was nominated to the National Register in April 2005 and is now listed. [S1522][S1523] The section at the bottom of the hill was erased by coal mining in the early twentieth century, and the rest was bypassed in the late 1920s when a new gravel road, the Fredonia Road, was built from Dunlap. [S1522] A short marked piece starts behind the amphitheater at Coke Ovens Park, blazed with green "T.T." letters on the trees; beyond a gravel road, it crosses private land. [S1523]
The valley’s farmers had few ways to reach bigger markets until 1852, when Anderson Pike was built to connect the Sequatchie Valley with the newly built Western and Atlantic Railroad in Georgia. Farmers used it mainly to drive livestock out of the valley to markets across the South. [S1510]
By the Civil War, markers call it the Anderson Turnpike or the Campbell and Anderson Turnpike. [S1524][S1521]
The Civil War Trails marker "Thunder in the Valley," in the Sequatchie County Veterans Memorial Park in Dunlap, says the war divided Sequatchie County families, with local men serving on both sides. Union and Confederate armies marched through, civilian law broke down, and marauders used the war as an excuse to rob, kill and settle old scores. William Rankin’s house was pillaged, and Rankin fled. [S1521]
In August 1862, Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg’s army passed through on its way to invade Kentucky. After the Battle of Chickamauga, the county served at different times as a base for both armies fighting over Chattanooga. Union Col. John T. Wilder reported that his arrival in August 1863 was timely enough for "surprising and capturing a party of 14 rebels and releasing 5 Union prisoners they were about to hang." [S1521]
A Southeast Tennessee Religious Heritage Trail marker at Chapel Hill United Methodist Church says the congregation’s first meeting house, put up in 1852 and named Henniger’s Chapel for a circuit rider, was partly torn down by Union troops under Gen. Crittenden in the summer of 1863, and what remained burned in late August. The church was rebuilt in 1884. [S1525]
For the rest of the war, the marker in Dunlap says, Federal forces occupied the county, but marauders still roamed the mountains and the valley, and the war left resentments that lasted. [S1521]
The fight for Chattanooga reached the county on October 2, 1863. After Chickamauga, Union Gen. William S. Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland had fallen back into Chattanooga, and a narrow, winding road through the Sequatchie Valley was its one fragile supply line, the county government says. Bragg ordered Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler to cut it. [S1520]
The Federal wagon trains ran between the Union base at Bridgeport, Alabama, and the besieged army, according to the state marker "Wheeler’s Raid." [S1524] Wheeler’s cavalry struck a train on the turnpike. [S1521] The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s county entry says Wheeler burned an estimated eight hundred to one thousand wagons and captured livestock. [S1510] The state marker gives the same range and says his men captured a number of mules. [S1524] The Civil War Trails marker says the train had more than 1,000 wagons pulled by an estimated 4,500 mules. [S1521] The county government says hundreds of wagons were destroyed and hundreds of prisoners taken, and that Wheeler let the prisoners go as he escaped the valley. It traces the raid through what is now Powell’s Cross Roads in Marion County, north on what is now East Valley Road and up what is now U.S. 127 toward Signal Mountain on Walden Ridge. [S1520]
The Chapel Hill marker says many soldiers from both sides killed in the raid were buried in unmarked graves in the church cemetery. [S1525]
The encyclopedia’s entry on Wheeler calls this his most famous raid. His troopers destroyed a large wagon train in the Sequatchie Valley but followed it with a wild ride across Middle Tennessee before being chased into Alabama, and in the end, it says, he had little to show for it. [S1526] The state marker for the raid is reported missing from its post. [S1524]
The railroad came after Reconstruction. The Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway built a line up the valley in the 1880s, the Tennessee Encyclopedia says, and it reached Sequatchie County in 1888. That let coal companies mine on a large scale by the turn of the century. [S1510] Daus, south of Dunlap and first called Delphi, grew from a farming community when the railroad came, then boomed and declined with the coal mines; coal also shaped Fredonia and Cartwright. [S1510]
The first mines in the county opened in 1899, according to the National Register nomination for the Dunlap Coke Ovens, but the coal was too soft for most household use. What changed Dunlap was the plan, announced in 1902 by the Douglas Coal and Coke Company, to make coke less than a mile from the center of town, which the nomination says was then known as Coops Creek. [S1516] The county government and the coke ovens park both date the first mine on Fredonia Mountain, above Dunlap, to 1899. [S1520][S1527]
Coke is what is left after coal is baked in a closed oven so that it does not burn, driving off most of its volatile material; blast furnaces use it to melt iron. As the southern steel industry grew, so did the demand for coke. [S1510] The nomination says this part of the Appalachians once supplied 80 to 90 percent of the nation’s coke. [S1516]
At the foot of Fredonia Mountain, along Coops Creek, the companies built 268 beehive ovens of brick and sandstone. The 1985 nomination says each was about twelve feet across with an arched opening six feet tall, built in batteries with coal dumped in through openings at the top. Thirty-eight stood in one single battery and 230 in double batteries, back to back. [S1516] The coking itself took eighty-five men and seventy-two hours to turn six tons of coal into three tons of coke. An incline railway brought coal down from the top of the mountain, and ten miles of railroad ran along the valley side of the mountain from the commissary. [S1516]
Douglas Coal and Coke built the first fifty ovens, the mines, the commissary, a clubhouse, houses, hotels and the incline railway, the nomination says. Then in 1905 it went bankrupt, and the Chattanooga Iron and Coal Company bought its property. That company also owned ore land and quarries in Georgia and a blast furnace at Tannery Flats in Chattanooga, where Dunlap coke and Georgia red ore were made into pig iron. [S1516] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says Chattanooga Iron and Coal owned sixteen thousand acres of coal land near Dunlap, employed 350 men and ran two sawmills that cut ties for the railroads and shoring for the mines. [S1510]
The coke ovens park gives the building sequence: the first 24 ovens and the company store in 1902; 144 ovens and a steam-powered coal washer in 1906; and in 1916, after a new railroad up Little Brush Creek raised demand, a million-dollar coal washer and 100 more ovens at the east end of the site, which were used very little. [S1527] The nomination, by contrast, says Douglas built the first fifty and that it is not known whether Douglas or later owners built the other 218. [S1516]
By the time Southern States Iron and Coal Company bought everything in 1919, Dunlap had become two communities: the town itself, with about 765 people, and the company town less than a mile northwest, with about 700. About 350 men worked for the company. [S1516]
The end came fast, though the sources date it differently. The National Register nomination says Southern States, which ran the operation for only about three years, stopped making coke at Dunlap in 1922. The ovens sat idle until 1928, when two brothers from Birmingham and Chattanooga who had worked in iron and steel bought the mines, ovens and furnace, but falling coal prices and the Depression kept the mines from ever reopening. [S1516] The Tennessee Encyclopedia also says Southern States closed the operations in 1922, because of overproduction of coal. [S1510] The coke ovens park and the county government say the company filed for bankruptcy in the mid-1920s and the mines were shut down in 1927, because of falling coal prices and the onset of the Depression. [S1527][S1520]
Either way, the closing took much of the county’s economy with it. The encyclopedia says associated industries closed, railroad traffic declined, many people left to find work, and those who stayed went back to subsistence farming. "The Great Depression seemed to start early for the residents of Sequatchie County," it says. [S1510] The 1994 nomination for the Dunlap Community Building adds that sawmills were no longer needed, rail traffic fell because the trains had mainly hauled coal and coke, a furniture maker and a canning factory tried and failed, and some people turned to moonshining. [S1528]
Relief came from Washington. The Tennessee Encyclopedia credits two New Deal programs: the Tennessee Valley Authority, which helped bring low-cost electricity, and the National Youth Administration, which taught young men job skills while keeping them out of a depressed labor market. [S1510] The NYA served people from sixteen to twenty-five who were out of school and without regular work. [S1528] Some young men from the county went to Civilian Conservation Corps camps, the Community Building nomination says, but it was TVA and the NYA that brought relief at home. [S1528]
The NYA was created in 1935 and began work in Sequatchie County that year, the nomination says. Its local contact was W. W. Harmon, principal of the county high school. Its main project was a community building in Dunlap, on Cherry Street, set to face the train depot so that travelers arriving by rail would see it first. [S1528]
Over the four years of work on the building, the NYA employed ninety-six young men who were neither in school nor working full time. A local builder, Horace Reynolds, supervised, with Jack Lockhart, Hershel Brock and Grover Elliott. Ten to twenty young men worked at a time, two weeks on and two weeks off, rotating so each learned as many parts of the job as possible. All of the stone was quarried from the nearby mountains by hand and cut and shaped with hand tools. One worker, Willie Higdon, went on to become a stonemason whose work can be seen around Dunlap. [S1528]
The entrance arch is inscribed "Built By N.Y.A. 1938-40." The building was in use by 1940 and finished in 1942. It housed county offices, a dentist’s office, the American Legion and the Home Demonstration Club; the county library moved in in 1959, and the building was renovated for it in 1991. [S1528] The same crews built the Liberty School in 1939 after the first one burned, the nomination says, and the NYA built three other schools, including one at Cagle, now a private home, and the Old Union school, which has since burned; it also helped build the Center Point school in Dunlap. [S1528] The encyclopedia counts the Community Building and four schools around Dunlap and Cagle. [S1510] A National Register marker stands at the building, at Cherry Street and Rankin Avenue. [S1529]
The present Sequatchie County Courthouse was built in 1911 for $12,000 by W. K. Brown and Brothers, according to its 1979 National Register nomination. [S1515] It is a two-story brick Colonial Revival building with a hip roof that extends over a front portico on brick Tuscan columns, and windows with segmentally arched lintels. Upstairs, the courtroom’s wooden pews are believed to be original. [S1515]
The nomination’s summary of the courthouse’s significance is pointed: it had served for sixty-eight years "as the seat of government of a county created in a circumvention of the state constitution." [S1515]
Two early congressmen came from the valley. James Standifer, whom the Tennessee Encyclopedia places at Mount Airy, served in the U.S. House in 1823–25 and again from 1829 until his death near Kingston on August 20, 1837, while on his way to Washington. The House’s biographical directory says he was born in Virginia around 1782. [S1510][S1530]
William Stone, of Delphi, now Daus, was elected to fill Standifer’s seat and served from September 14, 1837, to March 3, 1839. Born in Sevier County in 1791, he was a captain in the Creek War and fought with Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, and Congress presented him a cane for bravery at the Battle of Tippecanoe, according to the directory. He died at Delphi on February 18, 1853, and was buried in the family burying ground there. [S1510][S1531]
Arthur Thomas Stewart was born in Dunlap. As attorney general of the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit, he was on the prosecution team at the 1925 Scopes trial in Dayton, and he later served in the U.S. Senate in the 1930s and 1940s. [S1510] The encyclopedia’s Scopes trial entry calls him Tennessee Attorney General Thomas Stewart and names him with S. K. Hicks and William Jennings Bryan as the prosecution. [S26]
Raymond H. Cooley, born in Dunlap, was a staff sergeant with Company B, 27th Infantry, 25th Infantry Division. Near Lumboy, on Luzon in the Philippines, on February 24, 1945, he silenced one enemy machine gun with a grenade and was moving on a second when six enemy soldiers rushed him; unable to throw an armed grenade without hurting his own men, he covered it with his body and was badly wounded. President Harry S. Truman presented him the Medal of Honor at the White House on August 23, 1945. [S1532] The East Tennessee Historical Society’s Medal of Honor site says he lost his right hand, lived in constant pain, and died at thirty of injuries from an automobile accident on March 12, 1947. [S1533]
The ovens sat abandoned for more than fifty years, open to weather, trash dumpers and thieves who carried off their stone, the park says. In the mid-1980s local residents formed a historical group and began clearing the debris; Bowater Southern Paper Company donated the property for preservation. [S1527] The ovens were listed on the National Register on July 5, 1985. [S1522] The 1985 nomination noted that the Sequatchie Valley Historical Association already planned to clean the site and make it a park. [S1516]
Today the Sequatchie Valley Historical Association and the Coke Ovens Museum Association volunteers keep the park and a museum. [S1527] The museum is a full-size replica of the 1902 commissary of the Douglas Coal and Coke Company, the county government says, and holds what it calls the largest collection of regional historic coal mining photographs in Tennessee, with a copy of Butrick’s diary. [S1520] The park is free and open from sunup to sundown; a 3,900-foot incline leads to the top of Fredonia Mountain, though the park does not recommend the hike in summer. [S1534]
For researchers, the Tennessee State Library and Archives lists Sequatchie County records and transcriptions in its collections, among them Works Progress Administration transcriptions of the county court minutes from 1858 to 1874 and of county wills, marriages and tombstone inscriptions, as well as county histories. [S1535]
Visit: Check hours with each site before you go.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1796 | At statehood, the Sequatchie Valley is part of Roane County. [S1517] |
| 1805 | The Third Tellico Treaty; settlers begin moving into the upper valley. [S1518] |
| 1805 or 1806 | First white settlers in the lower valley, by the sources’ differing dates. [S1517][S1510] |
| 1807 | Bledsoe County is created, with its first seat at Madison, now in Sequatchie County. [S1518][S1519] |
| 1816 | Bledsoe’s county seat moves from Madison to Pikeville. [S1518] |
| 1820s | The Hill Road is built from McMinnville to the Sequatchie Valley. [S1522] |
| 1823 | James Standifer begins his first term in Congress. [S1530] |
| 1837 | Standifer dies August 20; William Stone of Delphi takes his seat September 14. [S1530][S1531] |
| 1838 | The Taylor detachment of the Trail of Tears enters the valley November 6 and climbs the Hill Road November 7. [S1522] |
| 1852 | Anderson Pike opens a route from the valley to the Western and Atlantic Railroad. Henniger’s Chapel is built. [S1510][S1525] |
| 1857 | The General Assembly annexes Marion and Bledsoe districts to Hamilton County (September 21), then creates Sequatchie County from them (December 9). [S1515] |
| 1858 | The county court first meets in January; Benjamin F. Bridgeman of Bledsoe sues February 18; Coops Creek is renamed Dunlap June 12. [S1520][S1515][S1512] |
| 1860 | The Tennessee Supreme Court throws out Bridgeman’s suit in September but orders a survey. [S1515] |
| 1862 | Bragg’s Confederate army passes through in August on its way to Kentucky. [S1521] |
| 1863 | Wheeler’s cavalry burns a Union supply train on the Anderson Turnpike, October 2. [S1521] |
| 1870 | The new Tennessee Constitution recognizes Sequatchie as a constitutional county. [S1515] |
| 1888 | The Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis line reaches the county. [S1510] |
| 1899 | The first coal mine opens on Fredonia Mountain. [S1527] |
| 1902 | Douglas Coal and Coke begins building coke ovens and a commissary at Dunlap. [S1516][S1527] |
| 1905 | Douglas goes bankrupt; Chattanooga Iron and Coal buys its property. [S1516] |
| 1909 | Dunlap is incorporated, December 1. [S1514] |
| 1911 | The present courthouse is built for $12,000. [S1515] |
| 1916 | A railroad up Little Brush Creek, a new coal washer and 100 more ovens. [S1527] |
| 1919 | Southern States Iron and Coal buys the mines and ovens. [S1516] |
| 1922 or 1927 | Coke production and mining end, by the sources’ differing dates. [S1516][S1527] |
| 1925 | Dunlap-born Tom Stewart helps prosecute John Scopes in Dayton. [S1510][S26] |
| 1935 | The National Youth Administration begins work in the county. [S1528] |
| 1938–1942 | NYA crews build the Dunlap Community Building. [S1528] |
| 1941 | Dunlap becomes a city under a new charter. [S1514][S1512] |
| 1945 | Raymond H. Cooley earns the Medal of Honor on Luzon, February 24. [S1532] |
| 1959 | The county library moves into the Community Building. [S1528] |
| 1980 | The courthouse is listed on the National Register. [S1528] |
| 1985 | The Dunlap Coke Ovens are listed on the National Register, July 5. [S1522] |
| 2005 | The Hill Road at the Cumberland Plateau is nominated to the National Register (April 5) and listed. [S1522][S1523] |
| 2020 | The census counts 15,826 people in the county. [S1513] |
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 beehive coke-oven ruins at Dunlap Coke Ovens Park, the same banner we use on our Sequatchie County guide. Our records describe it as an AI redraw made with reference to Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0) photographs credited to Stansberry; it is not a photograph, the details are not exact, and no endorsement by the photographer, the park, the Sequatchie Valley Historical Association or any source on this page is implied. Reused source numbers (S12, S26, S38) match the same sources on our other history pages. Corrections: [email protected].