Neighboring County News
MARION COUNTY:
Vol. II of "Keepsake Memories" of Marion County, TN, one third of the book is devoted to the Indian history of Marion County, going back to the 1700s.
It is now available for purchase. Only soft bound books available at the moment, but will order more hard bound books soon.
Prices for the soft bound book is $40.50 (plus $3.75 for tax). Shipping and handling is $2.75.
Also available is the map that the book was created from for $8.50 (plus .93 cents tax). If ordered with book, it can be folded and mailed with the book. There is no additional shipping and handling for both items.
Call 1-423-942-5486
Have ancestors in Marion County? Check to see if you can find photographs of them on this webpage! If not, why not send in your ancestor's photographs for other researchers to find! This page is part of Rootsweb.
Jasper
By Sharon Barnes Cline
Submitted by Katie Goforth
The year was 1795. The United States was beginning to expand west across the continent. Tennessee was within months of becoming the seventeenth state of the new nation. Most of the land west of the original thirteen states was still Indian Territory. The state of North Carolina had just given large parcels of land, that would become Marion County, in the form of land grants to three men: Landon Carter, Stokely Donaldson and John Sevier. Eventually, these men sold their land to the early settlers of Marion County. Due to the efforts of early settlers, Marion County became a Governmental Unit of Tennessee under the Tennessee Legislative Act of 1819. Five citizens were named county commissioners by the Tennessee General Assembly and were instructed to set up a county seat near the center of the new county. The county was named Marion, in honor of Francis Marion, a hero from the Revolutionary War. Marion was known as The Swamp Fox.
Located in the southeastern corner of Tennessee, most of Marion County was still Cherokee Indian Land. Calhoun’s Treaty, signed Feb. 27, 1819, between the United States and the Cherokee Nation, surrendered all Cherokee land north of the Tennessee River to the United States and designated that land as Tennessee Reservations. This land was then allocated to certain Cherokees, one of those being local resident Elizabeth Lowery Pack, daughter of Chief John Lowery. She was allotted six hundred forty acres.
As stated in the land deed registered at Marion County Courthouse, Elizabeth Pack, a “Cherokee Indian squaw” owning six hundred forty acres of land in and around the area that is now Jasper, donated forty acres to the commissioners of the village of Jasper in order to establish a county seat for the new county. The commissioners named the town Jasper after Sergeant William Jasper, a Revolutionary War hero from the Battle of Charleston Harbor at Fort Sullivan. The town of Jasper was incorporated in 1819.
The county seat was moved from Cheekville, now known as Whitwell, to Jasper to establish a centrally located county seat. The county commissioners set aside an area of the forty acres for the courthouse, then divided and sold the remaining land. Money from the sale of the land was used to build the courthouse and establish the town. By the early 1820’s Jasper had a courthouse, jail, county offices, and a post office. Like most small town county seats in Tennessee, Jasper was centered around the courthouse square.
The original courthouse was built of handmade bricks. According to the writings of Captain W.E. Donaldson, a Jasper attorney in the 1890’s, Mr. Wallace Estill constructed the building in 1819. Upon its completion, Mr. Estill gave a ball in the courthouse on January 1, 1820.
During his 1874 campaign for the U.S. Senate, former President Andrew Johnson spoke to a large crowd from the east door of the courthouse. A new courthouse was erected on the same site five years later in 1879. The new courthouse was destroyed by fire in 1922. The present-day courthouse was built in the same location. It was badly damaged by fire in 1984 and completely renovated in 1986.
Since its incorporation, Jasper has been the center for many activities involving county citizens. On October 7, 1824, Lodge #53 of the Free and Accepted Masons was established in Jasper just eleven years after the State Grand Lodge was organized. Among the thirty-eight charter members of Lodge #53 were Chief John Ross of the Cherokee Nation, Major George Lowery, a relative of Chief John Lowery and United States Senator Hopkins Turney, an outspoken secessionist.
The Turney family lived in a house located where First Volunteer Bank is today. In 1827 Senator Turney’s oldest son, Peter, was born. Peter Turney grew up to become a Tennessee State Supreme Court Justice; later he was elected Governor of Tennessee in 1893 and again in 1895.
Major George Lowery was the brother in law of Sequoyah, the Cherokee Indian famous for inventing the Cherokee writing system. Sequoyah lived with his sister and her husband, Major Lowery, in Jasper for some time. He most likely hunted and enjoyed the land of Marion County that is still hunted and enjoyed today.
By 1834, according to the book, Marion County by Nonie Webb, neighboring Hamilton County had a population of only eight hundred twenty-one people, while Marion County’s population had already grown to three thousand, five hundred eighty-eight. The fertile land of Marion County included twenty miles of Tennessee River frontage and provided an excellent environment for hunting and farming. The fact that Jasper set astride stagecoach routes going from Knoxville, TN, to Huntsville, AL, and from Nashville, TN, to Dalton, GA, was also essential to increasing the population. Those routes later became state Highways 41, 27, and 72. Only fifteen years after its incorporation Jasper had grown to a population of one hundred eighty people.
As population flourished, the need for educational facilities became apparent.
Land was purchased in 1853 to erect the Sam Houston Academy, named for Tennessee Governor Sam Houston. Sam Houston Academy was one of the first public schools in the Sequatchie Valley. The first academy was an all male school and was located on the east side of town where AmSouth Bank is today. In 1856 the Jasper Female Institute was created near the all male school. Chapter 118 of the Tennessee Public Acts of 1856 divided public funds between the two schools. Because of the division of funding and the fact that five of the trustees of the Female Institute were also trustees of the Sam Houston Academy, the two schools merged and became the Jasper Male & Female Institute, and was later renamed the Sam Houston Academy.
Construction of the new building was begun in 1860, but not completed until 1867 due to the outbreak of the Civil War. The question of Jasper’s secession was argued in the Sam Houston Academy. At different times during the war, the building was used as a hospital for both Northern and Southern troops. According to a 1930 article in the Chattanooga Times, by P.H. Thach, General Ulysses S. Grant ate supper and camped overnight near the academy campus while traveling from Louisville, KY, to Chattanooga, TN. In 1922, the Sam Houston Academy was vacated. The Masonic Lodge purchased the building in 1931.
The Sam Houston Academy was not the only school established in Jasper. Jasper community leaders organized the building of Pryor Institute in 1887 due to community dissatisfaction with the academy’s limited curriculum. For twenty-one years Pryor Institute served as the county’s only school comparable to a high school. Even though affiliated with the Methodist Episcopal Church South, the institute was financed entirely by private donations. Pryor Institute was named for its two leading benefactors, Jackson and Washington Pryor. Pryor Institute offered boarding for out of town and out of state students and had an approximate average attendance of one hundred students each year it was in operation.
Earlier in the twentieth century Jasper hotels were centers of social activities. One such hotel, The Lankster, had several well-known guests; two examples being John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford. In the late 1960’s Federal Interstate 24 was constructed nearby, and traffic largely bypassed Jasper. The old hotels are now found only in pictures and in the memories of older citizens.
Another form of transportation for Jasper citizens has been the railroad. In 1867 the railroad line from Jasper to Bridegeport, AL, was completed. The following year, Major William Kelley founded the Sequatchie Valley Railroad Company. The Sequatchie Valley Railroad Company was chartered to build a railroad line from Jasper to Pikeville A subsequent charter extension called for extending the rail line into Kentucky. The Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railroad purchased the Sequatchie Valley Railroad Co. some time later. Trains regularly carried passengers and freight to and from Chattanooga and Pikeville. Eventually the automobile displaced local transportation by rail. The Jasper Railroad Depot closed in 1928.
Travel routes and methods of transportation are not the only changes Jasper has seen.
Fires have changed the landscape of the town over the years. In 1921 all businesses south of the courthouse square, with the exception of Pryor Hosiery Mill, were lost to fire. As reported in the Sequatchie Valley Democrat, an area newspaper of the time, the fire started in the barbershop’s stove and spread to other businesses. Many of the original buildings on the courthouse square are still standing. Bill Simpson’s Store, built in 1838 by Jackson Pryor, is probably the oldest building in town. The old Marion Trust and Banking Company is another of the buildings and today houses the offices of attorney Harvey Cameron. The roads around the courthouse were not paved until 1925.
Other modern conveniences were eventually also brought to the community. On May 30, 1906, Dr. W. O. Dunwoody brought machinery to Jasper to provide a water works system. Dr. Dunwoody owned the Blue Spring from which the town creek originates. The water from the spring was pumped to a reservoir approximately one hundred feet higher. Jasper Water Works still uses Blue Spring as a source for water. The company also pumps water from the Sequatchie River due to its expansion of services for outlying communities and Jasper’s increasing population. Jasper’s population has grown from the one hundred eighty people of the early eighteen hundreds to a current population of three thousand, two hundred fourteen.
Jasper still looks much the same as depicted in early photographs and descriptions from various writings. The whistle of the small valley train, however, has long been silent. Gone too are the tourists in cars headed to Florida as well as the heavy trucks carrying freight north and south. The people continue to raise families, enjoy the beauty and bounty of the land, and work hard. Life is peaceful and quiet here in the center of Marion County.
