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| MEIGS COUNTY TENNESSEE |
Created in 1836 from Rhea County, Meigs County is named for Return Jonathan Meigs (1740-1823), a colonel in the American Revolutionary War and later an Indian agent from 1801 until his death in 1823. The county encompasses 195 square miles and is bounded on the west by the Tennessee River. The lower Hiwassee River crosses through the southern portion of the county, where it enters the Tennessee. The county contains fertile bottom land and ample timber, as well as a vein of iron ore.
The Tennessee River Valley was first inhabited by generations of Native Americans, and Meigs County contains many prehistoric and Cherokee sites. Hiwassee Island, at the mouth of the Hiwassee River, is the site of a large Mississippian Period town dating from the eleventh century A.D. and includes several temple mounds surrounding a plaza. The Cherokees later occupied the island. In 1809-10 Sam Houston lived with Oolootek (John Jolly), leader of three hundred Cherokees living on Hiwassee Island, also called Jolly's Island. Today the area is Hiwassee Island Wildlife Refuge, noted for its use by migrating sand hill cranes.
In the Hiwassee Treaty of 1817 and the Calhoun Agreement of 1819, the Cherokees ceded the land on the east bank of the Tennessee River north of the Hiwassee to Tennessee. The first settlements in the Meigs County area were in the Ten Mile Valley in the north, while later families settled near the site of Decatur. The territory south of the Hiwassee remained in the Ocoee District of the Cherokee nation and was not opened to white settlement until 1836. Most of the Cherokee residents were removed as part of the Trail of Tears in 1838, crossing the Tennessee in Meigs County at Blythe's Ferry. A few Cherokee residents remained, notably John Miller, Richard Taylor, Colonel Gideon Morgan, and John Jolly. The Meigs County government, Tennessee Valley Authority, National Park Service, and Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency have planned a monument near the Hiwassee inscribed with names of the Cherokees removed in 1838, as well as a walking trail along part of a removal route. Construction of the memorial and surrounding park at the former site of Blythe Ferry began in 1998, and parts of the park are already open to the public.
The only incorporated town in the county, Decatur, was laid out as the county seat in 1836 on fifty acres donated by James Lillard and Leonard Brooks. Named for Stephen Decatur, a War of 1812 naval hero, the present historic courthouse, listed on the National Register, was built in 1905. Decatur Academy, a secondary school, opened in the 1840s, and a school for African American children was established in 1869. When the academy closed in 1890, the Holston Conference of the Methodist Church set up a high school that operated until 1910, when Meigs County High School was built. The Meigs County High School's girls' basketball team won state AA championships in 1994 and 1995. County schools consolidated in 1997 into two elementary, one middle, and one high school. Other communities in the county include Ten Mile, Big Spring, Peakland, Union Grove, Sewee, Goodfield, and East View.
Meigs County is covered by a series of ridges and valleys running southwest to northeast, with the valleys filled with family farms. In antebellum times, commerce was linked to riverboats at landings such as Cottonport, Pinhook, and Breedenton. Several ferries were also established: the Blythe, Washington, and Free ferries on the Tennessee, and the Russell and Kincannon ferries on the Hiwassee. (In the 1990s, two bridges replaced the Blythe and Washington ferries, the last ferries in the eastern Tennessee River Valley.) Although a railroad was expected in the 1840s and 1850s, one would never cross the county. There were 598 farms in 1850, chiefly raising hogs (twenty thousand head), wheat, oats, corn, and potatoes.
In 1850 Meigs County's population consisted of 4,480 whites and 395 slaves with 4 free African Americans. By 1860 there were 4,021 whites, and the number of slaves had increased to 638, with 7 free blacks. When Tennessee voted on secession in June 1861, Meigs voted 481 for secession and 267 for the Union. The district south of the Hiwassee had the fewest slaveholders and sent most of its men to the Union. In 1864 Owen Soloman, acting under the order of Military Governor Andrew Johnson, organized a new county court loyal to the Union.
Following the war, farmers in the county resumed their lives, adding apples and peaches, beef cattle and milk cows to the production of grains. In the 1880s Meigs farmers turned increasingly to tobacco as a cash crop--4,159 pounds were raised in 1880, growing to 136,791 pounds by 1940. Timber became increasingly important to the county's economy and was sent by river to Chattanooga until 1900 when the pine and poplar trees were virtually logged out. Although Meigs County contained 814 freedmen in 1870, the African American population found little opportunity; their numbers fell after the Civil War to less than 2 percent by 1990. As late as 1940 Meigs County had only one industrial plant, the Decatur Hosiery Mills, established in the late 1930s.
The Tennessee Valley Authority brought changes to the county with the construction of Chickamauga Lake in 1940 and Watts Bar in 1942. Although Meigs's most productive acres were flooded by the lakes, 225 miles of shoreline were created within the county on the Tennessee and Hiwassee Rivers. The lakes brought tourist use for fishing, hunting, boating, and photography. The TVA's construction of Sequoyah and Watts Bar plants south and north of the county in the 1970s added residential growth. Several industries were established by the 1970s, when nine companies employed 432 workers.
In the late 1990s tobacco and vegetables top the Meigs County market crops, although beef cattle and dairy herds are still raised. The county contains neither railroads nor a U.S. highway, but seven motor freight companies serve the county. Shaw Industries, a yarn spinning mill, is the largest manufacturer, with over 400 employees; none of the county's other manufacturers have more than 80 workers. The largest public sector employer is the Meigs County School System. In 2000 Decatur's population was 1,395, while the Meigs County population stood at 11,086 in 2000. |
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| More about Meigs County History from The Meigs County Historical Society at the museum in Decatur. |
It was to John and Letty Stewart's house that they came - those men and women settlers of a certain community along the eastem shore of the Tennessee River in Southeast Tennessee who had decided, in the year of 1836, that they would organize a new county. Within two days plans were made to form the new county, and Miles Vernon had been instructed to go to the state capital and take care of the necessary legal work for this new county to have its own identity. Chapter 34, Section 1 of the Acts of the 1835-36 State Legislature state: ''That a new county be, and the same is hereby established, between the county of McMinn and the Tennessee River, to be known by the name of Meigs County, in honor of Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs, deceased, a patriot and soldier of the Revolution of 1 n6; to be composed of that part of Rhea County lying south of Tennessee River, and bounded as follows: beginning at a point below William Blythe's on the Tennessee River, where the line divides the counties of Rhea and Hamilton; thence running a southeast course, with said line, dividing the counties of Rhea and Hamilton to Wilson Novius, where the Rhea County line intersects the McMinn County line; thence a northeast course with said McMinn line, to a large ridge above the mouth of Price's Creek; thence with said dividing line between the counties of Rhea and McMinn, to the eight mile tree or stake, near Bottom's Mills, on Sugar Creek; thence a northwest course with the line dividing the counties of Rhea and Roane, at or near the mouth of White's Creek, on the Tennessee River, thence down the main channel of said river to the beginning." Thus, Meigs County, an area in the lap of what had once been Cherokee Territory, was created.
Return Jonathan Meigs had been an Indian Agent in the area from 1801 until his death in 1823, and his influence in the region gave him the prominence that made his name the choice name for the new county. The county seat, Decatur, situated precisely in the center of the approximately 30 mile long and 10 mile wide rectangular county, was named in honor of Commodore Stephen Decatur, who had distinguished himself in the War of 1812. One of the smallest counties in the state in terms of size (208 square miles in area), Meigs County would begin its history in one of the loveliest settings in all of the United States.
In the 161 year history of this small rural county, everything that has touched and affected the United States has also affected Meigs County in some way: the Great Cherokee Removal, the Civil War, the Steamboat Era, the Industrial Revolution, World War I, the Great Depression, the TVA, World War II, and the many changes that the last five decades have brought upon our land.
The "Trail of Tears" is said to have passed through the southern end of Meigs County in 1838, although the majority of Cherokees who had lived in this area had already gone West to Oklahoma after the Hiwassee Treaty of 1819. Several settlers of the area were among those soldiers who were involved with the Removal, and the influence of that epoch of American history is still strong in this area. Plans for a large memorial to those Cherokees who made the long, sad march westward are in effect at the present time. The plans are to build the memorial near where the Tennessee and Hiwassee Rivers meet, close to the site of the old Blythe's Ferry landing.
While some were involved with the Removal, many others were involved with establishing farms and mills, building community schools and churches, and putting the town of Decatur into full operation, complete with its courthouse, jail, academy, tannery, groceries, taverns, hat shops, doctors' and lawyers' offices, and residences around the town square. By the mid-1850's, talk of Civil War had reached Meigs County, and although few families owned slaves and fewer still wanted to go to war over the issue of slavery or anything else, yet by the time the War Between the States broke out, several hundred young (and older) men joined the ranks ... most to serve under the Confederate flag, but many to serve in the Union Army as well. In every area of the county, stories of snipers killing soldiers at home on leave or traveling through the area are prevalent, and there was a brief skirmish near Stewart's Landing in which several Union soldiers were killed. It is said that the town of Decatur was almost barren of males during the war, and more and more often there was sad news for the awaiting women received from the battlefields. Many Meigs Countians died during the war, and there are few families in Meigs County today that do not have a strong personal interest in the war that literally came home to them.
The last quarter century of the 1800's and the first part of the 1900's was a time of returning to the status quo in Meigs County. This was also perhaps the area's most "glorious" era, for it was the Steamboat Era. The steamboat brought with it the whole world, so to speak. Transportation had reached a new level, and since the whole western border of Meigs County was a river, Meigs County was in the heart of the steamboat heyday. Some of the more popular steamboats were the Atlas, the Trigg, and the Joe Wheeler (which had the added feature of a "dance barge" attached, named the "Clyde"). When the steamboats arrived at landings all along Meigs County, whole communities would turn out to buy and sell and trade, to get the latest news, and socialize. Meigs County is the only county in the state of Tennessee that never had a railway laid within its borders. Perhaps because they felt the river was their lifeline to the rest of the world, Meigs Countains did not turn to the railroad. Then, too, rails were laid in all adjoining counties, and the proximity to these rail lines afforded Meigs Countians sufficient access.
Just a few years after the Great Depression was winding down and healing its wounds, Meigs County became involved in a major govemment project which changed life in the valley forever: The Tennessee Valley Authority ... the TVA. Not only was the lifestyle of residents changed when they could, for the first time, pull a switch and have the lights come on, but the very face - the very geography of our area was changed. Along with the thrill of enjoying all the modernization that electricity brought with it came the anguish of many farmers who saw their farmland become the bottom of a huge lake. Now a much-sought haven for both recreation and leisure, peace and tranquility, the Watts Bar Lake area, when it was first transformed, looked like a water wasteland where the tops of lonely silos spoke of the drowning of some farm family's holdings. Many Meigs Countians are traditionally slow to make adjustments to major changes, and strong ties to "the way things used to be" hold a long, long time.
As TVA was making its mark on Meigs County, another major war was brewing that the United States could not ignore. Many veterans of World War II still live in Meigs County, well-respected by those of us who realize the extent to which they sacrificed for our country. The monument on the Courthouse Square reverently lists those who died in that war and other wars, and the memorial is often visited and decorated by townspeople who acknowledge those who made the ultimate contribution to freedom. Meigs County can be proud of many things, and especially it can stand tall among the best for its thousands of young men and women who have answered the call to military service every time that call has been made through the years.
Many of the people who originally settled Meigs County did so because they thought this was the most beautiful area they had ever seen ... and to this day, people are still settling here for the same reason. No matter where you live in Meigs County, you are never far from the river, from a meandering creek, or from a soothing pond. No matter where you live, you can see broad, fertile fields and hills that are ever-changing with the passing of the seasons. No matter where you live, you can find fine schools to educate your children and a good sports program all year round to provide physical fitness and community fellowship. No matter where you live, you can find a friendly neighbor, a helpful hand, a firm patriotism, a strong morality. It is said that people find what they look for, and many have looked for and found satisfaction in Meigs County, Tennessee. Once a person has ever called Meigs County "home", it is a place that holds a part of that person forever.
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| Early History of Wyoming County, West Virginia |
Wyoming County was created by an act of the Virginia General Assembly on January 26, 1850 from parts of Logan County. The county was named for the Wyoming Indian tribe. There is no record of the name's origin. Some historians believe that the name was suggested by its use in a poem written by Thomas Campbell entitled "Gertrude of Wyoming." Others suggest that the county's name came from a loose translation of the Delaware Indian word Maughwauwama, meaning "large or extensive plains."
David Hughes and Edward McDonald were probably the first Englishmen to set foot in present day Wyoming County. They explored the area in 1784. In 1798, John Cook, Sr. explored the present county and discovered a large, level area below present day Oceana. He moved to the county with his wife, Nellie, his four sons, and a daughter-in-law. They built a cabin near the Laurel and Clear Forks in 1799. When they moved to the county they met a man named Milam who had supposedly lived in the area for some time, moving to and from three hunting lodges he had constructed. In 1800, Captain Ralph Stewart and his family settled in the area, just a few miles from the Cook's cabin. In 1802, Edward McDonald, who had explored the area 18 years earlier, moved into the county. He was accompanied by his son-in-law, James Shannon, and several slaves. They started clearing land for a plantation at the main fork of the Guyandotte River. In the meantime, the Cook and Stewart families intermarried, creating a strong bond between the families that lasted for generations. A census taken in 1890 revealed that a majority of the county's residents were direct descendants of John Cook, Sr.
The first meeting of the Wyoming County court was held at John Cook's home, near present day Oceana. The act creating the county specified that the county seat was to be laid out on the lands of William Cook, Sr., one of John Cook's sons. The town was laid out that year and originally named Cassville, in honor of Lewis Cass, a famous American statesman. L. B. Chambers operated the town's first business, a retail store. At that time, the county was only sparsely populated. The 1850 census revealed that there were only 1,645 people living in the county at that time. In 1851, the town was renamed Sumpterville because another settlement was calling itself Cassville, creating confusion for the mails. In 1853, the town's name was changed again, this time to Oceana, in honor of the younger of Chief Cornstalk's daughters. Nevertheless, the town was known by most as Wyoming Court House. Oceana continued to serve as the county seat until 1907 when the county's residents voted to move the location of the county seat to Pineville.
Pineville, the current county seat, was established on the lands of Rev. William H. Cook. It was originally known as Rock View and was incorporated with that name by the West Virginia state legislature on February 16, 1871. The town was renamed Pineville by John W. Cline who reopened a post office there in 1880. He could not use the name Rock View for the post office because it was also used by another town at that time. The name is derived from a large pine forest that existed on the site at that time.
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