Knoxville is a city in Knox County, Tennessee, United States, and its county seat. Located on the Tennessee River within the Appalachian Mountains, it is the largest city in the Grand Division of East Tennessee. Knoxville had a population of 190,740 at the 2020 census, making it the third-most-populous city in Tennessee. The Knoxville metropolitan area has an estimated 958,000 residents.
Settled in 1786, Knoxville was the first capital of Tennessee. The city struggled with geographic isolation throughout the early 19th century before the arrival of the railroad in 1855 led to an economic boom. The city was bitterly divided over the issue of secession during the American Civil War and was occupied alternately by the Confederate and Union armies, which culminated in the Battle of Fort Sanders in 1863. Following the war, Knoxville grew rapidly and became a major wholesaling and manufacturing center until the 1920s when the city's economy began to stagnate. During the Great Depression, Knoxville's manufacturing sector collapsed, the downtown area declined, and city leaders became entrenched in highly partisan political fights. Hosting the 1982 World's Fair helped reinvigorate the city, and revitalization initiatives by city leaders and private developers have spurred growth in the city, especially downtown.
Knoxville is home to the University of Tennessee's flagship campus, and the Tennessee Volunteers athletic teams are popular in the surrounding area.
Knoxville is home to the Tennessee Supreme Court's courthouse for East Tennessee. It serves as the headquarters of the Tennessee Valley Authority and several national and regional companies, including Pilot Company, Clayton Homes, Bush Brothers, and H. T. Hackney Company.
As one of the largest cities in the Appalachian region, Knoxville has positioned itself in recent years as a repository of Appalachian culture and gateway to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
History
Early history
The first people to form substantial settlements in what is now Knoxville were indigenous people who arrived during the Woodland period (c. 1000 B.C. to 1000 A.D.). One of the oldest artificial structures in Knoxville is a burial mound constructed during the early Mississippian culture period (c. 1000–1400 A.D.). The earthwork mound was preserved, but the University of Tennessee campus developed around it.
Other prehistoric sites include an Early Woodland habitation area at the confluence of the Tennessee River and Knob Creek (near the Knox–Blount county line) and Dallas phase Mississippian villages at Post Oak Island (also along the river near the Knox–Blount line) and at Bussell Island (at the mouth of the Little Tennessee River near Lenoir City).
By the 18th century, the Cherokee, an Iroquoian language people, had become the dominant tribe in the East Tennessee region. They are believed to have migrated from the Great Lakes region centuries earlier. They were frequently at war with the Creek and Shawnee.
The Cherokee people called the Knoxville area kuwanda'talun'yi, which means "mulberry place". Most Cherokee habitation in the area concentrated in what American colonists called the Overhill settlements along the Little Tennessee River, southwest of Knoxville.
The first white traders and explorers arrived in the Tennessee Valley in the late 17th century. There is significant evidence that Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto visited Bussell Island in 1540.
However, the first major recorded Euro-American presence in the Knoxville area was the Timberlake Expedition, which passed through the area in December 1761 at the confluence of the Holston River and French Broad River into the Tennessee River. A British soldier and Anglo-American emissary from the Thirteen Colonies to the Overhill settlements, Henry Timberlake appreciated the Tennessee's deep waters after his party had spent several weeks struggling down the relatively shallow Holston.
Settlement
The end of the French and Indian War in 1763 and the confusion brought about by the American Revolution led to a drastic increase in Euro-American settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. By the 1780s, white settlers were already established in the Holston and French Broad valleys. In 1785 the U.S. Congress ordered all illegal settlers out of the valley but to little effect. Settlers continued to trickle into Cherokee lands, and tensions between the settlers and the Cherokee rose.
In 1786, James White, a Revolutionary War officer, and his friend James Connor built White's Fort near the mouth of First Creek, on land White had purchased three years earlier. In 1790, White's son-in-law, Charles McClung—who had arrived from Pennsylvania the previous year—surveyed White's holdings between First Creek and Second Creek for the establishment of a town. McClung drew up sixty-four 0.5-acre (0.20 ha) lots. The waterfront was set aside for a town common. Two lots were set aside for a church and graveyard (First Presbyterian Church, founded 1792). Four lots were set aside for a school. That school was eventually chartered as Blount College and it served as the starting point for the University of Tennessee, which uses Blount College's founding date of 1794 as its own.
In 1790, President George Washington appointed North Carolina surveyor William Blount governor of the newly created Territory South of the River Ohio. One of Blount's first tasks was to meet with the Cherokee and establish territorial boundaries and resolve the issue of illegal settlers. This he accomplished almost immediately with the Treaty of Holston, which was negotiated and signed at White's Fort in 1791. Blount originally wanted to place the territorial capital at the confluence of the Clinch River and Tennessee River (now Kingston), but when the Cherokee refused to cede this land, Blount chose White's Fort. Blount named the new capital Knoxville after Revolutionary War General and Secretary of War Henry Knox, who at the time was Blount's immediate superior.
Problems immediately arose from the Treaty of Holston. Blount believed that he had "purchased" much of what is now East Tennessee when the treaty was signed in 1791. However, the terms of the treaty came under dispute, culminating in ongoing violence on both sides. When the government invited Cherokee chief Hanging Maw for negotiations in 1793, Knoxville settlers attacked the Cherokee against orders, killing the chief's wife. Peace was renegotiated in 1794.
Antebellum era
Knoxville served as capital of the Southwest Territory and as capital of Tennessee (admitted as a state in 1796) until 1817, when the capital was moved to Murfreesboro. Early Knoxville has been described as an "alternately quiet and rowdy river town". Early issues of the Knoxville Gazette—the first newspaper published in Tennessee—are filled with accounts of murder, theft, and hostile Cherokee attacks. Abishai Thomas, a friend of William Blount, visited Knoxville in 1794 and wrote that, while he was impressed by the town's modern frame buildings, the town had "seven taverns" and no church.
Knoxville initially thrived as a way station for travelers and migrants heading west. Its location at the confluence of three major rivers in the Tennessee Valley brought flatboat and later steamboat traffic to its waterfront in the first half of the 19th century, and Knoxville quickly developed into a regional merchandising center. Local agricultural products—especially tobacco, corn, and whiskey—were traded for cotton, which was grown in the Deep South. The population of Knoxville more than doubled in the 1850s with the arrival of the East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad in 1855.
Among the most prominent citizens of Knoxville during the Antebellum years was James White's son, Hugh Lawson White (1773–1840). White first served as a judge and state senator, before being nominated by the state legislature to replace Andrew Jackson in the U.S. Senate in 1825. In 1836, White ran unsuccessfully for president, representing the Whig Party.
American Civil War
Anti-slavery and anti-secession sentiment ran high in East Tennessee in the years leading up to the Civil War. William "Parson" Brownlow, the radical publisher of the Knoxville Whig, was one of the region's leading anti-secessionists (although he strongly defended the practice of slavery). Blount County, just south of Knoxville, had developed into a center of abolitionist activity, due in part to its relatively large Quaker faction and the anti-slavery president of Maryville College, Isaac Anderson. The Greater Warner Tabernacle AME Zion Church was reportedly a station on the Underground Railroad.
Business interests, however, guided largely by Knoxville's trade connections with cotton-growing centers to the south, contributed to the development of a strong pro-secession movement within the city. The city's pro-secessionists included among their ranks J. G. M. Ramsey, a prominent historian whose father had built the Ramsey House in 1797.
Thus, while East Tennessee and greater Knox County voted decisively against secession in 1861, the city of Knoxville favored secession by a 2–1 margin. In late May 1861, just before the secession vote, delegates of the East Tennessee Convention met at Temperance Hall in Knoxville in hopes of keeping Tennessee in the Union. After Tennessee voted to secede in June, the convention met in Greeneville and attempted to create a separate Union-aligned state in East Tennessee.
In July 1861, after Tennessee had joined the Confederacy, General Felix Zollicoffer arrived in Knoxville as commander of the District of East Tennessee. While initially lenient toward the city's Union sympathizers, Zollicoffer instituted martial law in November, after pro-Union guerrillas burned seven of the city's bridges. The command of the district passed briefly to George Crittenden and then to Kirby Smith, who launched an unsuccessful invasion of Kentucky in August 1862. In early 1863, General Simon Buckner took command of Confederate forces in Knoxville. Anticipating a Union invasion, Buckner fortified Fort Loudon (in West Knoxville, not to be confused with the colonial fort to the southwest) and began constructing earthworks throughout the city. However, the approach of stronger Union forces under Ambrose Burnside in the summer of 1863 forced Buckner to evacuate Knoxville before the earthworks were completed.
Burnside arrived in early September 1863, beginning the Knoxville campaign. Like the Confederates, he immediately began fortifying the city. The Union forces rebuilt Fort Loudon and erected 12 other forts and batteries flanked by entrenchments around the city. Burnside moved a pontoon bridge upstream from Loudon, allowing Union forces to cross the river and to build a series of forts along the heights of south Knoxville, including Fort Stanley and Fort Dickerson.
As Burnside was fortifying Knoxville, a Confederate army under Braxton Bragg defeated Union forces under William Rosecrans at the Battle of Chickamauga (near the Tennessee-Georgia line) and laid siege to Chattanooga. On November 3, 1863, the Confederates sent General James Longstreet to attack Burnside at Knoxville and prevent him from reinforcing the Union at Chattanooga. Longstreet wanted to attack the city from the south, but lacking the necessary pontoon bridges he was forced to cross the river further downstream at Loudon on November 14 and march against the city's heavily fortified western section. On November 15, General Joseph Wheeler unsuccessfully attempted to dislodge Union forces in the heights of south Knoxville, and the following day Longstreet failed to cut off retreating Union forces at the Battle of Campbell's Station (now Farragut).
On November 18, Union General William P. Sanders was mortally wounded while conducting delaying maneuvers west of Knoxville, and Fort Loudon was renamed Fort Sanders in his honor. On November 29, following a two-week siege, the Confederates attacked Fort Sanders but failed after a fierce 20-minute engagement. On December 4, after word of the Confederate defeat at Chattanooga reached Longstreet, he broke his siege of Knoxville. The Union victories in the Knoxville campaign and at Chattanooga put much of East Tennessee under Union control for the rest of the war.
Reconstruction and the Industrial Age
After the war, northern investors such as brothers Joseph and David Richards helped Knoxville recover relatively quickly. The Richards brothers convinced 104 Welsh immigrant families to migrate from the Welsh Tract in Pennsylvania to work in a rolling mill. These Welsh families settled in an area now known as Mechanicsville. The Richards brothers also co-founded the Knoxville Iron Works beside the L&N Railroad, also employing Welsh workers. Later, the site was used as the grounds for the 1982 World's Fair.
Other companies that sprang up during this period were Knoxville Woolen Mills, Dixie Cement, and Woodruff's Furniture. Between 1880 and 1887, 97 factories were established in Knoxville, most of them specializing in textiles, food products, and iron products. By the 1890s, Knoxville was home to more than 50 wholesaling houses, making it the third largest wholesaling center by volume in the South. The Candoro Marble Works, established in the community of Vestal in 1914, became the nation's foremost producer of pink marble and one of the nation's largest marble importers. In 1896, Knoxville celebrated its achievements by creating its own flag. The Flag of Knoxville, Tennessee represents the city's progressive growth due to agriculture and industry.