East Tennessee History · County by county
Tennessee’s upper corner on the Virginia line: a sacred Cherokee island at the head of the Holston, the frontier’s first wagon road and first church, the river port where the Donelson flotilla set out, the cabin that served as the Southwest Territory’s first capitol, a county seat burned in battle, a railroad town split down State Street, a model industrial city built from scratch, the 1927 recordings remembered as country music’s big bang, and the war plants and TVA lakes that made the modern Tri-Cities.
Sullivan County is the upper corner of Tennessee, the place where the Holston River and its forks come down out of Virginia toward the rest of the state. North Carolina created it in 1779 out of Washington County and named it for John Sullivan, a Revolutionary War officer who later governed New Hampshire. [S38][S945] Its first settlers thought they were living in Virginia until a boundary survey that same year put them in North Carolina, and the county was formally organized in February 1780. [S946] Blountville is the county seat; Kingsport and Bristol, two of the three Tri-Cities, are its largest towns. [S946][S945]
Few counties hold as many of Tennessee’s beginnings. The Long Island of the Holston, sacred to the Cherokee, sits at the head of navigation on the river; the frontier’s first wagon road ended there, Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road started there, and John Donelson’s flotilla sailed from there to found Nashville. [S947][S623] The county claims what was probably the first church in the future state, its first Methodist chapel and an early ironworks with the state’s first nail factory, and William Cobb’s house at Rocky Mount was the first seat of government for the Southwest Territory. [S946][S948] In the twentieth century the county became an industrial center: Kingsport was planned from the ground up as a factory city, Tennessee Eastman grew into the county’s largest employer, and a 1927 recording session on Bristol’s State Street is remembered as the start of the modern country music business. [S949][S950][S951] The 2020 census counted 158,163 people. [S952]
The Holston River crosses Sullivan County from northeast to southwest. At the county’s southwestern corner the Holston and the Watauga come together, and the North Fork of the Holston forms the line with Hawkins County. [S946] Just east of where the North and South Forks meet lies the Long Island of the Holston, about four miles long and half a mile wide at its widest. [S947]
For the Cherokee the island was a sacred council and treaty ground in the middle of a large hunting territory, a place where their leaders "sat down" for councils and treaty talks until late in the eighteenth century. People who own land there have long turned up arrowheads and other artifacts, and the National Park Service has noted that the whole island has potential for archaeology. [S947] Nearby was the crossing of the Great Indian Warpath, a main trail northeast from central Tennessee. [S947] A marker placed by the Daughters of the American Colonists calls it the most heavily traveled road in colonial America, laid over older animal and Native trading and war paths. [S953] A state marker says the island remained Cherokee until it was ceded in 1806, long after the land around it had been given up. [S623]
The first fort came in 1761. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says troops headed to relieve besieged Fort Loudoun passed through, cut the Island Road and built Fort Robinson at the Long Island. [S946] Sources name different leaders: the National Park Service’s landmark form credits Colonel William Byrd’s colonial expedition, while the state’s Island Road marker says the road was finished in September 1761 by Major Andrew Lewis under Colonel Adam Stephen, whose militia built the fort to treat with the Cherokees for peace. [S947][S954] The soldiers soon left and the Cherokees took the ground back, but more hunters and traders now passed through on their way to Kentucky and Tennessee. [S947] The Tennessee Encyclopedia calls the Island Road the oldest wagon road in Tennessee. [S946]
According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, permanent settlers came from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1765. The Boat Yard, across from the later Netherland Inn, opened as the state’s first major river port in 1768. [S946] The settlers called their district North of the Holston and believed it was part of Virginia. [S946] North Carolina’s 1779 act creating Sullivan County explains what went wrong: the line between the two states had never been surveyed west of a place called Steep Rock, so families north of the Holston had "by mistake" held their land as Virginians and missed North Carolina’s deadlines for claiming it. The act gave them until the following May 1 to enter their land before anyone else could. [S945]
Families built forts of their own. Captain Jacob Womack’s fortified house near Bluff City went up before 1774 and was abandoned about 1785, when he moved farther west. [S955] At Sapling Grove, now Bristol, Evan Shelby built a fort in 1771 that became a center of settlement. [S946][S956] A state marker says Shelby was born in Wales in 1719 and had served in Braddock’s campaign and Lord Dunmore’s War; men from his fort went to the battles of Point Pleasant and Long Island Flats and on the 1779 expedition he led against the Chickamauga towns. [S957][S956]
When the Revolution began, the Cherokees sided with the British and moved in July 1776 to drive out the settlers on land they claimed. [S947] On July 20 militia marched down the Island Road from Eaton’s Fort, rushed Cherokee warriors hidden in a ravine and then went on to the main fight on the flats. [S958] A state marker calls the Battle of Island Flats the first battle of the Revolution in the West and says Captain James Thompson’s militia defeated a Cherokee force under Dragging Canoe in a short, bloody fight. [S959] The Tennessee Encyclopedia calls it the battle in which settlers defeated the Cherokees’ attempt to resist settlement. [S946]
Two months later the settlers built Fort Patrick Henry on the north bank of the South Fork, on the old site of Fort Robinson. [S946][S947] The state marker says Lieutenant Colonel William Russell built it in September 1776 on Colonel William Christian’s orders, and that Captain William Winchester’s company held it while other troops campaigned in the Cherokee country. [S960] The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s entry on Warriors’ Path State Park gives the garrison commander as Captain William Witcher instead. [S961] Christian gathered a punitive expedition of about 2,000 men there, marched on the Cherokee towns and, the Park Service says, brought two years of relative peace to the frontier; his first camp, on October 1–4, 1776, was at Double Springs. [S947][S962]
The Treaty of Long Island of the Holston followed in July 1777; a state marker dates it July 20. Commissioners from North Carolina and Virginia, led by Waightstill Avery, signed with Cherokee leaders, who gave up land to both states. [S946][S963] The marker, on Wilcox Drive in Kingsport near the island, says the treaty was made at that spot and that settlers soon violated it; the Tennessee Encyclopedia’s Donelson entry places it at Fort Patrick Henry. [S963][S964] The same year Colonel Joseph Martin was made Indian agent and opened a trading post on the island, where, the Park Service form says, he lived for the next decade with his wife, Betsy Ward; a state marker says the first Fourth of July celebration west of the mountains was held there in 1777. [S947][S623]
The Long Island was also a starting line. In March 1775, while Richard Henderson’s Transylvania Company was still bargaining with the Cherokees for Kentucky land, Henderson sent Daniel Boone and 30 axmen to open a trail. Boone began work at the Long Island on March 10 and reached the Kentucky River about two weeks later, marking what became the Wilderness Road. [S947] A Daniel Boone Wilderness Trail marker in Kingsport says that by the end of the Revolution, 12,000 people had crossed Cumberland Gap into the new country. [S965]
The voyage that founded Nashville started here too. On December 22, 1779, John Donelson and his party set out from Fort Patrick Henry in the flatboat Adventure. [S964][S966] The size of the party depends on the source: the Tennessee Encyclopedia says over one hundred settlers, about thirty families at the start, while a state marker says 300 people in 30 flatboats and a 1979 Boy Scout marker says about 300 in flatboats and canoes. [S964][S967][S966] The state marker says the group arrived early in 1779 to build its boats. [S967] Donelson’s own family, the Tennessee Encyclopedia notes, included about thirty enslaved African Americans and his thirteen-year-old daughter Rachel, the future wife of Andrew Jackson. [S964]
The flotilla got only as far as the shoals at the mouth of Reedy Creek before low water stopped it. The travelers waited there almost two months, repairing boats until the river rose, and reached the Big Salt Lick, now Nashville, on April 24, 1780. [S966][S964] The Park Service says the trip set the pattern for later migration: walk to the Long Island country, build a flatboat, and go west by water. [S947]
The Kings Mountain campaign of 1780 has roots here. According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, early planning for it took place at Evan Shelby’s fort. [S946] A 1927 marker placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution says the expedition was conceived there by Shelby, Campbell and Sevier. [S968] Isaac Shelby, Evan’s son, was born in Maryland in 1750 and moved with his family to Sapling Grove in 1771. He rose to colonel and fought at Kings Mountain on October 7, 1780, served as an early Sullivan County justice of the peace and represented the county in North Carolina’s House of Commons in 1782. He later moved to Kentucky and served two terms as its governor. [S969][S968]
North Carolina’s act split Washington County in two along the ridges between the Holston and Watauga, naming everything to the north Sullivan County. [S945] A bicentennial marker placed by the county in 1979 says the new county came from both sides of the old line, the part north of the Holston formerly in Washington County, Virginia, and the part south of it from Washington County, North Carolina. Until 1786 it took in what became Hawkins, Hancock and part of Claiborne counties. Isaac Shelby was its first militia commandant, John Rhea its first court clerk and Nathan Clark its first sheriff. [S970] Hawkins County was cut from Sullivan in 1786. [S946][S38]
From 1780 to 1792 the county court met in a house on the Island Road that James Hollis built in 1779; John Yancey bought it in 1782 and ran it as a tavern. [S971] On December 11, 1792, James Brigham deeded 30 acres to the county commissioners for a courthouse and jail in Blountville. [S972]
The county marker says parts of Sullivan backed the State of Franklin from 1784 to 1786. [S970] That breakaway state grew out of a meeting at Jonesborough in August 1784, organized by leaders from southwestern Virginia and the Holston settlements. [S6] Evan Shelby, by then a North Carolina militia general, declined the Franklin governorship in 1787, a state marker says. He died in 1794 and is buried in Bristol’s East Hill Cemetery. [S957] North Carolina gave up its western lands in December 1789, and the next year Congress made them the Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio. [S7] Sullivan County became part of Tennessee in 1796. [S970]
The territory’s first capital was the home of William Cobb, called Rocky Mount, near the Watauga. Governor William Blount and territorial secretary Daniel Smith set up their office there in 1790 and moved the capital to Knoxville in 1792. [S7][S948] Cobb had come from North Carolina in 1769; he was one of the first county magistrates and helped lay out Jonesborough. [S973]
Even this landmark has disputed details. Blount headed an October 20, 1790, letter "At William Cobb’s Washington County" and wrote that he had arrived "on the 11th instant," and the Tennessee Encyclopedia still places Rocky Mount in Washington County in 1790. [S973][S7] The Rocky Mount site lies today at Piney Flats in Sullivan County, and the county’s bicentennial marker says the Piney Flats area was added to Sullivan in 1789. [S974][S948][S970] The state’s Rocky Mount marker dates the seat of government to October 10, 1790, and the Tennessee Historical Commission gives Blount’s arrival as October 23. [S948][S974] The Commission says Blount called the local leaders together to explain the new territorial government, then repeated his message in Greene, Hawkins and Sullivan counties. [S974] Andrew Jackson stayed at Rocky Mount for six weeks while he waited for his law license. [S973][S948]
The house itself is dated two ways. The Tennessee Encyclopedia describes a two-story log house built about 1770, while the Tennessee Historical Commission, which lists it among the state historic sites, says the present large log house was built in the late 1820s on Cobb’s former land. The two also disagree on when the state bought it: 1959 in the encyclopedia, 1962 in the Commission’s account. [S973][S974] The Rocky Mount Historical Association opened it to the public on April 1, 1962, and it is now a living-history museum set in 1791, with costumed interpreters playing the Cobb family. [S973][S974]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia gives Sullivan a long list of firsts. [S946] Settlers organized a Presbyterian church at Taylor’s Meeting House near Blountville in 1773; the state marker says it was probably the first church of any denomination in what became Tennessee, and that it also served as a fort and held school on Sundays. [S946][S975] Acuff Chapel, founded in 1786 on land given by Timothy Acuff, was the first Methodist Episcopal church in the state, and Bishop Francis Asbury preached there often. [S946][S976] Immanuel Lutheran Church, founded in 1793 by German immigrants, is by tradition the oldest Lutheran church in Tennessee. [S977]
Iron came early. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the first nail factory in Tennessee was at King’s Ironworks, set up south of Bristol in 1784. [S946] A state marker says Colonel James King, a Revolutionary veteran who was at Yorktown, built the works at the mouth of Steele Creek, with Governor William Blount later joining as an associate. [S978] Upriver, Moses Cavett built the Pactolus Ironworks before 1795; John Sevier, his son and his son-in-law bought it soon after, and it later belonged to the Embrees, East Tennessee ironmasters whose Pactolus Nail Factory stood a quarter mile downriver. [S979] By the early 1800s farms shared the county with ironworks, powder mills, tanneries, gristmills and sawmills. [S946]
Blountville grew into a trading town on the turnpike north to Richmond, Washington and Philadelphia. [S946] Another old route, the Jonesboro Turnpike, began as a branch of the Great War and Trading Path; a state marker says Andrew Jackson traveled it on his way to his first inauguration. [S980] Its best-known stop was the Deery Inn, and the sources differ on when it was built and how long it lasted. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says it served travelers from 1785 to the 1930s. The state marker says it was built shortly after 1785 and operated until shortly before 1930, and lists Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, Lafayette, Louis Philippe and Andrew Johnson among its guests. A Civil War Trails marker says William Deery built it as a trading post and tavern early in the 1800s. [S946][S981][S982] Behind the inn stands a brick building that a marker says Deery built in the early 1800s to house the people he enslaved, one of very few such buildings left in northeast Tennessee. [S983]
On the river, William King of Saltville, Virginia, bought lots in 1802 in Christianville, a new village laid out on Gilbert Christian’s land, and built wharves, warehouses and a store. His boats carried salt and other goods as far as New Orleans. [S984][S985][S986] Kingsport takes its name from him. [S986] The Netherland Inn grew up beside his boat yard, but who built it is uncertain. The Tennessee Encyclopedia dates it between 1810 and 1820 and says King, George Hale or Richard Netherland, who bought the property in 1818, might have built it. A marker at the inn says King built it in the early 1800s, and the Park Service’s landmark form leaves the question open. [S986][S987][S947] It was a stagecoach stop on the Great Stage Road as well as a river landing, with about fourteen scheduled coach visits a week. [S986] In 1822 Christianville and neighboring Rossville were joined as the town of Kingsport. [S947] A state marker says the Boat Yard stayed the head of navigation on the Holston until 1850. [S988]
Exchange Place, a double log house on the stage road, took its name from swapping horses and currencies. From 1816 to 1846 it was the main house of John Gaines’s plantation. [S989]
Railroads turned crossroads into towns. Modern Bristol, the Tennessee Encyclopedia says, grew up where the Southern Railway and the Norfolk and Western met, and that junction drew rapid commercial and industrial growth. [S946] Joseph Rhea Anderson planned and laid out Bristol in 1852, and in 1853 he built a combined house and store that held the community’s first store, post office and bank. [S990] A 2010 marker says both sides of the state line were recognized in the original town. In 1856 the Virginia side joined with Goodsonville as the town of Goodson, then went back to the name Bristol in 1890. [S991] The Tennessee side was incorporated on November 1, 1856. [S992]
Along the line to the south, the Bluff City marker says the place began as Choate’s Ford, became Middletown on the Abingdon–Knoxville stage line, and then took the name Union once the railroad came through. In 1862 it was renamed Zollicoffer after a Confederate general. It went back to Union in 1865 and became Bluff City in 1887. [S993] It was incorporated in 1870. [S994] Railroad construction reached Piney Flats in 1854, and by 1889 the village had a furniture factory, Wolfe Bros. & Co. [S995]
Most of East Tennessee stayed loyal to the Union, but the Tennessee Encyclopedia says Democratic Sullivan County voted for secession. [S946] The railroad made the county valuable to both sides. Bristol became a Confederate medical center. Its general hospital took over the former Exchange Hotel, and soldiers who died there were buried on East Hill. [S996][S997] A Civil War Trails marker counts 101 burials in the soldiers’ plot, almost 200 more Confederate graves elsewhere in the cemetery, the graves of 57 Union veterans and, by oral tradition, twelve African American graves near the soldiers. [S997] Unionists still found ways out. Captain Dan Ellis hid groups of recruits by day and guided them through the county into Virginia and on toward Kentucky to join the Union army. [S998]
In September 1863 Union General Ambrose Burnside’s forces and Confederate troops under General Samuel Jones fought for control of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad. [S982][S999] On September 22, Union Colonel John W. Foster’s cavalry brigade crossed the Watauga, took Cemetery Hill on the west side of Blountville and fought a four-hour artillery duel with Colonel James E. Carter’s 1st Tennessee Cavalry, then charged the town near sundown and drove the Confederates out. [S1000][S999][S1001] Women and children sheltered in the cellars of the Deery Inn and the St. John house while shells set much of the town on fire. [S982] A state marker says the courthouse and much of the town burned. [S1002] A Kentucky Confederate counted twelve houses, the courthouse, the jail and both hotels destroyed, about half the town. [S1003] The two sides blamed each other for the fire. Foster reported that the enemy’s shells set the town alight, while a local woman later wrote that a Federal shell set the courthouse burning. [S999] Losses are counted differently too: Foster reported six killed and fourteen wounded, while the National Park Service estimates 27 Union and 165 Confederate casualties. [S1000][S1004] The Miller-Haynes house, still called the Cannonball House, shows the shell damage. During the war it belonged to Matthew T. Haynes, a Confederate official who collected property confiscated from Unionists. [S1003]
The war came back in December 1864, when Union General George Stoneman led a raid from Knoxville to wreck saltworks and other targets in southwest Virginia. On December 13, at Kingsport, part of his force crossed the Holston upstream at Cloud’s Ford, came in behind about 300 Confederates under Colonel Richard C. Morgan and captured Morgan; a Union general reported taking 85 prisoners. [S1005] A Civil War Trails marker says Stoneman led 5,700 men, while a 1986 Confederate monument gives 5,500. [S1005][S1006]
Two years after the war, the Holston Presbytery founded King College in Bristol in 1867. [S1007] A state marker says the Reverend James King and other Presbyterian leaders founded it, and the marker at its first site says King donated the land. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says the school was named for James King, an eighteenth-century settler. [S1008][S1009][S1007] It moved in 1917 to its present campus, part of the original King estate, and today carries the name King University. [S1009]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia says Kingsport stayed a country village until 1909, when the Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio Railway came through the Holston Valley. [S946] George L. Carter, the railroad’s promoter, had seen the chance for an industrial city as early as 1906. Around 1914 he sold out to John B. Dennis and Blair and Company of New York, and in 1915 Dennis organized the Kingsport Improvement Corporation with J. Fred Johnson as its chief promoter. [S949] Their plan was social and economic as well as physical. They counted on cheap land, low-cost nonunion labor, natural resources and new freight for the railroad, with factories that would trade with each other. [S949]
They hired the Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm of John Nolen for the town plan. The county entry in the Tennessee Encyclopedia spells his name "Nolan," but its Kingsport entry and a downtown marker use "Nolen." [S949][S946][S1010] Church Circle, designed by railroad engineer William Dunlap and refined by Nolen in the 1919 plan, became the hub of the city’s spoke-and-wheel streets. [S1010] The railroad station and freight depot of 1916 were designed by New York architect Clinton MacKenzie. [S1011][S949] Kingsport was incorporated on March 2, 1917, and was apparently the first Tennessee city to start out with a city manager. [S662][S949] The Tennessee Encyclopedia calls it the first economically diversified, professionally planned and privately financed city in twentieth-century America. [S949]
George Eastman of Kodak visited in July 1920 and bought 35 acres and the factory buildings of the American Wood Reduction Company from the federal government. Tennessee Eastman, incorporated on July 17, 1920, first made methanol and other chemicals by distilling wood. [S950] By 1931 it was turning out cellulose acetate yarn in large amounts, and during the Depression it became Kingsport’s largest employer, so the young town kept growing while others shrank. [S950][S949] Kingsport Press, started in 1922 by the same New York bankers, grew into one of the country’s big book manufacturers. [S1012] By 1927 the town had ten factories employing 3,383 people. [S949]
The planned city was segregated. The only school for African American children in Kingsport began in 1913 as the Oklahoma Grove School. With money from the Rosenwald fund and the community, the first Douglass School building went up in 1928, and a new kindergarten-through-12th-grade school opened in 1951. It was accredited by the state in 1946 and became one of the largest Black high schools in the tri-state area. Its last graduation, on June 8, 1966, came with desegregation. [S1013]
In the summer of 1927, Victor Talking Machine Company producer Ralph Peer set up a temporary studio on the Tennessee side of Bristol’s State Street. [S946][S1014] Between July 25 and August 5, 19 performers or groups recorded 76 songs, including the first recordings of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. [S951] The Birthplace of Country Music museum’s session list dates the Carters’ recordings to August 1 and 2 and Rodgers’s to August 4. [S1015] The Tennessee Encyclopedia dates the sessions to July 1927 in one entry and to the mid-1920s in its county entry. [S28][S946] A 1971 monument on State Street gives August 2. [S1016] Encyclopedia Virginia places the studio on the second and third floors of the Taylor-Christian Hat Company building at 408 State Street. [S1017]
The sessions are often called the "big bang" of modern country music. [S28][S951] In 1998 Congress recognized Bristol as the Birthplace of Country Music. [S1014][S951] Encyclopedia Virginia adds a historian’s caution. Atlanta held more sessions and recorded earlier, Asheville had a field session as early as 1925, and the Bristol records by the Carters and Rodgers sold only modestly at first. Even so, it judges the sessions "indeed important" for the cross section of mountain music they captured. [S1017] Victor came back for a second Bristol session in the fall of 1928. [S1017]
Some of the music’s roots ran through Sullivan County’s Black community. Lesley Riddle, who grew up near Kingsport, met A. P. Carter in 1928 and traveled with him collecting songs. Carter wrote down the words, Riddle remembered the tunes, and he brought songs of African American origin into the Carter Family’s repertoire. [S1018] Brownie McGhee, born in Knoxville in 1915, grew up in Kingsport and became a blues star who brought the music to audiences around the world. [S1019][S1018] Tennessee Ernie Ford, born in Fordtown in Sullivan County in 1919 and raised in Bristol, started out as an announcer on Bristol radio. [S1020] A mural marker says Bristol radio shows of the 1930s through the 1950s, especially Farm and Fun Time, helped bluegrass take shape. [S1021] Bristol’s stone Municipal Stadium, built with Works Progress Administration money and dedicated in 1936, served the white and Black high schools of both Bristols, including Slater High School on the Tennessee side. [S1022]
World War II made Kingsport a defense center. Early in the 1940s Tennessee Eastman scientists developed a continuous process for making RDX, a powerful explosive. [S949][S950] In June 1942 the company was authorized to design and run Holston Ordnance Works, which spread over 6,000 acres along the Holston in Sullivan and Hawkins counties. [S950][S619] At its peak the plant employed nearly 7,000 people, 40 percent of them women, and by 1944 it was the largest maker of high explosives in the world. [S619] The boom also brought displaced families and serious housing shortages. [S619] Because of the company’s record at Holston, General Leslie Groves had Tennessee Eastman run the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, which produced uranium for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. [S949][S950] The Holston plant still operates as the Holston Army Ammunition Plant. [S619]
The Tennessee Valley Authority built three dams on the South Fork Holston between 1942 and 1953. Work on South Holston Dam started in 1942, stopped for other wartime projects, resumed in 1947 and was finished in 1950. [S1023] Boone Dam, named for Daniel Boone, was built from 1950 to 1952. [S1024] Fort Patrick Henry Dam, named for the Revolutionary fort, was built mainly for power and to keep steady water flowing to downstream industry. TVA dates it 1951 to 1953, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia gives 1951 to 1954. [S1025][S961] Warriors’ Path State Park, set up by the early 1960s on both sides of Fort Patrick Henry Lake, takes its name from the old Native trails along the Holston. The 1903 Roller-Pettyjohn Mill and the archaeological remains of Childress Town are inside it. [S961]
In October 2014 TVA found a sinkhole near the base of Boone Dam’s earthen embankment and muddy water seeping from the riverbank below. Engineers traced the problem to internal erosion in karst bedrock under the 1950s foundation. [S1026] TVA lowered the lake about 10 feet below winter pool, watched the dam around the clock and built a composite seepage barrier that included a concrete wall through the dam into bedrock. [S1026] The $326 million repair took seven years, and TVA marked its completion and reopened the recreation area on May 25, 2022. [S1027]
Bristol entrepreneurs Larry Carrier, Carl Moore and R. G. Pope built Bristol International Speedway in 1960–61 and ran its first big NASCAR race on July 30, 1961. [S1028] Bruton Smith’s Speedway Motorsports bought it in 1996 and renamed it Bristol Motor Speedway. By 2000 it had about 147,000 seats, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia says its races drew the largest crowds of any sporting events in the state. [S1028]
Kingsport’s factories had their own troubles. A strike at Kingsport Press that began on March 11, 1963, and lasted into the spring of 1967 was one of the longest in the country, with picket lines, vandalism and violence. [S1012] The plant, later owned by Quebecor World, closed in 2006. [S1012] Eastman Chemical became independent of Kodak on January 1, 1994, and kept its headquarters in Kingsport. [S950] The Tennessee Encyclopedia notes that post-war Kingsport also faced a declining downtown, sprawl, pollution and annexation fights. [S949]
The state’s county profile lists four incorporated cities in Sullivan: Bluff City, Bristol, Johnson City and Kingsport. Kingsport also reaches into Hawkins County. [S952][S662] The population grew from 153,048 in 2000 to 158,163 in 2020. [S946][S952]
Visit: Our Sullivan County guide has towns, parks and local news.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| Before 1761 | Long Island of the Holston is a Cherokee council and treaty ground [S947] |
| 1761 | Island Road cut; Fort Robinson built at the Long Island [S946][S954] |
| 1765 | First permanent settlers arrive from Lancaster, Pennsylvania [S946] |
| 1768 | Boat Yard at the Long Island opens as a river port [S946] |
| 1771 | Evan Shelby builds his fort at Sapling Grove (Bristol) [S956] |
| 1773 | Presbyterians organize Taylor’s Meeting House near Blountville [S975] |
| March 1775 | Boone’s axmen start the Wilderness Road at the Long Island [S947] |
| July 20, 1776 | Battle of Island Flats [S959] |
| Sept. 1776 | Fort Patrick Henry built [S960] |
| July 1777 | Treaty of Long Island of the Holston [S946][S963] |
| 1779 | North Carolina creates Sullivan County; boundary survey places North of Holston in N.C. [S945][S946] |
| Dec. 22, 1779 | Donelson’s flotilla leaves Fort Patrick Henry [S964] |
| Feb. 1780 | County organized [S946] |
| Oct. 7, 1780 | Sullivan men under Isaac Shelby fight at Kings Mountain [S969] |
| 1784 | King’s Ironworks and nail factory near Bristol [S946][S978] |
| 1786 | Hawkins County cut from Sullivan; Acuff Chapel founded [S38][S976] |
| 1790–1792 | Rocky Mount serves as the Southwest Territory’s first capitol [S7][S948] |
| 1792 | Land deeded for the Blountville courthouse [S972] |
| 1796 | Sullivan becomes part of the state of Tennessee [S970] |
| 1802 | William King’s boat yard at Christianville [S984] |
| 1818 | Richard Netherland buys the inn property [S986] |
| 1822 | Christianville and Rossville united as Kingsport [S947] |
| 1852–1856 | Bristol laid out by Joseph R. Anderson; Tennessee side incorporated [S990][S992] |
| 1861 | Sullivan County votes for secession [S946] |
| Sept. 22, 1863 | Battle of Blountville; much of the town burns [S1002] |
| Dec. 13, 1864 | Stoneman’s raiders fight at Kingsport [S1005] |
| 1867 | King College founded in Bristol [S1007] |
| 1887 | Union renamed Bluff City [S993] |
| 1909 | Clinchfield railroad reaches Kingsport [S946] |
| 1917 | Kingsport incorporated (March 2) [S662] |
| 1920 | Tennessee Eastman Corporation founded [S950] |
| 1922 | Kingsport Press founded [S1012] |
| July 25–Aug. 5, 1927 | Bristol Sessions [S951] |
| 1928 | First Douglass School building in Kingsport [S1013] |
| 1942–1944 | Holston Ordnance Works built [S619] |
| 1950–1953 | South Holston, Boone and Fort Patrick Henry dams completed [S1023][S1024][S1025] |
| 1961 | First NASCAR race at Bristol (July 30) [S1028] |
| 1962 | Rocky Mount opens to the public [S973] |
| 1963–1967 | Kingsport Press strike [S1012] |
| 1966 | Last graduation at Douglass High School [S1013] |
| 1994 | Eastman Chemical becomes independent, headquartered in Kingsport [S950] |
| 1998 | Congress recognizes Bristol as the Birthplace of Country Music [S1014] |
| 2014–2022 | Boone Dam seepage repair [S1026][S1027] |
| 2020 | Census counts 158,163 people [S952] |
Every bracketed number on this page links here. Written by My East TN in our own words and checked against each source on 2026-10-31 (ET). Where sources disagree, we say so on the page and give each version: whether Sullivan County dates from 1779 (the North Carolina act, the Blue Book, CTAS and the state archives) or 1780 (the Tennessee Encyclopedia, which says it was organized in February 1780); who built Fort Robinson in 1761 (Colonel William Byrd’s expedition, per the National Park Service landmark form, or militia under Major Andrew Lewis and Colonel Adam Stephen, per the Island Road marker); whether Fort Patrick Henry’s first garrison was Captain William Winchester’s company (state marker) or Captain William Witcher’s (Tennessee Encyclopedia); whether the Treaty of Long Island is dated July 1777 or July 20, 1777, and whether it was signed at Fort Patrick Henry or at the marker’s spot near the island; how many people sailed with John Donelson (over one hundred, or about thirty families, in the Tennessee Encyclopedia; about 300 on two markers), and whether the party arrived early in 1779 or only set out that December; whether Rocky Mount lay in Washington County in 1790 (Blount’s own letter and the Tennessee Encyclopedia) or in Sullivan, which a county marker says gained the Piney Flats area in 1789; whether the Rocky Mount house was built about 1770 (Tennessee Encyclopedia) or in the late 1820s (Tennessee Historical Commission), whether Blount arrived October 10, 11 or 23, 1790, and whether the state bought the site in 1959 or 1962; when the Deery Inn was built (shortly after 1785, or early in the 1800s) and when it stopped serving travelers (before 1930, or in the 1930s); who built the Netherland Inn and when (William King in the early 1800s, Richard Netherland after 1818, or someone between 1810 and 1820), and whether its preservation association bought it in 1967 or 1968; whether King College was named for its founder, the Reverend James King, or for an eighteenth-century settler of that name; who set fire to Blountville in 1863, and whether Union losses there were twenty (Foster’s report) or twenty-seven (National Park Service estimate); whether Stoneman led 5,500 or 5,700 men through Kingsport in 1864; how the Tennessee Encyclopedia’s county entry spells planner John Nolen; whether the Bristol Sessions took place in ’the mid-1920s,’ ’July 1927’ or July 25–August 5, 1927; and whether Fort Patrick Henry Dam was finished in 1953 (TVA) or 1954 (Tennessee Encyclopedia). We don’t republish encyclopedia, museum or marker text — follow the links for the full articles.
Hero art: our illustrative map of historic East Tennessee counties, reused from the site’s county guides. It is a drawn map, not to scale, showing where Sullivan sits in the northeast corner on the Virginia line; it is not a photograph of Sullivan County, and no endorsement by any agency or source is implied. Reused source numbers (S6, S7, S28, S38, S619, S623, S662) match the same sources on our other history pages. Corrections: [email protected].