Qualla: Hawkins County, Tennessee

Hawkins County, Tennessee: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian Stansberry, CC BY 3.0. In 1797, Louis Philippe traveled across upper East Tennessee and stopped at William Armstrong's estate on the Holston River. He was, at the time, a French aristocrat in exile, the eldest son of a duke executed in the Revolution. Thirty-three years later he would become King of the French. He almost certainly did not know that the rough frontier county he was crossing had been named the previous decade for Benjamin Hawkins, a North Carolina senator with a parallel preoccupation: serving as the federal government's chief diplomat to the Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw nations. The county still bears Hawkins's name, the future king moved on, and the Holston kept rolling toward the Tennessee.

Image: Brian Stansberry | CC BY 3.0

Hawkins County, Tennessee: Land Grant and Founding

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lewis Hine, Public domain. Armstrong received the land that became Hawkins County as a North Carolina land grant in the 1780s, back when North Carolina still claimed everything west to the Mississippi. He built Stony Point, his fortified home in what is now Surgoinsville. When the county was formally estab...

Image: Lewis Hine | Public domain

Hawkins County, Tennessee: Rogersville and Big Creek

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AppalachianCentrist, CC BY-SA 4.0. The county seat, Rogersville, was founded by Joseph Rogers, whose father-in-law Thomas Amis had built a fortified stone inn on Big Creek two miles east in 1780-1782. The Amis House, listed on the National Register in 1973, ranks as one of the oldest buildings in East Tennessee. R...

Image: AppalachianCentrist | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hawkins County, Tennessee: Bays Mountain and the Hawkins County Landscape

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matikal2012, CC BY-SA 3.0. Hawkins County covers 500 square miles in the upper Holston Valley. Bays Mountain, a Ridge-and-Valley range, rises in the southeastern corner. Clinch Mountain runs along the northwestern edge, a long unbroken ridge separating the county from the more remote upcountry of Hancock C...

Image: Matikal2012 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hawkins County, Tennessee: Trail of the Lonesome Pine

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nathan Metcalf, CC BY-SA 4.0. State Route 70, which runs through Hawkins County, carries the regional moniker Trail of the Lonesome Pine, borrowed from John Fox Jr.'s 1908 novel of the same name. The book, set in the Cumberland mountains during the coalfields' opening, became one of the best-selling American ...

Image: Nathan Metcalf | CC BY-SA 4.0