East Tennessee History · County by county
The first county west of the mountains: buffalo trails and long hunters on Boone’s Creek, the county that once covered all of Tennessee, the oldest town in the state and the short-lived State of Franklin, frontier churches and the first abolition papers, a railroad that founded Johnson City, a county divided by war, a soldiers’ home and a teachers’ school that grew into a university, the 1928 recording sessions, a historic district that started a storytelling revival, a five-million-year-old fossil pond and the Nolichucky’s record flood.
Washington County is where Tennessee’s government began. North Carolina created it in November 1777 out of the western territory called the Washington District and named it for George Washington; at first the county took in the whole of what would become Tennessee. [S1029][S38][S1030] Jonesborough, its county seat, is the oldest town in the state, chartered by North Carolina in 1779 and laid out in 1780. [S1031][S1032] Johnson City, the largest of the county’s three incorporated towns, grew up around a railroad water tank in the 1850s and became the county’s industrial, medical and university center. [S1033][S1034]
The county’s story runs from long hunters and the first permanent white settlers through the short-lived State of Franklin, frontier churches and the nation’s first abolitionist papers, a Civil War that split neighbors and families, and a railroad boom that made Johnson City one of the largest cities in Tennessee by 1930. [S1029][S1034] In the twentieth century it gained a national soldiers’ home, a normal school that became East Tennessee State University, a place in early country music, a preserved historic Main Street and a storytelling festival each October that the Tennessee Encyclopedia ranks among the nation’s premier folklife events. [S1029][S1031][S1035] In 2020 the Census counted 133,001 people in the county. [S1033]
Long before any county lines, animal trails crossed the land at the foot of Buffalo Mountain. A Tennessee Historical Commission panel at the Tipton-Haynes site explains that buffalo and elk wore a lasting trace through the grasslands and springs there, that prehistoric peoples followed the herds, and that artifacts from pottery sherds to projectile points have been found on the grounds; it names the Chisca, Yuchi and Cherokee among the peoples who hunted and lived in the area. [S1036] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says Woodland Period Indians and later the Cherokees hunted the buffalo that came to the site’s natural spring, and that the buffalo trail later became the stage road from Jonesborough to Morganton, North Carolina. [S1037] The town of Jonesborough notes that it stands on land belonging to the Cherokee and Yuchi peoples. [S612]
In June 1673 James Needham and Gabriel Arthur, sent by the Virginia trader Abraham Wood to seek trade with the Cherokees, passed the spring on the great buffalo trail on their way to the towns on the Little Tennessee River. A 1946 monument at Tipton-Haynes calls them the first English-speaking men to set foot in Tennessee, and a 1975 marker from the Daughters of the American Colonists makes the same claim. [S1038][S1039] The monument also says Needham was killed by an Indian guide on a second journey west. [S1038]
Hunters came early. Daniel Boone left tangible evidence of his trips in the Boone’s Creek area, where settlers found a tree carved "D Boon cilled a bar on tree 1760." [S1029] A state marker points to the site of that beech tree and to a waterfall, then about four feet high, under which Boone is said to have hidden from a raiding party. [S1040] The 1946 monument says Boone followed the same buffalo trail in the 1760s, built a rough hunting camp near the spring, and hunted on the creek that has carried his name ever since. [S1038]
The frontier was violent from the start. A state marker east of Jonesborough points to the grave of Jesse Duncan, killed and scalped in 1765 and the first white man known to have been slain in the area. [S1041]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia calls William Bean and his family the first permanent white settlers in Tennessee, in 1768–69. [S1029] A state marker places Bean’s 1769 cabin on a knoll beside Boone’s Creek, on ground Boone had used as a hunting camp, and says Russell Bean, the first child born to permanent settlers, was born there; the town of Jonesborough’s timeline instead puts William and Lydia Bean’s cabin on the Watauga River. [S1042][S612] The 1946 monument at Tipton-Haynes places Bean’s settlement at the mouth of Boone’s Creek, which may reconcile the two. [S1038] Other settlers followed from Virginia and North Carolina. [S612]
Jacob Brown came from South Carolina to trade with the Cherokees. A state marker says he settled on the Nolichucky River in 1771 and that his purchase of two tracts from the Cherokees on March 25, 1775, was made beneath a great oak; the encyclopedia describes thousands of acres bought that year. [S1043][S1029] A 1938 tablet from the Daughters of the American Colonists adds that Brown served as merchant, gunsmith and blacksmith to the Cherokees and as a captain under John Sevier at Kings Mountain. [S1044]
The settlers on the Watauga, in what is now Carter County, formed the Watauga Association in 1772, a court of five magistrates that the Tennessee Encyclopedia calls the first white government in Tennessee. In 1777 the area became part of North Carolina, and the association disappeared the next year. [S5] The town of Jonesborough’s timeline says the Watauga and Nolichucky settlers bought great acreages from the Cherokees in 1775, nearly all of the six upper counties of today’s Tennessee, and petitioned North Carolina to be annexed. [S612]
A Jonesborough marker calls the Washington District of 1776 the first governmental division ever named for George Washington. [S1045] In November 1777 the North Carolina legislature made the district a county, the first west of the mountains (Chapter 31 of the Laws of North Carolina for 1777). [S1029][S1030][S612] Its boundaries took in the whole territory that would become Tennessee. [S1029] The Tennessee Blue Book notes that Carter and Greene counties were later cut from Washington, Greene in 1783 and Carter in 1796, and the state line marker between Washington and Greene still notes both dates. [S38][S1046]
The first court of the new county met on February 23, 1778, at the house of Colonel Charles Robertson on a branch of Sinking Creek. John Carter was chairman, John Sevier clerk, John McMahon register, Valentine Sevier sheriff and James Stuart surveyor. [S1047] County court minutes, wills and tax books survive from 1778–79 onward, and the state archives notes a courthouse fire in 1839. [S1030]
North Carolina’s General Assembly established Jonesborough in 1779 as the county seat and named it for Willie Jones of Halifax, North Carolina, who supported the western settlements. [S1031][S1032][S612] The town’s history says the location of the new courthouse was chosen at a meeting at Charles Robertson’s home, that John Carter, John Sevier, James Stuart and others were named to lay it out, and that 100 acres bought from David Hughes were divided into lots and offered by lottery. [S612] Work on a log courthouse covered with clapboards began in 1779, and the town was laid out in 1780. [S1029][S1031]
The Revolution reached the county in 1780. The over-mountain men gathered at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga that September and, led by John Sevier, helped defeat the British at Kings Mountain on October 7. [S612] Samuel Doak, the Presbyterian minister who settled in the county that year, preached his best-known sermon to them at Sycamore Shoals. [S888] Jacob Brown was one of Sevier’s captains in that battle. [S1044] Major Jesse Walton, remembered on a tablet in the county, served as Sevier’s second in command of the Washington District forces. [S1048]
In 1784 North Carolina voted to cede its western lands to Congress, and the settlers beyond the mountains found themselves without a government. [S1029][S6] Under the leadership of Arthur Campbell of southwestern Virginia and others, a meeting at Jonesborough in August 1784 decided unanimously for statehood, and a convention met on December 14, 1784, to reaffirm support for an independent state to be called Franklin. [S6] The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s county entry and a marker in Jonesborough treat August 1784 as the founding (the marker gives August 23); the town’s own timeline counts December 14 as the day delegates approved the new state. [S1029][S1049][S612] Jonesborough served as Franklin’s first capital, in 1784–85, before the government moved to Greeneville. [S1031][S1032][S612] The town dates John Sevier’s election as governor to March 1785; the encyclopedia’s Franklin entry places it at a third convention held the March after a November 1785 meeting. [S612][S6]
Not everyone accepted the new state. By August 1786 John Tipton had emerged as leader of the faction in Washington County loyal to North Carolina, and the contest became a bitter personal feud between Tipton and Sevier. [S6][S1029] Tipton, a Maryland native, had bought land near present-day Johnson City in 1784 and built a substantial log house there. [S1037][S1050]
In February 1788, under North Carolina orders, Washington County Sheriff Jonathan Pugh seized enslaved people belonging to Sevier to pay owed taxes and took them to Tipton’s for safekeeping. On February 27 Sevier and more than 100 Franklin militiamen laid siege to Tipton’s property. Talks failed, and when North Carolina militia from Sullivan County arrived on February 29, a skirmish of about ten minutes followed; three men were mortally wounded, Sheriff Pugh among them. Sevier retreated to Jonesborough. [S1051][S1037] The Tennessee Historical Commission calls it the only armed skirmish between supporters of Franklin and those loyal to North Carolina, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia says it marked Franklin’s demise. [S1050][S1037] Later that year Tipton arrested Sevier on a North Carolina warrant, and by early 1789 the Franklin movement was all but over. [S6]
Tipton’s cabin still forms the core of the Tipton-Haynes house. A commission panel says tree-ring samples taken in 2008 dated some of its logs to 1795–99, suggesting a rebuilding of similar size before 1800, and that oral history places Sevier’s enslaved people in the basement kitchen in 1788. [S1052] Tipton went on to serve in the territorial assembly, help frame Tennessee’s first constitution in 1796 and sit in the first two state legislatures. [S1037][S1050] The French botanist André Michaux stayed at his home in May 1795 and March 1796 and noted the spring wildflowers on the mountains. [S1053]
Settlers organized congregations quickly. Tidence Lane founded Buffalo Ridge Baptist Church in 1779, the first church in the county and, by the state marker’s account, the first Baptist church on Tennessee soil; the building was later moved to Gray’s Station, but the cemetery remains. [S1029][S1054] In 1780 Samuel Doak organized Salem Presbyterian Church, where in August 1785 the Abingdon Presbytery, the first on Tennessee soil, was formed with Doak as moderator. [S1029][S1055]
Doak also started a school. The county entry and a state marker call it Martin Academy, founded in 1780; Doak’s encyclopedia biography says the school was chartered as St. Martin’s Academy in 1783, the first chartered school in the region. In 1795, on John Sevier’s motion according to the marker, it became Washington College, and Doak served as its president until 1818. [S1029][S1056][S888] A Daughters of the American Revolution tablet calls it the first institution of learning west of the Alleghenies. [S1057] The sources part ways on Doak’s last years: the state marker says he died in 1829 at 80 and is buried on the campus, while the Tennessee Encyclopedia says he died on December 12, 1830, after moving to Tusculum, and is buried at Salem Church. [S1056][S888] Doak was also a delegate to the 1784 Franklin convention. [S888]
Other faiths followed. William Nelson built the first Methodist church, Nelson’s Chapel on Knob Creek Road, in 1789, and Bishop Francis Asbury held annual conferences at Nelson’s home in 1793, 1796 and 1797. [S1029][S1058] Quakers built their first meeting house near Telford, probably around 1800, and German settlers on Knob Creek organized the first Church of the Brethren in Tennessee about 1799. [S1029][S1059] The Immanuel Lutheran Church near Cherokee Creek was established between 1800 and 1805 by the encyclopedia’s account, or about 1807 by the state marker’s; the "Old Dutch Meeting House" held services in German and English and became a charter member of the Tennessee Synod in 1820. [S1029][S1060] Boone’s Creek Christian Church, organized in 1825, hosted the first recorded conference of Christian churches in East Tennessee in 1829. [S1029][S1061] Methodist camp meetings have been held at Sulphur Springs since 1820. [S1062]
In 1788 a 20-year-old lawyer named Andrew Jackson came to Jonesborough to wait for a party traveling west to the Cumberland settlements. He took the oath to practice law in North Carolina’s western district and boarded in the two-story log home of Christopher Taylor, a veteran of the French and Indian War and the Revolution. [S1029][S612][S1063] The state marker dates the house to 1777 and Jackson’s stay to 1788–89; the town’s plaque calls it a 1778 landmark. The house was moved from about two miles outside town to Main Street in 1974 to save it from demolition. [S1063][S1064]
Dr. William P. Chester of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, built the Chester Inn on the stage road in 1797 (about 1797–98 in the Tennessee Encyclopedia). It is the oldest frame building in Jonesborough’s commercial district. [S1065][S1066][S1067] The inn hosted Presidents Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson, and the commission says it was the first inn on the Tennessee frontier to offer featherbeds. Jackson held a reception for friends on its porch in the summer of 1832. [S1065][S1067] The Victorian porch was added in the 1880s, and the inn doubled in size in 1836. [S1065][S1066]
Washington County produced some of the country’s earliest antislavery publishing. Thomas Embree, a Quaker, and his son Elihu became known as advocates of abolition. [S1029] A Pennsylvania stonemason built the Embree house near Telford in 1791, and a state marker says Sarah Hawkins, John Sevier’s first wife, is buried nearby. [S1068] In 1819 Elihu Embree began publishing the Manumission Intelligencer in Jonesborough, and in April 1820 he replaced it with a monthly called the Emancipator. [S892][S612] The newspaper entry in the Tennessee Encyclopedia calls the Emancipator the first newspaper in the United States devoted entirely to abolition and the Intelligencer its forerunner; the encyclopedia’s county entry and a state marker give the first-of-its-kind credit to both papers. [S892][S1029][S1069] Both were printed by Jacob Howard. The Emancipator reached a circulation of more than 2,000 by October 1820, including readers in Boston and Philadelphia, and ended with Embree’s death that year. [S1069][S892] The town notes the contradiction that Embree had himself been an enslaver for most of his life; his will freed a woman named Nancy and her five children. [S612]
In the 1840s a Washington County farmer’s will led to a landmark case. Lloyd Ford freed five of his enslaved children and left them land; when his son Lloyd Ford Jr. contested the will, Phoebe Stuart filed suit for them as "next friend" because they had no legal standing. [S1070][S612] In 1846 Judge Nathan Green of the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that an enslaved person "is not in the condition of a horse or an ox" and upheld their right to bring suit. The heirs kept their freedom and the land; the town says they received their share of the estate in 1850. [S1071][S612] The town dates Ford’s death to 1842; the commission’s 2024 marker says 1843. [S612][S1070]
Jonesborough had grown into a busy town by the 1830s; an 1834 gazetteer counted about 500 residents, eleven lawyers and four taverns, and many of its brick Federal-style buildings date from the early 1840s. [S612] Bavarian-born Jewish merchants Herman Cone and Jacob Adler opened a store across from the Chester Inn; the Cone family later sent money back during the 1873 cholera epidemic. [S612]
Dr. Samuel Blair Cunningham of Jonesborough pushed for the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad, which was completed through the county in 1857–58. [S1029] The town says a group called the "Immortal Thirty," including Cunningham and merchant A. E. Jackson, mortgaged homes and businesses to fund the company, and that Cunningham drove the last spike in 1858. [S612] The line later became part of the Southern Railway and is now Norfolk Southern. [S612]
Henry Johnson saw an opportunity on the new line. In 1854 he built a store, depot and post office where the proposed railroad crossed the stage road; the county entry says he bought a half acre on the right-of-way and built a station and water tower. The village became known as Johnson’s Tank and then Johnson’s Depot. [S1034][S1029] A state marker lists still earlier names, Green Meadows and Blue Plum, on land granted to Robert and Joseph Young in 1782 and Joseph Tipton in 1792. [S1072]
The Tennessee Encyclopedia calls Washington County Unionist, like its northeastern neighbors. [S1029] The town of Jonesborough says the county voted against secession twice in close votes, but that the first regiments raised in Jonesborough were Confederate and several leading citizens became Confederate officers. The 1860 census counted 952 enslaved people in the county. [S612] Both armies passed through, and Jonesborough served as a headquarters for each; the Bell-Herrin House, with its trapdoors and tunnels, is thought to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad. [S1029][S612]
Alfred Eugene Jackson, a founder and financial agent of the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad, became a Confederate brigadier general and was later driven from town for some years after the war; he is buried in Jonesborough’s old cemetery. [S1073][S612] Landon Carter Haynes, who lived on the old Tipton farm, served in the Confederate Senate from 1862 to 1865 and pressed for harsher measures against East Tennessee Unionists. During the war Johnson’s Depot was renamed Haynesville in his honor. [S1074][S1034] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says David Haynes bought the Tipton property in 1837 and gave it to Landon as a wedding gift; the commission and the Civil War Trails marker date the gift to his 1839 marriage. [S1037][S1050][S1074] Pardoned by Andrew Johnson, Haynes moved to Memphis and died there in 1875. [S1074][S1050]
On September 8, 1863, at a bridge at Limestone Station, the 100th Ohio Infantry fought more than 1,000 of A. E. Jackson’s men. Out of ammunition and surrounded, the Ohioans surrendered; a state marker counts six Union dead and more than 250 captured, 85 of whom later died in Confederate prisons. [S1075]
After the war, Black and white residents worked to rebuild. [S1029] Hezekiah B. Hankal, born enslaved, was ordained by Boone’s Creek Christian Church in 1866, founded five churches, practiced medicine, served as one of the supervisors of "colored schools," and in 1887 was elected a Johnson City alderman. [S1076][S1029] The church he founded around 1869 put up a building in 1889 that also served as Johnson City’s second school for Black children; it is the oldest church and school building still standing in the city. [S1077] Johnson City’s St. Paul AME Zion and Thankful Baptist churches date from the late 1860s and 1870s. [S1034]
In Jonesborough the Holston Baptist Female Institute of 1854 later housed a Freedmen’s Bureau school, and in 1876 the Quaker Yardley Warner bought the building for Warner Institute, to educate Black students and train teachers. [S1031][S1078] The state marker says the school stayed open until 1910; the town says it served the Black community until it was sold in 1917. [S1078][S612] In 1874 James C. Cousins and James A. Bailey became the first African Americans to run for office in Jonesborough. [S612]
Science Hill, now Johnson City’s high school, began on land Tipton Jobe gave in 1867; the state marker says its brick building was dedicated in October 1867, while the Tennessee Encyclopedia dates the academy’s opening to 1868. [S1079][S1034] On December 1, 1869, the state chartered the town of Johnson City, with Henry Johnson as its first mayor. [S1034][S1029] A state marker adds that the charter was repealed in 1879 and the town incorporated again in 1885. [S1072]
In the 1880s northern industrialists invested in Johnson City. Former Union General John T. Wilder built a furnace to smelt iron ore from the Cranberry mines in North Carolina, carried by the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad, completed in 1882. [S1029] A Tweetsie Trail panel says Ario Pardee formed the Cranberry Iron and Coal Company in 1875 and that the three-foot narrow-gauge line reached Hampton by 1881 and Cranberry in 1882. [S1080] Called "the train with a heart" for the way its crews ran errands for mountain families, it later took the nickname Tweetsie from its shrill whistle. [S1080] Johnson City’s 1891 union depot served the line and the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railroad; because the narrow gauge crossed standard-gauge lines in town, some tracks had a third rail. [S1081][S1082] The Cranberry mine and Johnson City furnace closed in 1929, and the last narrow-gauge passenger train ran in 1950. [S1080]
For much of the late nineteenth century Johnson City was a boomtown, expecting to become an iron and steel hub. When a planned Chicago-to-Charleston railroad failed and the Panic of 1893 struck, its fortunes declined for several years. [S1034] The revival came after 1900, when George L. Carter built the Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio Railway. [S1029][S1034] Carter also developed the Southwest Addition in 1909, the last piece of what is now the Tree Streets Historic District. [S1083] In 1908 the city sold $49,000 in bonds to pave its muddy downtown streets with brick. [S1084] By 1930 Johnson City was the fifth-largest city in Tennessee. [S1034]
Congressman Walter P. Brownlow, a former Jonesboro postmaster, was instrumental in bringing Johnson City one of the National Homes for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers. [S1029][S1085] Congress approved the Mountain Branch on January 28, 1901. [S1086] The VA says the buildings were finished in 1903 and the first resident arrived that October; a state marker says the home opened in October 1903, while a VA cemetery panel says the first resident arrived in 1903, a year before the home officially opened. [S1087][S1086][S1085] The sources also differ on its size: 447 acres originally (state marker), about 400 acres (cemetery panel), or 200 acres today (Tennessee Encyclopedia). [S1086][S1085][S1029] Architect Joseph H. Freelander designed its Beaux Arts campus of local timber, brick and limestone, and peak enrollment topped 2,500 Civil War and Spanish-American War veterans. [S1085][S1086] In 1920 Congress allowed it to become a hospital for World War I veterans with tuberculosis and influenza, and the national homes joined the Veterans Administration in 1930. [S1087][S1086] Today it is the James H. Quillen VA Medical Center, with a national cemetery whose first burial was on September 18, 1903. [S1029][S1085]
The Education Act of 1909 created four state normal schools to train teachers, and the one at Johnson City enrolled its first students in October 1911 on land given by George L. Carter. [S1088][S1089] The encyclopedia’s county entry says Carter donated 120 acres in 1911. [S1029] The school’s first president was Sidney G. Gilbreath, and the state flag was first raised at its dedication on October 10, 1911. [S1089][S1088] It became a teachers college in the mid-1920s (1925 on the state marker), dropped "Teachers" from its name in 1941 (the Tennessee Encyclopedia) or became a college in 1943 (the state marker), and became East Tennessee State University in 1963. [S1088][S1089] The encyclopedia says the state established the Quillen College of Medicine in 1974; the marker says the medical school opened in 1978. [S1029][S1089] Its Archives of Appalachia hold manuscripts, photographs and recordings about the region. [S1088]
The 1920s brought banks, a library, theaters and the John Sevier Hotel, which opened on August 5, 1924, and was billed as the finest hotel between Roanoke and Chattanooga. [S1034][S1090] A local history-tour marker says the city was known in those years as "Little Chicago." [S1090]
In October 1928 Frank Walker of Columbia Records held auditions at the John Sevier and then recorded local musicians in a makeshift studio on East Main Street. Charlie Bowman and his brothers, Clarence Greene and the Roane County Ramblers were among those recorded, and Walker returned in October 1929 for a second round that included Clarence "Tom" Ashley. [S1091][S1092] The tour marker credits the 1928 session with "Roll On Buddy" and "Johnson City Blues," and the 1929 session with Ashley’s "Coo Coo Bird." [S1092] Bowman, a fiddler who wrote "Nine Pound Hammer," toured with the Hill Billies; his daughters Jennie and Pauline were among the first sister acts recorded in country music. [S1093]
Johnson City’s recording history did not stop there. In 1946 James Hobart Stanton founded Rich-R-Tone Records at 113 West Main Street, and the state marker calls it the first label dedicated to bluegrass. [S1094] A Tennessee Music Pathways marker says Rich-R-Tone issued the first records by the Stanley Brothers and by Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper before Stanton moved the label away in 1952. [S1095] Another state marker says the Tri-City Beverage Corporation in Johnson City was one of the first to bottle Mountain Dew in 1954, and that the citrus-lemonade flavor its plant manager put into Mountain Dew bottles in 1960 is the flavor sold today. [S1096]
The Depression and World War II brought New Deal projects, including the airport that became Tri-Cities Regional, along with TVA dams and lakes. Johnson City adopted the council-manager government it still uses. [S1034] The John Sevier Hotel closed in 1975 and reopened as senior apartments in 1978; a Christmas Eve fire there in 1989 killed sixteen people. [S1090]
Johnson City’s Langston High School, founded in 1893 and named for John Mercer Langston, was the city’s first public high school for African Americans; its first class graduated in 1897. Hezekiah Hankal was among Langston’s founders. [S1097][S1076] In January 1956 Eugene Caruthers, a Langston teacher, became the first Black graduate student at East Tennessee State College, and in August 1958 four Langston graduates enrolled as its first Black undergraduates. The state marker says the college was among the first public institutions in Tennessee to desegregate, and did so without incident. [S1098] Langston’s last class graduated in 1963, and Johnson City’s schools were fully integrated that fall. [S1097] In Jonesborough the Booker T. Washington School, a Works Progress Administration project, served Black children in grades one through eight from 1940 until the county’s schools were integrated in 1965. [S612]
Politics changed as well. The town says at least 720 women in Washington County registered and voted in a June 1919 local election, before the Nineteenth Amendment. [S612] Ernest McKinney became Jonesborough’s first Black alderman in 1968. [S612] May Ross McDowell became Johnson City’s first woman mayor in 1961, Grace Haws became Jonesborough’s first woman mayor in 1976, and in 1988 Kevin McKinney became Jonesborough’s first African American mayor. [S1029][S612]
Jonesborough was early to the preservation movement. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says it became the first historic district in Tennessee in 1969; the town says its district joined the National Register on December 23, 1969, the second in the state after Beale Street in Memphis. [S1029][S612] The district includes the Chester Inn, the Christopher Taylor House, the 1820s Sisters Row, the Greek Revival Presbyterian church of 1845–47 and the 1913 courthouse designed by Baumann and Baumann of Knoxville. [S1031]
In 1973 the Jonesborough Civic Trust sponsored a storytelling festival. The town says teacher Jimmy Neil Smith set up a hay wagon stage in the shadow of the courthouse, and storytellers including Ray Hicks shared tales with a small crowd. [S1029][S612] The Tennessee Encyclopedia says about sixty people came the first year, a thousand by 1980 and five thousand by the mid-1980s; the town now counts more than 15,000 visitors on the first full weekend of each October. [S1035][S612] The Chester Inn served as a center of that first festival, and the storytelling center built beside it opened in 2001. [S1066][S1035] The Tennessee Encyclopedia calls the event the National Storytelling Festival; the town calls it the International Storytelling Festival. [S1035][S612]
The state bought the Chester Inn and began restoring it in the early 1990s, and since 2011 its cellar has housed the Chester Inn Museum on the town’s history. [S1065] The Tipton-Haynes farm was conveyed to the state in 1944–45 by Simerly descendants and opened to the public in the early 1970s; it is run by the Tipton-Haynes Historical Association. [S1037][S1050]
In May 2000 a state transportation geologist widening State Route 75 near Gray noticed strange black and gray clays and brought samples to the Tennessee Geological Survey. On May 31, 2000, a joint visit turned up the first bones within minutes. [S1099] The deposit, which geologists suspected was an ancient sinkhole pond, held tapirs, rhinoceros, alligators, turtles and many smaller animals. The road was moved, and the Gray Fossil Site and Museum opened in 2007 under East Tennessee State University. [S1099][S1100] More than 100 species have been found there, including a red panda relative, Pristinailurus bristoli, and the oldest known fossil wolverine. [S1100]
In late September 2024 the remnants of Hurricane Helene brought catastrophic flooding to Northeast Tennessee. Washington County officials told residents of some communities to evacuate, and federal aid for evacuation and shelter was authorized for the county. [S940] The state reported that at one point more than 1.2 million gallons per second poured over the Nolichucky Dam, and an expedited major disaster declaration was granted for Washington and seven neighboring counties. [S1101]
Visit: Our Washington County guide has towns, parks and local news.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1673 | James Needham and Gabriel Arthur pass the Buffalo Mountain spring on the way to the Cherokee towns [S1038] |
| 1760 | Boone’s "cilled a bar" tree on Boone’s Creek [S1029] |
| 1765 | Jesse Duncan killed, the first known white death in the area [S1041] |
| 1768–69 | William Bean’s family settles on Boone’s Creek [S1029][S1042] |
| 1775 | Jacob Brown buys Nolichucky lands from the Cherokees [S1043] |
| 1776 | Washington District named [S1045] |
| 1777 | North Carolina creates Washington County [S1029][S1030] |
| 1778 | First county court at Charles Robertson’s [S1047] |
| 1779 | Jonesborough established; Buffalo Ridge Baptist Church founded [S1031][S1054] |
| 1780 | Jonesborough laid out; Samuel Doak’s Salem Church and school [S1031][S1029] |
| 1784 | State of Franklin organized at Jonesborough [S6] |
| 1788 | Battle at Tipton’s; Andrew Jackson in Jonesborough [S1051][S612] |
| 1795 | Doak’s academy becomes Washington College [S1056] |
| 1797 | Chester Inn built [S1065] |
| 1819–20 | Embree’s Manumission Intelligencer and Emancipator [S892] |
| 1846 | Tennessee Supreme Court rules in Ford v. Ford [S1071] |
| 1857–58 | East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad completed [S1029] |
| 1863 | Skirmish at Limestone Station [S1075] |
| 1869 | Johnson City chartered [S1034] |
| 1876 | Warner Institute opens [S1078] |
| 1882 | ET&WNC reaches Cranberry [S1080] |
| 1893 | Langston school founded [S1097] |
| 1901–03 | Mountain Home authorized and opened [S1086] |
| 1911 | East Tennessee State Normal School opens [S1088] |
| 1928–29 | Johnson City Sessions for Columbia Records [S1091] |
| 1946 | Rich-R-Tone Records founded [S1094] |
| 1958 | First Black undergraduates at ETSC [S1098] |
| 1963 | ETSU gains university status [S1088] |
| 1969 | Jonesborough Historic District listed [S612] |
| 1973 | First storytelling festival [S1035] |
| 2000 | Gray Fossil Site discovered [S1099] |
| 2007 | Gray Fossil Site and Museum opens [S1100] |
| 2020 | Census counts 133,001 people [S1033] |
| 2024 | Helene floods the Nolichucky [S1101] |
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 William Bean’s 1768–69 or 1769 cabin stood on Boone’s Creek (state marker) or on the Watauga River (the town’s timeline); whether the State of Franklin was organized at Jonesborough in August 1784 (the Tennessee Encyclopedia and a Jonesborough marker, which gives August 23) or when the December 14, 1784, convention approved it (the town’s timeline, though the encyclopedia’s Franklin entry dates that convention as a reaffirmation); whether the Christopher Taylor house was built in 1777 (state marker) or 1778 (the town’s plaque), and whether Andrew Jackson lived there in 1788 or in 1788–89; whether the Chester Inn dates from 1797 (state marker and Tennessee Historical Commission) or about 1797–98 (Tennessee Encyclopedia); whether Samuel Doak’s school is best called Martin Academy (state marker and county entry) or St. Martin’s Academy, chartered in 1783 (his encyclopedia biography), and whether he died in 1829 and lies on the Washington College campus (state marker) or died December 12, 1830, and is buried at Salem Church (Tennessee Encyclopedia); whether the 1819 Manumission Intelligencer was itself the first abolitionist journal (the county entry and a state marker, which counts both papers) or only the forerunner of the 1820 Emancipator (the encyclopedia’s newspaper entry); whether Lloyd Ford died in 1842 (the town) or 1843 (state marker); whether Landon Carter Haynes received the Tipton farm after David Haynes bought it in 1837 (Tennessee Encyclopedia) or as an 1839 wedding gift (Tennessee Historical Commission and Civil War Trails); whether Science Hill opened in 1867 (state marker) or 1868 (Tennessee Encyclopedia); whether Warner Institute closed in 1910 (state marker) or in 1917 (the town); when the Mountain Home soldiers’ home opened (October 1903 per the VA and a state marker, or officially in 1904 per a VA cemetery panel) and how large it was (200, about 400, or 447 acres); whether East Tennessee State dropped “Teachers” from its name in 1941 (Tennessee Encyclopedia) or became a college in 1943 (state marker), and whether its medical school dates from 1974 (Tennessee Encyclopedia) or opened in 1978 (state marker); and whether the Jonesborough Historic District was Tennessee’s first (Tennessee Encyclopedia) or the state’s second, after Beale Street (the town). We also give both dates for John Sevier’s election as Franklin’s governor (March 1785 in the town’s timeline, or the March after November 1785 in the encyclopedia) and for the Immanuel Lutheran congregation (1800–05 or about 1807), and we note where the festival is called national (Tennessee Encyclopedia) or international (the town). 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 Washington County sits in the northeast; it is not a photograph of Washington County, and no endorsement by any agency or source is implied. Reused source numbers (S5, S6, S38, S612, S888, S892, S940) match the same sources on our other history pages. Corrections: [email protected].