East Tennessee History · County by county
A small ridge-and-valley county stitched together from five neighbors in the 1850s: a long court fight and a seat renamed for the lawyer who won it, a Unionist county in a war that split its families, farm valleys along the Clinch and Powell, TVA’s first lake and the thousands of people it moved, a New Deal park and a state forest on the drowned farmland, the music of Maynardville and Luttrell, and a county that now drives to work in Knoxville.
Union County is a small county just north of Knoxville, about 224 square miles of ridges and valleys between Clinch Mountain and the Powell River. [S472][S496] The General Assembly passed the act to create it on January 3, 1850, from pieces of five counties: Anderson, Campbell, Claiborne, Grainger and Knox. Lawsuits held it up, and the county was not formally created until January 23, 1856. [S472][S473] Nobody is quite sure where the name came from. Dr. Robert H. White, Tennessee’s state historian from 1955 to 1970, thought it described the union of five county pieces. In 1961 a former county schools superintendent, William H. Thomas, suggested instead that it reflected the area’s support for the federal Union. [S472]
The county seat, a small place called Liberty, was renamed Maynardville for Horace Maynard, the young Knoxville lawyer who won the county’s court fight and went on to a long career in Congress. [S472][S474][S476] In the Civil War most of the county sided with the Union, though not all of it, and the war’s foraging armies stripped its farms. [S477]
The biggest change came in the 1930s. TVA’s Norris Dam, finished in 1936 just over the line in Anderson County, backed the Clinch and Powell rivers across Union County’s best bottomland. The dam brought jobs and training, and it also moved many families whose homes lay below the new water line. [S472][S22][S359] The town of Loyston went under the lake. Parts of the land TVA bought became Big Ridge State Park and Chuck Swan State Forest. [S483][S481][S486]
Union County is also a music county. Roy Acuff and Carl Smith were born in Maynardville, Chet Atkins in Luttrell, and Kenny Chesney grew up in Luttrell; all four are in the Country Music Hall of Fame. [S490][S493][S492][S494] The 2020 Census counted 19,802 people. [S496] The county has three incorporated towns, Maynardville, Luttrell and Plainview, and the lake community of Sharps Chapel. [S472][S496]
Union County is laid out the way most of the Great Valley of East Tennessee is: long ridges running southwest to northeast, with narrow valleys between them. The county line follows two rivers for much of its length. The 1850 act drew long stretches of the boundary down the Clinch and the Powell "as it meanders," and its line passes close to the mouth of the Powell, where the two rivers meet. [S473] Today both rivers are arms of Norris Lake, and the county has about 264 miles of shoreline. [S472]
Before the lake, the rivers were the county’s farmland and its roads. The National Park Service’s school booklet on the Clinch River Valley says the first European American settlers arrived in the 1780s, chiefly families named Sharp, Snodderly, Hill and Rice. They worked small farms and built small communities, and for about 150 years not much about that way of life changed. [S484]
One of the earliest names on the land belongs to Captain John "Racoon" Miller, whose blockhouse stood near the present Maynardville. A state marker at Main Street and Ailor Gap Road says Miller was born in South Carolina in 1747, served in a Virginia militia in 1776, and came to this area in 1777. Racoon Valley carries his name, and he is buried in the Ousley Cemetery. [S479] The state marker spells his nickname "Racoon." The Wilson Park marker in Maynardville, which lists him among the ancestors of a local family, spells it "Raccoon." [S505] We use the state marker’s spelling.
The act that created Union County is short on politics and long on surveying. The Tennessee State Library and Archives has posted its text, Acts of Tennessee 1849-50, Chapter 61. It begins by setting up a new county "composed of fractions taken from" Grainger, Claiborne, Campbell, Anderson and Knox, "to be known and designated by the name of Union County." [S473]
The boundary runs from tree to tree in the old way: a sweet gum on the Knox County line at the end of Clinch Mountain, a beech on Dyer’s Branch, a sugar tree near John Bullard’s, down the Clinch "as it meanders" to a large double sycamore below Dodson’s Island, along the Powell to a walnut at Thomas’s Ford, and over House Mountain back to the start. [S473]
The act did not simply create the county. It named commissioners from each of the five old counties and ordered an election in each piece. Voters were to write "new county" or "old county" on their ballots, and Union County would exist only if a majority in each piece voted for it. [S473] Until a seat was chosen, courts were to meet at John F. Huddleston’s place "on the waters of Bull Run." The commissioners were to buy land for a county town, lay off a public square and save a lot for a jail. [S473] The act also gave the new county a militia regiment, the 162nd. [S473]
The new county ran straight into court. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says "legal challenges and complications" kept Union County from being formally created until January 23, 1856, six years after the act passed. County court minutes and records begin about then. [S472] The encyclopedia’s entry on Horace Maynard says one of his most famous cases was defending Union County against a suit filed by unhappy citizens of Knox County, who objected to losing territory to the new county. [S474]
So which is Union County’s birthday? The state archives and the University of Tennessee’s county advisory service both date the county to 1850, the year of the act. [S473][S496] The encyclopedia dates its formal creation to 1856. [S472] Both are correct, depending on whether you count the law or the working county. We give both.
The seat was a small community called Liberty, near the middle of the new county. In thanks for Maynard’s courtroom win, it was renamed Maynardville. [S472][S474] The county high school is Horace Maynard High School. [S472] The town itself was not incorporated until later; the University of Tennessee’s municipal service lists Maynardville’s incorporation act as Private Acts 1869-70, with an incorporation date of February 1, 1870. [S497]
Maynard was not a local man. He was born in Westboro, Massachusetts, on August 30, 1814, graduated from Amherst College in 1838, and came to Knoxville to teach at East Tennessee College, the school that became the University of Tennessee. He studied law there and was admitted to the bar in 1844. [S474][S475] A state marker at Main and Court streets in Maynardville tells his story and notes that he was counsel for the county’s establishment. [S476]
Maynard’s career shows how East Tennessee’s politics moved in the 1850s and 1860s. The House of Representatives’ biographical directory says he was elected to Congress as an American (Know-Nothing) in 1857, as an Opposition member in 1859, and as a Unionist in 1861, and that he served from March 4, 1857, to March 3, 1863. [S475] The Tennessee Encyclopedia adds that after Lincoln’s election he campaigned across the region against secession, and that he kept his seat in Congress even after Tennessee left the Union. [S474]
In 1863, Military Governor Andrew Johnson made him Tennessee’s attorney general. He went back to Congress after the war, serving until 1875, when President Ulysses S. Grant named him minister to Turkey. President Rutherford B. Hayes brought him home in 1880 to be postmaster general, a cabinet post he held until March 1881. He died in Knoxville on May 3, 1882. [S474][S475][S476]
The county’s name may or may not come from the federal Union. Its loyalties in the Civil War are clearer. A Tennessee Civil War Trails marker in Maynardville, titled "Divided Loyalties," says most residents opposed secession and were staunch Unionists. Men joined Federal regiments such as the 1st Tennessee Infantry and the 2nd and 9th Tennessee Cavalry. Others sided with the Confederacy, and the marker says the split broke up families and turned neighbors against one another. [S477]
Union County has no official count from the June 8, 1861, statewide vote on secession. A table of East Tennessee returns posted on the Teach Tennessee History website lists Union’s results as "not available." Its neighbors are on the list: Anderson voted about 93 percent against secession, Campbell about 94 percent, Claiborne about 83 percent and Knox about 72 percent. [S480] We don’t guess at Union’s numbers.
Union County sat between Knoxville and Cumberland Gap, and the Gap changed hands several times, so the armies kept passing through. The marker describes two fights in the county. On June 30, 1862, Union Col. Robert K. Byrd’s 1st Tennessee Infantry and two companies of the 3rd Kentucky were foraging along the Powell River west of Maynardville when several companies of Confederate cavalry attacked them. Five Federals were captured; Byrd’s men took one Confederate. [S477]
The larger fight came at Walker’s Ford on the Clinch, in December 1863, during Confederate Gen. James Longstreet’s siege of Knoxville. A second Civil War Trails marker, near Hickory Valley Missionary Baptist Church, tells the story. Union cavalry under Col. Felix W. Graham pushed south to Maynardville, then pulled back toward the ford when Confederate cavalry under Gen. William T. Martin came up against them. Early on December 2, Martin attacked and drove the outnumbered Federals toward the river. Union Gen. Orlando B. Willcox arrived with two regiments of Indiana infantry. When Martin tried to get around them at the next ford, Col. Horace Capron’s 14th Illinois Cavalry, armed with Henry repeating rifles and four mountain howitzers, held the crossing. The Confederates fell back toward Knoxville the next day, and Longstreet gave up the siege on December 4. [S478][S477]
The war was hard on the people who stayed home. Foragers from both sides took crops, livestock and fence rails. The marker says enslaved and free Black residents left for the Federal lines in such numbers that the county’s Black population had fallen 20 percent by the end of the war. Afterward, a formerly enslaved man named Samuel Smith bought 110 acres and set up the county’s only school and church for Black residents. [S477]
People researching Union County families run into the same problem they hit in many Tennessee counties: missing records. The state archives notes that there was a fire at the Union County courthouse in 1869 and another in the 1870s. [S473] Even so, the archives lists a deed index starting in 1856, marriage records from the 1850s and 1860s on, and wills from 1856, along with a long shelf of local histories and cemetery books. [S473] The Union County Historical Society runs a museum and genealogical library in Maynardville for the same kind of digging. [S500]
For its first eighty years Union County was farm country. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says that in 1930 most people still lived and worked on farms, and most of those farms were subsistence operations that barely supported the family that ran them. [S472]
The best land lay along the rivers. A 2020 column in the local paper, Historic Union County, describes how settlers took the fertile Clinch River bottoms first. Over time the land that is now Big Ridge State Park was split among more than a hundred families, and people pushed onto the poorer ground behind the ridges. They grew corn and tobacco and kept gardens, and grist mills stood on the creeks in every direction. [S503]
The NPS booklet’s photographs from the early 1930s show what that life looked like just before the lake. Families straining boiled sorghum for syrup, a woman dipping water from a spring, children of several ages sharing a room at Oakdale School, and Sharp’s Station Methodist Episcopal Church. The booklet notes that only one percent of farm owners in the valley had indoor plumbing at the time. [S484]
At the center of the Big Valley farm country was Loyston. Tennessee State Parks’ management plan for Big Ridge says John Loy founded it in the early 1800s. [S483] A 1933 Knoxville News-Sentinel story, quoted in The Tennessee Magazine, said Loyston had been around more than a hundred years and had a mill, two stores, two churches, a post office, a grammar school and a high school. [S501]
Congress created the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933, and Norris was its first dam. Work began in October 1933, a few months after TVA was created, and the dam was finished in 1936. It sits on the Clinch in Anderson County and was named for Senator George Norris of Nebraska, who had pushed for public power in the valley for years. [S22][S359] The reservoir reaches 73 miles up the Clinch and 56 miles up the Powell. That put much of Union County’s river land underwater. [S359]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia sums up the dam’s effect on the county in two sentences: it created jobs, trained people and improved living conditions, and it displaced many people whose homes and land lay below the pool level or in the floodplain. [S472] The NPS booklet puts numbers on the whole project: about 152,000 acres in five counties, 2,899 families removed, and an average price of $55 an acre. It also notes that TVA hired local people to promote the project as it bought land. [S484]
The booklet also follows one family. In the fall of 1933, a small boy named John Rice Irwin watched his family pack up in Big Valley. He later remembered that "all the people were talking about it, and it was very traumatic," with "quite a scurry to get all the crops in." The Irwins moved by mule and wagon to Robertsville, and about ten years later they had to move again when Robertsville was taken for the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge. [S484]
Photographer Lewis Hine visited Loyston in 1933 to record the town before the water came. [S501] A National Archives photo series, reposted by the TVA in Tennessee TNGenWeb project, includes TVA captions from that fall. One describes the Sherman Stiner place at Lead Mine Bend in Union County, where much of a 1,500-acre farm would be flooded. Another quotes Curtis Stiner: "I love my mountains, and I want to stay right here the rest of my life if I can." [S504]
Loyston is now under the widest part of Norris Lake, a stretch of water known as the Loyston Sea. [S483][S482] In the words of the state park’s management plan, the town’s grocery store, gas station, school, churches and post office "are now covered by the waters of Norris Lake." [S483]
The lake also changed roads and river crossings. TVA built a long steel truss bridge over the Clinch between Maynardville and Tazewell, completed in 1936. A monument built from pieces salvaged from that bridge now stands in Maynardville’s Wilson Park, and its marker says the crossing carried an average of 371 vehicles a day in 1937 and 6,850 in 2017. The marker says the river bridge it replaced was moved to Hogskin Creek in Grainger County. [S487]
The lake did not wipe out every trace of the old communities. Norris Reservoir is a flood-control lake, and in a normal year TVA lets its level drop about 29 feet between summer and winter. [S359] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says former Norris Reservoir residents still meet every year, and when the water is down they make pilgrimages to old homesites, cemeteries and landmarks. [S472]
Some of the dead were moved. The Tennessee Magazine reports that most graves from Big Barren, a Claiborne County town under the lake, were moved to a new cemetery in Union County now called Big Barren Cemetery. [S501] Other cemeteries stayed on the hills above the waterline, inside what are now Big Ridge State Park and Chuck Swan State Forest, and the state archives lists a published survey of cemeteries on the Central Peninsula and around Norris Reservoir. [S483][S486][S473]
Big Ridge State Park grew out of the same project that flooded Loyston. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says park construction began on October 20, 1934, with Civilian Conservation Corps Company 4495 doing the work. The company had started out as part of a TVA work crew. Under the National Park Service and TVA’s housing division, the company built log cabins, a lodge, a swimming area and bathhouse, a beach, trails, picnic shelters and a blacksmith shop. [S481]
They also restored a grist mill from about 1825, to show how the people of Lone Mountain and Blue Mud had lived before the Norris project. [S481] The state’s management plan calls it the Norton Grist Mill. Of the pre-TVA buildings that stood on or near the park land, it is the only one left. The plan also credits the CCC with Big Ridge Dam, which holds the park’s 45-acre lake. [S483] TVA ran Big Ridge as one of its five reclamation and recreation demonstration parks and transferred it to the state in 1949; the state’s management plan dates the deed to September 7, 1949. [S481][S483] TVA says the demonstration parks it built on Norris Reservoir, including Big Ridge, Cove Lake and the area around Norris Dam, became the core of Tennessee’s state park system. [S359]
Sources give two sizes for the park. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says 3,642 acres; Tennessee State Parks and its 2025 management plan say 3,687, and the plan notes that the state bought more land from private owners in 1974. [S481][S506][S483]
They also disagree on the cemeteries. The park’s history page says it holds four old cemeteries. The management plan lists five by name: Langley, Branam, Snodderly, Hutchison and Norton. [S482][S483] By the plan’s count, remnants of the old farm world can still be found on or near the park land, including traces of 95 houses, 86 barns, 6 churches, 2 schools and 24 cemeteries. [S483]
Tennessee State Parks adds one more piece of history: records show a sit-in took place at Big Ridge, part of the push that eventually desegregated Tennessee’s state parks. The park page does not give a date, and neither do we. [S482]
The local paper’s 2020 column tells a story from the last years before the lake. L. B. Hutcheson became Union County sheriff in 1930 and was shot and killed by an escaped convict on December 6, 1935. The county court made his widow, Della Hutcheson, sheriff in his place, and the column calls her one of the state’s first female sheriffs. A year later she was among the hundreds of people the lake displaced. [S503] We have not found a state or county record for this, so we credit it to the column.
After the dam, people left. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says that over the next twenty years large numbers of people moved off the farms for jobs outside the county. Then the county began to tie itself to Knoxville. New businesses came, more people commuted, and in 1990 alone ten new manufacturing plants opened in the county. By the time the entry was written, about 85 percent of the county’s workers had jobs outside it. The population grew from 13,694 in 1990 to 17,808 in 2000, a 30 percent jump. [S472]
The encyclopedia does not hide the hard numbers either. In 1999 the county’s per capita income was $14,796, 91st of Tennessee’s 95 counties. In 1990, 37 percent of adults had less than nine years of schooling, more than twice the state rate. It also notes that high school graduates rose from 106 in 1994 to 180 in 1998. [S472] Those figures are now more than twenty-five years old. For current numbers, use the census and state data. The University of Tennessee’s county profile shows 19,109 people in 2010 and 19,802 in 2020. [S496]
Tourism and recreation are part of the county’s living now. The encyclopedia names the lake shoreline and Big Ridge as the main draws. [S472]
Maynardville is the county seat, named for Horace Maynard. The University of Tennessee’s municipal service lists its incorporation date as February 1, 1870, a 2010 Census population of 2,413 and a 2026 state estimate of 2,723. [S472][S497] Its main streets hold the county’s cluster of history markers: Horace Maynard, Roy Acuff, the Divided Loyalties Civil War marker, and the Union County World War I Monument. [S476][S491][S477][S488] The monument was put up in 1922 by the Local Exemption Board of Union County. Its two sides list the county’s soldiers of 1917-1918, and many of the surnames, among them Sharp, Stooksbary, Snoderly and Longmire, also turn up among the old Big Valley families. [S488][S503][S484]
Luttrell was incorporated on February 1, 1925, by a private act. MTAS gives it 1,074 people in 2010 and a 2026 estimate of 1,118. [S498] It is the hometown of Chet Atkins and Kenny Chesney. [S492][S494]
Plainview is the newest city. MTAS lists it as incorporated in 1992 under the state’s general law, with 2,125 people in 2010 and an estimated 2,263 in 2026. [S499]
Sharps Chapel is not incorporated. It is the peninsula community on the lake described above. [S472][S486]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia says four of the county’s sons are known around the world: Roy Acuff, Chet Atkins, Carl Smith and Kenny Chesney. It also names Lois Johnson, Hilda Kitts Harrill and Melba Kitts Greene among its best-known women entertainers. [S472] We checked the four men against the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the Hall’s records agree.
Roy Acuff was born in Maynardville on September 15, 1903. His father farmed and also served as Maynardville’s postmaster and pastor of the town’s Baptist church. Acuff learned folk ballads, fiddle tunes and hymns from neighbors, kin and traveling singing-school teachers. After a collapse at a baseball training camp ended his hopes of a major-league career, he took up the fiddle, played Knoxville radio, and joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1938 with "Great Speckled Bird." He co-founded Acuff-Rose Publications with Fred Rose and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1962. [S490] His state marker in Maynardville lists his songs, among them "Down in Union County." [S491]
Chet Atkins was born June 20, 1924, and the Hall of Fame lists his birthplace as Luttrell. He grew up in the hills near town, where his mother sang and played piano, and he learned guitar and fiddle playing with his brother, sister and stepfather. He started on Knoxville radio at WNOX, became one of Nashville’s early "A-Team" of session players, and later produced hit records at RCA. He entered the Hall of Fame in 1973. [S492][S495]
Carl Smith was born in Maynardville on March 15, 1927. The Hall of Fame calls him "a second famous son of Maynardville" after Acuff. He got his first radio work on Knoxville’s WROL in 1944. "Are You Teasing Me" went to No. 1 in 1952, and he had at least one record on the country charts every year from 1951 to 1973. He was inducted in 2003. [S493]
Kenny Chesney, born March 26, 1968, was raised in Luttrell, "also the hometown of Chet Atkins," and went to Gibbs High School in nearby Corryton. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2025. [S494]
The Union County Historical Society’s museum in Maynardville features its musicians, listing Acuff, Atkins, Chesney, Lois Johnson and Carl Smith on its home page. [S500]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia says Union County has sent two men to Congress: Lafayette Ledgerwood and J. Will Taylor. [S472] The House’s own records confirm Taylor. James Willis Taylor was born near Lead Mine Bend in Union County on August 28, 1880. He practiced law in LaFollette and was elected as a Republican to the Sixty-sixth Congress. He served in the House from March 4, 1919, until his death in LaFollette on November 14, 1939. [S489]
A name search of the House’s biographical records turned up no Ledgerwood, so we cannot confirm the encyclopedia’s second name and give no details for him. [S472][S489] Horace Maynard, the county seat’s namesake, served in Congress for many years, but he was a Knoxville man, not a native. [S475]
Union County’s history is easy to see if you know where to look. The markers in Maynardville tell the story of the county’s founding, its war and its music, and the overlook at Big Ridge looks out over the water that covers Loyston. [S476][S477][S491][S483] Most of what the lake took is gone for good. What survives is in cemeteries on the hillsides, CCC stonework at Big Ridge, the brick Ousley house, old records, and reunions of families who remember what is under the water. [S481][S485][S472]
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1777 | Capt. John "Racoon" Miller arrives in the area, by the state marker’s account [S479] |
| 1780s | First European American settlers in the Clinch River Valley, chiefly Sharps, Snodderlys, Hills and Rices [S484] |
| c. 1810 | Jake Sharp builds the brick house near Sharps Chapel later called the Baite Ousley House (some local accounts say 1835) [S485][S502] |
| c. 1825 | Grist mill built that the CCC later restores at Big Ridge [S481] |
| 1850 | General Assembly passes the act to create Union County (Jan. 3) [S472][S473] |
| 1856 | After lawsuits, Union County is formally created (Jan. 23); Liberty is renamed Maynardville [S472] |
| 1857 | Horace Maynard elected to Congress [S475] |
| 1861 | Secession vote; Union County’s returns are not in the published East Tennessee table [S480] |
| 1862 | Skirmish on the Powell River west of Maynardville (June 30) [S477] |
| 1863 | Fight at Walker’s Ford on the Clinch (Dec. 2) [S478] |
| 1866 | Clinch River post office operating on the peninsula [S502] |
| 1869 | Courthouse fire; Clinch River post office renamed Sharps Chapel (Jan. 25) [S473][S502] |
| 1870 | Maynardville incorporated (Feb. 1) [S497] |
| 1880 | J. Will Taylor born near Lead Mine Bend (Aug. 28) [S489] |
| 1903 | Roy Acuff born in Maynardville (Sept. 15) [S490] |
| 1922 | World War I monument erected in Maynardville [S488] |
| 1924 | Chet Atkins born (June 20); the Hall of Fame lists Luttrell [S492] |
| 1925 | Luttrell incorporated (Feb. 1) [S498] |
| 1927 | Carl Smith born in Maynardville (Mar. 15) [S493] |
| 1933 | Work begins on Norris Dam; Lewis Hine photographs Loyston [S22][S501] |
| 1934 | TVA begins buying Central Peninsula land; CCC starts Big Ridge (Oct. 20) [S486][S481] |
| 1936 | Norris Dam finished; Loyston and the river bottoms go under the lake; TVA’s Clinch River bridge completed [S359][S483][S487] |
| 1949 | TVA deeds Big Ridge to the state (Sept. 7) [S483] |
| 1952 | TVA sells the Central Peninsula to the state; it becomes Chuck Swan State Forest [S486] |
| 1975 | Baite Ousley House nominated to the National Register [S485] |
| 1990 | Ten new manufacturing plants open; population 13,694 [S472] |
| 1992 | Plainview incorporated [S499] |
| 2000 | Population 17,808 [S472] |
| 2020 | Census counts 19,802 people [S496] |
| 2025 | Kenny Chesney inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame [S494] |
Start in Maynardville. The Union County Historical Society’s museum and genealogical library is on Maynardville Highway, and the "Divided Loyalties" Civil War Trails marker lists the same street address. [S500][S477] Within a few blocks you can find the state markers for Horace Maynard at Main and Court streets and for Roy Acuff at Monroe Street, plus the 1922 World War I Monument on Main Street. [S476][S491][S488] On Wilson Lane, Wilson Park holds the marker built from pieces of TVA’s 1936 Clinch River bridge. [S487][S505] The Racoon Valley marker stands at Main Street and Ailor Gap Road. [S479] Check the museum’s website before you go.
Visit: Union County Historical Society Museum and Genealogical Library, 3824 Maynardville Hwy., Maynardville [S500]
At midday, drive to Big Ridge State Park. Walk the Old Mill Trail to the Norton Grist Mill, look at the CCC-built gatehouse and swim beach house, and take the Loyston Overlook trail to look out over the Loyston Sea, where the town used to be. [S483][S482] Some park buildings are closed for renovation from time to time, so check the park page for current conditions.
Visit: Big Ridge State Park, 1015 Big Ridge Park Rd., Maynardville [S506]
In the afternoon, choose between the lake and the battlefield. For the lake, head north to Sharps Chapel and Chuck Swan State Forest on the Central Peninsula. The forest’s 53 cemeteries are a reminder of the farms that were here before. Read the state forest’s page for road and use rules first; some forest roads are open only to certain kinds of traffic. [S486] For the Civil War, drive out Walker’s Ford Road to the Walker’s Ford marker at Hickory Valley Missionary Baptist Church, about three miles from the ford where the Federals held the Clinch crossing in December 1863. [S478]
Visit: Chuck Swan State Forest (Tennessee Division of Forestry) [S486]
If you want to see the dam itself, Norris Dam and TVA’s visitor center are just over the county line in Anderson County, off U.S. 441. [S359]
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 or leave a gap (for example, whether Union County was named for the union of five county pieces or for its people’s support of the federal Union, whether the county should be dated to the 1850 act or to its formal creation in 1856, how many acres Big Ridge State Park covers, whether four or five old cemeteries lie inside the park, whether the Ousley house near Sharps Chapel was built around 1810 or in 1835, how to spell Captain John Racoon or Raccoon Miller’s nickname, and whether a second congressman named by the encyclopedia appears in the House’s own records), we give both versions or say plainly what we could not confirm. We don’t republish encyclopedia, museum, park or marker text — follow the links for the full articles. Where a fact rests on a local newspaper column or a community history rather than an official record, the article says so.
Hero photo: Norris Lake at dusk from a marina deck, from our own photo library (the same image as our Campbell County history; Norris Lake borders both counties, and this is not a specific Union County landmark). Corrections: [email protected].