Appalachian Community Histories – Surgoinsville, Hawkins County: Stony Point, New Providence, and Phipps Bend on the Holston
Surgoinsville sits in Hawkins County between Rogersville and Church Hill, close enough to the Holston River that the valley, the road, the farms, and the old church settlements all help explain its story. The town itself was established in 1815, but the history around it begins earlier, in the older world of Carter’s Valley, Stony Point, Long Meadow, New Providence, and the early Hawkins County roads that carried settlers, churchmen, farmers, travelers, and later industry through this part of East Tennessee.
The official town history traces Surgoinsville to James Surguine, remembered locally as a French Protestant settler. Legislative and county summaries preserve another spelling, James Surgoines, and identify the 1815 act that established the town. That act appointed Arthur B. Armstrong, Joseph Klepper, Jonas Laughmoller, James Surgoines, and Edward Erwin as commissioners to lay out and develop the new town.
The spelling differences are part of the historical record itself. In older Appalachian records, names often shifted from clerk to clerk and generation to generation. Surguine, Surgoines, and Surgoinsville all point back to the same local memory: a small Hawkins County town tied to a founder, a road, and the older settlements already standing around it.
Before Surgoinsville: Carter’s Valley and the Early Hawkins County Settlement
To understand Surgoinsville, the town cannot be separated from Carter’s Valley. The National Register nomination for New Providence Presbyterian Church, Academy, and Cemetery describes the church property as part of the remaining evidence of the first Hawkins County settlement in Carter’s Valley. That same nomination connects New Providence to Long Meadow, Stony Point, and the Captain Thomas Amis house-fort, all of which belonged to the early settlement network of the valley.
Hawkins County itself was one of Tennessee’s oldest counties. It was created when this region still belonged to North Carolina, before Tennessee became a state in 1796. The county’s early records, land grants, deed books, court files, church records, and family papers are the kinds of sources that carry Surgoinsville’s earliest history. Much of that history was not originally filed under the town name, because the town did not yet exist. It was filed under families, churches, creeks, farms, roads, mills, and older settlement names.
That is why Surgoinsville’s early story is best read through the surrounding places. Stony Point tells the story of the Armstrong family. New Providence tells the story of Presbyterian settlement and education. Fudge Farm tells the story of agriculture, enslaved labor, and mountain farm architecture. Phipps Bend tells the story of a twentieth-century energy project that almost changed the region forever.
Stony Point and the Armstrong Family
One of the strongest surviving landmarks in the Surgoinsville area is Stony Point. The National Register nomination describes it as one of the earliest brick dwellings in East Tennessee and possibly the first brick building in what became Hawkins County. It stood on a hill overlooking the route of Highway 11W, which followed older lines of travel through the valley.
Stony Point was associated with William Armstrong, a member of one of the early influential families in the area. The nomination states that Armstrong was born in 1757, grew up in Augusta County, Virginia, and received a land grant in Carter’s Valley in the early 1780s. Armstrong family papers record that a daughter of William Armstrong and Elizabeth Galbraith was married at Stony Point in 1791, showing that at least part of the house had been built by then.
The house was more than a family residence. The same nomination says that in 1797 Louis Philippe, the future king of France, recorded having a good supper at William Armstrong’s on the Holston River. Armstrong was described as a wealthy landowner and farmer who also owned a tavern, livery stable, and stagecoach line. In that one detail, Stony Point becomes a window into frontier hospitality, road travel, and the movement of people through early Hawkins County.
The architecture mattered too. The nomination calls attention to the stuccoed and rusticated exterior surface, an unusual surviving example in Tennessee. The house had changed little by the time it was listed, which made it one of the clearest physical links between the Surgoinsville area and the late eighteenth-century settlement period.
New Providence: Church, School, and Cemetery
If Stony Point preserves one family’s place in the valley, New Providence Presbyterian Church preserves the community’s religious and educational history. The National Register nomination states that New Providence was one of the oldest continuous congregations west of the Alleghenies and one of the three oldest in Tennessee.
The original log church stood in Carter’s Valley on the east bank of Renfro Creek. According to the nomination, tradition placed that first log building around 1785 on land entered by Arthur Galbraith. A church building certainly existed by 1786, since Presbyterian records referred to New Providence that year.
After 1800, the church site moved from Carter’s Valley to the ridge northeast of William Armstrong’s mill at Stony Point. In 1816, William Armstrong deeded land to the trustees of New Providence Meeting House. The deed included the meeting house, ground for a burying ground, and a schoolhouse. That detail is important because it shows how closely religion and education were connected in early Hawkins County.
The church buildings changed over time. Notes preserved by Robert Armstrong of Surgoinsville described a log church that also served as a school, then a small brick church, then a large frame building. That frame building was torn down in 1866, replaced, and then destroyed by fire in March 1892. The present building was completed in late 1893.
New Providence Academy added another layer to the story. The earliest extant record for a separate academy building dates to 1852, when the building committee contracted with Daniel Fields of Hawkins County to erect a brick building for New Providence Academy for $625. The school, church, cemetery, and manse formed a religious and educational enclave that survived long after many early settlement structures disappeared.
The Graveyard and the Memory of the First Settlers
The New Providence cemetery is not just a churchyard. It is a map of memory for the Surgoinsville and Carter’s Valley settlement. The nomination notes that the original New Providence Cemetery stood on the west bank of Renfro Creek, on land tied to the same early family network. William Armstrong II and his two wives were known to be buried there, and other members of the older generation of settlers were probably buried there as well.
In Appalachian history, cemeteries often serve as archives in stone. They record family movement, epidemics, war service, migration, church membership, and community continuity. At New Providence, the cemetery ties the living congregation to the valley’s first settlers. It also reminds the researcher that Surgoinsville’s history is not only in town minutes and maps. It is in grave markers, church registers, deed books, and family papers.
Fudge Farm and the Agricultural Landscape
East of Surgoinsville on Highway 11W stands another important historic property, Fudge Farm. Its National Register nomination places it directly in the agricultural history of the area. The farm was associated with Conrad Fudge, who came to Tennessee from Marion County, Virginia, in 1851 and purchased 150 acres from James Fibbs. The nomination states that the land had been surveyed and entered in the Hawkins County survey records on March 19, 1812.
The farmhouse itself included a two-story brick section built before 1851. The nomination says the bricks were manufactured on site, presumably by enslaved labor, and notes that several slave cabins stood on the property at that time. That line is a difficult but necessary part of the record. It shows that the built landscape of early East Tennessee farms, even in communities often remembered through pioneer and church stories, also carried the labor of enslaved people.
Fudge Farm is valuable because it preserves more than a house. The nomination describes a stock barn, log granary, smokehouse, wellhouse, wash house, woodshed, garage, calf barn, cattle barn, and tobacco barn. The log double-crib barn, two-story granary, and smokehouse were especially important examples of rural architecture in the southern mountain region of East Tennessee.
The farm also shows how agriculture changed over time. Buildings were added, altered, and reused as production methods shifted. Wheat, corn, oats, stock raising, meat preservation, and later tobacco all appear in the buildings themselves. In that sense, Fudge Farm is not just an old house near Surgoinsville. It is a surviving farm system.
Roads, Churches, and the Shape of the Town
Surgoinsville grew in a place already shaped by roads and institutions. Highway 11W runs through the area today, but it follows an older corridor of travel that connected Hawkins County communities to Rogersville, Kingsport, and the broader Holston Valley. The official town page notes that the four-lane highway passes through the northern part of Surgoinsville, leading northeast toward Kingsport and southwest toward Rogersville.
That road helps explain why the town mattered. Surgoinsville was not isolated. It was part of a line of movement. Farmers used the road. Churchgoers used the road. Merchants and travelers used the road. Later, industrial planners used the same valley logic when they looked at Phipps Bend and the transportation routes around it.
The municipal record gives another side of the story. Surgoinsville’s modern town government is documented through its charter, municipal code, ordinances, minutes, planning records, and public works records. Those sources show how a place that began as an early nineteenth-century town adapted to zoning, utilities, streets, refuse collection, public safety, historic zoning, and land-use planning.
Phipps Bend and the Nuclear Plant That Never Was
The twentieth-century chapter of Surgoinsville history belongs in part to Phipps Bend. In the 1970s, the Tennessee Valley Authority proposed a two-unit nuclear plant at Phipps Bend on the Holston River east of Surgoinsville. Federal records show that TVA filed an application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on November 7, 1975, for licenses to construct and operate Phipps Bend Nuclear Plant Units 1 and 2 in Hawkins County.
The project was enormous for a rural Appalachian community. A Tennessee State Planning Office community impact assessment described a proposed two-unit nuclear plant with an estimated cost of $1.6 billion and a generating capacity of 2,600,000 kilowatts. The report projected 2,500 construction employees and a permanent workforce of 300, with impacts on Hawkins, Greene, and Sullivan counties.
For Surgoinsville and the surrounding area, Phipps Bend was not just an energy project. It was a promise, a disruption, and a warning. It promised jobs and infrastructure. It disrupted land, farms, roads, and expectations. It warned local governments that sudden industrial development could strain housing, public services, and planning systems.
The nuclear plant was never completed, but its shadow remained. The land and infrastructure later became part of the Phipps Bend Industrial Park story. In that sense, Phipps Bend turned from an unfinished nuclear dream into a modern industrial district, still connected to Surgoinsville’s larger story of land use, work, and regional change.
Surgoinsville’s Historical Records
The best way to study Surgoinsville is through layers of records. The 1815 Private Act gives the town its legal beginning. The Municipal Technical Advisory Service preserves the incorporation citation and the modern charter and code. The Hawkins County Archives in Rogersville preserves court records, marriages, wills, tax assessments, road orders, school records, and other public records that reach back into the earliest years of the county.
The Hawkins County Register of Deeds is central for land history. Deed books can connect town lots, churches, farms, mills, cemeteries, and family transfers. New Providence’s National Register bibliography points researchers toward Hawkins County deed books, Armstrong Family Papers, New Providence church records, Holston Presbytery minutes, Hanover Presbytery records, North Carolina land grants, and Presbyterian records.
Maps are just as important. Louis T. Ketron’s Historical Map of Hawkins County, 1771 to 1971, held by East Tennessee State University’s Archives of Appalachia, marks historically significant Hawkins County sites and includes a legend of more than 400 events and places. Historic USGS topographic maps can help identify roads, churches, cemeteries, schools, waterways, and older place names around Surgoinsville, Stony Point, New Providence, and Phipps Bend.
Newspapers fill in the everyday life that deeds and charters miss. The Rogersville Review, regional newspapers, Tennessee State Library and Archives newspaper microfilm, and Chronicling America can help trace fires, floods, school events, obituaries, church gatherings, business changes, public notices, and Phipps Bend coverage. Search terms should include Surgoinsville, Surgoines, Surguine, Stony Point, New Providence, Carter’s Valley, Long Meadow, and Phipps Bend.
Why Surgoinsville Matters
Surgoinsville matters because it is not only one town story. It is a settlement story, a church story, a farm story, a road story, and an industrial story gathered in one Hawkins County landscape.
The early town charter points to James Surgoines and the commissioners of 1815. Stony Point points to the Armstrongs, early brick architecture, tavern keeping, and the Holston Valley road. New Providence points to Presbyterian settlement, schooling, and the cemetery memory of Carter’s Valley. Fudge Farm points to agriculture, enslaved labor, log barns, granaries, smokehouses, and the long life of mountain farming. Phipps Bend points to the modern era, when national energy planning reached into rural East Tennessee and left behind one of the region’s most complicated industrial legacies.
The result is a place where the history is deeper than the town limits. Surgoinsville is a reminder that Appalachian communities often have to be read through the older names around them. A town may be incorporated in 1815, but its story may begin in a church register, a land grant, a family paper, a road order, a brick house on a hill, or a farm building still standing beside the highway.
Sources & Further Reading
Private Acts of Tennessee, 1815, chap. 68. “An Act to Establish the Town of Surgoinsville in Hawkins County.” Referenced in Tennessee Municipal Technical Advisory Service, Surgoinsville municipal directory. https://www.mtas.tennessee.edu/directories/cities/surgoinsville
Tennessee Municipal Technical Advisory Service. “Surgoinsville.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://www.mtas.tennessee.edu/directories/cities/surgoinsville
Town of Surgoinsville. “Surgoinsville, TN.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://www.surgoinsvilletn.gov/
TNGenWeb, Hawkins County. “County Administration, Private Legislative Acts.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://tngenweb.org/hawkins/private-acts-county-admininstration/
Hawkins County Government. “Hawkins County Archives.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://hawkinscountytn.gov/archives.html
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Genealogical ‘Fact Sheets’ About Hawkins County.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla/pages/genealogical-fact-sheets-about-hawkins-county
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Hawkins County.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/history/county/facthawkins.htm
FamilySearch. “Hawkins County, Tennessee Genealogy.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Hawkins_County%2C_Tennessee_Genealogy
TNGenWeb, Hawkins County. “Court Record Images Online at FamilySearch.org.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://tngenweb.org/hawkins/category/research-aids/public-records/courts-councils/
National Park Service. “Stony Point, National Register of Historic Places Inventory, Nomination Form.” National Register of Historic Places, 1973. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/73001788_text
National Park Service. “Fudge Farm, National Register of Historic Places Inventory, Nomination Form.” National Register of Historic Places, 1976. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/7108e811-005d-4915-85a6-37e77223ebd2
National Park Service. “Fudge Farm.” NPGallery Asset Detail. Accessed June 9, 2026. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/7108e811-005d-4915-85a6-37e77223ebd2
National Park Service. “New Providence Presbyterian Church, Academy, and Cemetery, National Register of Historic Places Inventory, Nomination Form.” National Register of Historic Places, 1978. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/5fec3ed2-e889-491e-a14b-c8b41fbf3314
Tennessee Historical Commission. “Listing Process, National Register.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://www.tn.gov/historicalcommission/federal-programs/national-register/listing-process.html
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). “New Providence Presbyterian Church, Surgoinsville, TN.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://pcusa.org/congregation/new-providence-church-surgoinsville-tn
Historical Marker Database. “New Providence Church.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=91884
Ketron, Louis T. “Historical Map of Hawkins County Tennessee, 1771 to 1971.” East Tennessee State University, Archives of Appalachia. Accessed June 9, 2026. https://dc.etsu.edu/rare-maps/172/
United States Geological Survey. “TopoView.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
United States Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Maps, Preserving the Past.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past
United States Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
Library of Congress. “Chronicling America.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Newspapers on Microfilm at the Tennessee State Library and Archives.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla
Hawkins County Library System. “East Tennessee History and Genealogy Room Binders.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://www.hawkinslibraries.org/uploads/1/4/5/0/145022359/genealogy_room_binder_list.pdf
United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “TVA Cancellation of Phipps Bend Nuclear Plant.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2006/ML20065B465.pdf
United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “Phipps Bend Site-Specific Information.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0823/ML082380227.pdf
United States Department of Commerce, National Technical Information Service. “Construction of Phipps Bend Nuclear Plant, Units 1 and 2, Tennessee Valley Authority.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/dashboard/searchResults/titleDetail/PB265595.xhtml
Snapp, P. C. Phipps Bend Nuclear Energy Project: Community Impact Assessment, Final Report. Tennessee State Planning Office, 1977. https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6951583
Tennessee Valley Authority. Phipps Bend Nuclear Plant: Socioeconomic Monitoring Report, September 30, 1981. Knoxville: Tennessee Valley Authority, 1982. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102366865
Price, Henry R. “Hawkins County.” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. Last modified March 1, 2018. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/hawkins-county/
Tennessee Historical Society. “The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://tennesseehistory.org/publications/the-tennessee-encyclopedia-of-history-and-culture/
McNamara, Billie R. “A Brief Overview of Hawkins County’s Early History.” TNGenWeb, Hawkins County. Accessed June 9, 2026. https://tngenweb.org/hawkins/a-brief-overview-of-hawkins-countys-early-history/
Goodspeed Publishing Company. History of Tennessee from the Earliest Time to the Present: Together with an Historical and a Biographical Sketch of the Counties of East Tennessee. Nashville: Goodspeed Publishing Company, 1887. https://archive.org/
Williams, Samuel Cole. Early Travels in the Tennessee Country, 1540 to 1800. Johnson City, TN: Watauga Press, 1928. https://archive.org/
Brandau, Roberta Seawell. History of Homes and Gardens of Tennessee. Nashville: Parthenon Press, 1936. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/
North Carolina Land Grants in Tennessee, 1778 to 1791. Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla
West, Carroll Van. Tennessee’s Historic Landscapes: A Traveler’s Guide. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. https://utpress.org/
Ferrell, Rodney L. Hawkins County. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2009. https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/
United States Census Bureau. “Explore Census Data.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://data.census.gov/
Tennessee State Data Center. “Tennessee State Data Center.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://tnsdc.utk.edu/
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Tennessee.” Accessed June 9, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-states/tennessee/
Author Note: Surgoinsville’s history is deeper than its 1815 charter, so this article follows the older records of Carter’s Valley, Stony Point, New Providence, Fudge Farm, and Phipps Bend. Readers with family records, church materials, photographs, or local memories from the Surgoinsville area are encouraged to preserve and compare them with the public record.