Before settlers, this was Cherokee hunting country. A Cherokee village once stood at the mouth of Stony Creek on the Clinch River, and bands hunted the slopes that would become Scott County. Thomas McCulloch is recorded as the first European-American settler to arrive, in 1769. Five years later Daniel Boone commanded several frontier forts here during Dunmore's War, helping protect the trickle of settlers pushing through what colonists called the backcountry. The Wilderness Road - opened by Boone and his crew in 1775 - cut through the county on its way to Kentucky, and for the next thirty years a hard, mostly Scots-Irish settler population followed it west. Bob Benge, a leader the settlers called Chickamauga Cherokee, fought a long resistance against this encroachment; he was killed in 1794. By the time the county was formally created in 1814, yeoman farmers had been raising houses in its valleys for two decades.

Poor Valley, in the southern part of the county at the foot of Clinch Mountain, holds the small settlement of Maces Spring. In 1891, in a one-room log cabin there, Alvin Pleasant Delaney Carter was born. He grew up to be A.P. Carter, who married Sara Dougherty in 1915 and recruited her first cousin Maybelle Addington into a trio that recorded their first records for Ralph Peer in Bristol in 1927. The Carter Family - A.P., Sara, and Maybelle - put much of the foundation of American country and folk music on wax over the next decade and a half. Maybelle's daughter June would marry Johnny Cash. Janette Carter, A.P. and Sara's daughter, founded the Carter Family Fold concert pavilion in Maces Spring in 1979. The Fold still hosts old-time and bluegrass music every Saturday night. The county's other famous daughter, June Carter Cash, was born across the line in Virginia but raised here too.

Geography here is defined by the Clinch River and the long, parallel ridges that channel it - Clinch Mountain, Powell Mountain, the smaller knobs in between. Natural Tunnel State Park, north of Duffield, contains an 850-foot-long natural cave through which a creek and a working rail line both pass. Daniel Boone reportedly explored the tunnel in 1775. The Appalachian Regional Commission counts Scott County as part of Greater Appalachia, and the late writer Colin Woodard's book American Nations places it in that cultural region as well. The fall color on the ridges is, in good years, spectacular - the kind that draws people who otherwise might never visit. The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, John Fox Jr.'s 1908 novel and the Virginia outdoor drama based on it, draws on the same mountains.

Six small towns - Clinchport, Duffield, Dungannon, Gate City, Nickelsville, Weber City - dot the county. So do unincorporated places with names worth saying out loud: Speers Ferry, Snowflake, Wadlow Gap, Yuma, Daniel Boone (named for the explorer). Scott County's first public schools opened in 1870, during Reconstruction; wealthy planters had paid for their own children before that and considered the rest no responsibility of theirs. The economy now leans on cross-county Tri-Cities employers around Kingsport and Bristol, with smaller education and health-care employers in Gate City. Politically the county has been a Republican stronghold for two decades; from 2016 forward it gave Donald Trump more than 80 percent of its votes. It last voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1976. The 539 square miles of mountains hold a smaller population than they did a generation ago, but the music made here still travels.