Morgan County, Tennessee

A short history

Organized in 1817 as Tennessee’s thirty-ninth county, mostly from Roane County land, Morgan County runs diagonally across the Cumberland Plateau toward the Kentucky line. It is named for Revolutionary War general Daniel Morgan; its first seat, Montgomery, honored Maj. Lemuel P. Montgomery, killed at Horseshoe Bend. The first permanent settlers, Samuel and Martin Hall, came after the 1805 Third Tellico Treaty opened the area. Coal was first mined in 1819.

In 1844 New York businessman George F. Gerding’s East Tennessee Colonization Company bought land across the plateau to bring German and Swiss settlers; the first fifty arrived from Mainz in 1845, founding Wartburg. They planted vineyards and orchards and worked as craftsmen — there was even a Wartburg piano company — but by 1870 fewer than a hundred German- and Swiss-born residents remained. In 1880 British reformer Thomas Hughes bought land for Rugby, a utopian colony for younger sons of English gentry; it, too, scattered by about 1900.

The Cincinnati Southern Railroad (1880) built up Sunbright, Lancing and Oakdale and brought summer visitors to Deer Lodge. In 1893 the legislature funded Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, which ended convict leasing though not convict coal mining. Today Frozen Head State Park, the Obed Wild and Scenic River, Catoosa WMA and Big South Fork bring visitors to the plateau.

Towns & communities

• Wartburg — county seat; the 1845 German-Swiss colony
• Rugby — Thomas Hughes’s 1880 English colony (on the Scott County line)
• Oakdale & Sunbright — railroad towns of the 1880s
• Deer Lodge — old summer resort on the plateau
• Petros — home of Brushy Mountain
• Coalfield & Lancing — coal and rail communities

Our place stories in and near Morgan County

• Windrock — off-road country on the Cumberland

Go deeper

• When Tennessee was North Carolina

Neighboring counties: Roane County · Anderson County · All counties →

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