Appalachian Community Histories – Bristol, Sullivan County: Railroads, State Street, and the Birthplace of Country Music
Few Appalachian communities can be understood from only one side of the street. In downtown Bristol, Tennessee, a person can stand on State Street, look across the pavement, and see another city in another state. Bristol, Virginia, begins on the opposite side, yet for most of their history the two Bristols have functioned as parts of the same commercial and cultural community.
That unusual arrangement has shaped nearly everything about Bristol. Its newspapers covered both cities. Its railroads crossed the boundary without much concern for municipal lines. Merchants advertised to customers in Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, and North Carolina. Families worked, worshiped, shopped, and went to school within a community whose official boundaries were far more complicated than everyday life.
Bristol did not simply happen to grow along a state line. The city was intentionally created there because railroad builders were coming. Joseph Rhea Anderson recognized what a rail connection could mean for a rural stretch of Sullivan County and neighboring Washington County, Virginia. Within a few years, farmland and meadow became streets, stores, hotels, warehouses, depots, and homes. The place grew into one of the most important commercial centers in the southern Appalachian mountains, and in 1927 a temporary recording studio in Bristol helped change American music forever.
Before Bristol
Long before there was a Bristol, the land belonged to a much older Appalachian borderland. Colonial settlement moved into the region during the eighteenth century, and families established farms, mills, ironworks, and trading routes along the Holston country.
The land on which much of Bristol developed eventually became associated with the King family. National Register research traces the immediate story of the future city to James King Jr., who acquired a large tract extending across what became the Tennessee and Virginia line. King and his wife established a plantation there, and the property remained largely agricultural during the first decades of the nineteenth century.
That rural character was about to change because of transportation.
By the 1840s, plans for a railroad through southwest Virginia toward East Tennessee created enormous interest among landowners and businessmen. King provided right of way and land for railroad purposes, and his son-in-law Joseph Rhea Anderson quickly understood that the proposed line could support an entirely new town.
On July 10, 1852, Anderson purchased one hundred acres from King. Within weeks, the property had been surveyed and divided into lots. Anderson chose the name Bristol, borrowing it from the English city associated with trade and manufacturing. His ambitions were commercial from the beginning. This was not simply a group of houses that slowly grew into a town. Bristol was planned in anticipation of the railroad.
Joseph Rhea Anderson and the First Bristol
Construction followed quickly. Anderson erected the first building in the new community in 1853 near Fourth and Main streets, the latter eventually becoming State Street. The structure served as both his residence and his store. By the end of that year, his general store was operating and a Bristol post office had been established.
Those first years must have presented an unusual sight. Streets and lots existed on paper before much of the town existed physically. Houses and businesses appeared amid land that only recently had been meadow and farmland, while residents waited for the railroad that had inspired the entire venture.
Anderson was not the only person who recognized the opportunity. On the Virginia side, Colonel Samuel Eason Goodson developed land of his own and created Goodsonville. For a short period, the area around the railroad contained Bristol, Tennessee, Bristol, Virginia, and Goodsonville, Virginia.
The arrangement soon became confusing. Residents on the Virginia side ultimately consolidated under the name Goodson, while the Tennessee community retained Bristol. Bristol, Tennessee, moved toward incorporation in 1856, with Anderson becoming its first mayor. Tennessee’s Municipal Technical Advisory Service records the city’s incorporation under the Acts of Tennessee of 1855-56.
The Virginia town continued legally as Goodson for decades, although many residents and businesses kept calling the entire community Bristol. In 1890, Virginia residents finally made the common usage official and changed their municipality’s name to Bristol as well. From that point forward there were unmistakably two Bristols, but to travelers arriving by railroad they often appeared to be one city.
The Railroad Creates a City
The event Anderson had anticipated finally came in 1856.
The Virginia and Tennessee Railroad completed its track to Bristol that September, and on October 1 the first train arrived from Lynchburg. National Register research describes two special trains making the 204-mile journey as Bristol residents celebrated with speeches, music, cannon fire, and a barbecue.
Another route was approaching from the opposite direction. The East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad connected Bristol with Knoxville by 1858. Bristol was no longer merely a new settlement on the edge of Sullivan County. It had become the point where major transportation routes linking Virginia and East Tennessee met.
The railroad transformed the town’s economy almost immediately. Farmers could bring produce into Bristol for shipment elsewhere. Merchants could receive manufactured goods that previously required slower wagon transportation. Commission houses handled agricultural products. Hotels received travelers waiting for trains or making connections. Draymen carried freight between depots, warehouses, and stores.
By the eve of the Civil War, Bristol contained hotels, drugstores, blacksmiths, saloons, merchants, a bakery, woodworking operations, a tannery, a brickyard, and other businesses. The city was still young, but its reason for existing had already been proven. Bristol had become a railroad marketplace for the surrounding mountains.
Bristol and the Civil War
Bristol had barely taken shape when the Civil War interrupted its growth.
Sullivan County differed politically from much of East Tennessee. While Unionist sentiment remained strong across many neighboring counties, Sullivan County supported secession. Bristol’s railroad connections then became strategically important to the Confederacy because the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad formed part of a transportation network linking the Confederate interior with East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia.
War also damaged the young city’s economy. Bristol merchants had depended on suppliers in northern and eastern cities, relationships that became difficult or impossible after secession. Inflation increased, normal trade was disrupted, and armies repeatedly moved through the region.
Federal troops raided Bristol several times. The most damaging raid came in December 1864 during operations connected with Union General George Stoneman’s campaign into East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. National Register documentation records that Federal troops entered Bristol on December 14 and destroyed railroad depots. The Exchange Hotel, one of the establishments associated with Bristol’s early commercial growth, had also been used as a Confederate hospital.
For a town created because of the railroad, destruction of the railroad facilities struck at the heart of its economy. Yet Bristol recovered remarkably quickly after the war.
The Boom Years
By the late 1860s, trade had returned and Bristol entered the period that created much of the city’s historic character.
Main Street, later State Street, increasingly became the commercial spine of the twin cities. Houses stood among stores and offices at first, but as land became more valuable many residences disappeared and larger commercial buildings replaced them. Merchants opened dry goods stores, hardware businesses, jewelry shops, bakeries, furniture factories, banks, and produce houses.
Industry spread beyond storefront retailing. Bristol developed sawmills, woodworking establishments, iron businesses, woolen mills, carriage manufacturing, tobacco processing, and other enterprises. A large tobacco operation established by A. D. Reynolds became particularly important during the late nineteenth century. Lumber, iron, agriculture, and railroad transportation tied Bristol’s economy to a much larger Appalachian hinterland.
The scale of that growth appears clearly in a remarkable federal document from 1899. A House of Representatives committee considering construction of a federal building in Bristol described the city as the terminal point of five railroad lines. The committee reported that Bristol’s post office receipts had risen from $4,501.10 in 1886 to $12,799.57 a decade later.
The same congressional report listed millions of dollars in wholesale business, retail and manufacturing activity, bank deposits, and railroad receipts. It named the Dixie Tannery, Bristol Iron Furnace, Bristol Foundry and Machine Shops, Reynolds Tobacco Company, lumber operations, factories, water companies, and other industries. The report even noted two telephone systems, electric light plants, a street railway, several newspapers, numerous churches, and educational institutions.
Whatever promotional enthusiasm influenced the language of the report, its statistics show how dramatically Bristol had changed. Less than fifty years earlier, Anderson had built his home and store in a largely undeveloped meadow. By the close of the century, the federal government was evaluating Bristol as an important commercial and transportation center.
State Street Becomes the State Line
The Tennessee and Virginia boundary had always complicated Bristol, but the exact relationship between the street and the state line became a legal matter of its own.
In 1901, Tennessee enacted legislation ceding the northern half of Main Street through the central part of Bristol to Virginia. Virginia accepted the transfer, and Congress approved the arrangement. The action placed the interstate boundary through the street itself for that section of the city.
Main Street eventually became State Street, and the boundary became one of Bristol’s defining features.
The arrangement created one of the most recognizable downtown landscapes in Appalachia. A shopper could cross from Tennessee into Virginia merely by walking across a street. Businesses on opposite sides operated under different state governments even while sharing the same commercial district.
Federal boundary proceedings involving Tennessee and Virginia later documented the unusual arrangement, preserving in government records what Bristol residents already understood in everyday life: the state line did not divide two distant communities. It ran through the heart of one urban place.
State Street in the Early Twentieth Century
By the early twentieth century, State Street had become the kind of downtown that drew people from surrounding mountain counties for an entire day of shopping, banking, entertainment, and business.
Historic maps, city directories, newspapers, and National Register surveys show a dense commercial district filled with banks, drugstores, hardware stores, hotels, theaters, furniture businesses, department stores, restaurants, and professional offices. Larger brick buildings replaced many of the earlier frame structures.
A 1912 bird’s-eye view by T. M. Fowler captured the twin cities at the height of this transformation, identifying banks, lumber companies, manufacturers, the Union Passenger Station, the Tennessee post office, and other landmarks. The image is valuable because it shows Bristol not as two isolated towns but as a continuous urban landscape built around the railroad and State Street.
The railroad continued to deliver enormous numbers of travelers. National Register research estimates that roughly half a million passengers passed through Bristol’s railroad station in 1914. They entered a downtown filled with streetcars, automobiles, carriages, bicycles, electric lights, theaters, banks, and crowded storefronts.
Department stores became especially important. H. P. King’s developed into one of the region’s major retail establishments, while other department and variety stores followed. Woolworth’s, Kress, J. C. Penney, local furniture businesses, jewelers, drugstores, and specialty merchants turned downtown Bristol into a shopping destination for people far beyond the city limits.
Black Bristol and the History Beyond the Storefronts
Bristol’s rise was not experienced equally by everyone.
Slavery had existed in Sullivan County before the Civil War, and research by Black in Appalachia shows that enslaved and free African Americans formed an important part of the population on both sides of the state line. Several prominent early Bristol families, including figures connected to the city’s founding, enslaved people. That history is essential to understanding the wealth, labor, and social structure of antebellum Bristol.
Emancipation did not produce equality. During the decades after the Civil War, Bristol’s Black residents created businesses, churches, schools, professional networks, and neighborhoods while living under segregation and discriminatory laws.
Education became one of the most enduring parts of that story. On the Tennessee side, the school eventually remembered as Slater served generations of African American students before integration. Bristol city records note that the surviving Slater building was constructed for the segregated high school and later found new uses after desegregation. Former students continued to preserve the school’s history long after the classrooms changed.
The Bristol Community History Project and Black in Appalachia have helped recover photographs, oral histories, newspaper material, family records, and stories that older city histories sometimes neglected. Those collections reveal that Bristol’s history was never simply the history of railroad executives, merchants, manufacturers, and famous musicians. It was also the history of Black families who built institutions and communities while navigating segregation on both sides of the state line.
The Bristol Sign and a City Selling Itself
Bristol’s unusual geography eventually became something the city advertised rather than merely tolerated.
The enormous electric sign associated with State Street became one of the best-known symbols of the twin cities. Its early slogans promoted Bristol’s ambition and commercial energy. By 1921 the words most closely associated with the landmark had become “A Good Place to Live.”
The sign reflected a broader civic identity. Bristol had spent decades selling itself to railroad companies, manufacturers, investors, shoppers, and travelers. Now the state line itself became part of the advertisement.
Historic photographs show busy streets beneath signs and electric lights while traffic moved across the boundary almost without notice. The two states remained legally distinct, but Bristol’s public image increasingly depended on the novelty of being one community divided between them.
The Summer That Changed American Music
Bristol’s railroad history made possible another chapter for which the city would become internationally known.
In the summer of 1927, Ralph Peer of the Victor Talking Machine Company came to Bristol to record musicians from the southern Appalachian region. Recording companies had begun searching outside major cities for performers whose music could be sold to growing audiences through phonograph records.
Bristol was a natural place to conduct such an experiment. Railroads and roads connected it with mountain communities across several states, newspapers could advertise the sessions to regional musicians, and the city already functioned as a commercial meeting place.
During the last week of July and the first week of August, musicians came to Bristol to audition and record. Among them were Ernest Stoneman, Blind Alfred Reed, the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, religious performers, string bands, singers, and instrumentalists representing a surprisingly broad cross section of Appalachian music.
The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers were not the only musicians recorded in Bristol, but their subsequent success transformed the historical reputation of the sessions. Rodgers became one of the first great stars of commercial country music, while A. P., Sara, and Maybelle Carter profoundly influenced country, folk, bluegrass, and later American popular music.
The Library of Congress has called the 1927 Victor recordings a watershed in country music history and selected the sessions for the National Recording Registry in its first group of recordings chosen in 2002.
What makes the Bristol Sessions especially important is that they were not the invention of Appalachian music. The songs, instrumental traditions, religious influences, commercial popular music, African American musical influences, ballads, gospel traditions, and string-band styles heard in Bristol had developed over generations.
What happened in 1927 was that modern recording technology and commercial distribution met those traditions in one Appalachian railroad city.
The result traveled far beyond the mountains.
In 1998, the United States Congress formally recognized Bristol, Tennessee, and Bristol, Virginia, for their critical contributions to country music and acknowledged the cities as the Birthplace of Country Music.
Railroads, Factories, and a Changing Downtown
Country music eventually became Bristol’s most famous cultural legacy, but throughout much of the twentieth century the city’s economy remained rooted in commerce and manufacturing.
Factories employed large numbers of workers, while railroads continued carrying freight and passengers through the city. State Street remained a regional retail center filled with department stores and locally owned businesses. Downtown theaters offered entertainment, hotels served travelers, and the city’s newspapers chronicled daily life on both sides of the line.
After World War II, however, American shopping and transportation patterns changed. Passenger rail service declined. Automobiles made it easier for people to shop farther from the traditional downtown. New commercial development spread along highways and suburban corridors.
Like downtowns throughout the United States, Bristol began losing major retailers during the 1960s and 1970s. Department stores closed or relocated. Historic hotels disappeared. Entire blocks were altered or demolished for parking lots and newer development.
The changes did not erase Bristol’s earlier landscape, but they removed enough of it to make preservation increasingly important. The surviving commercial blocks along State Street now represent only part of what once existed.
From the Railroad to the Racetrack
As older pieces of Bristol’s economy changed, a new institution emerged several miles from State Street.
In 1961, Larry Carrier, Carl Moore, and R. G. Pope opened what became Bristol Motor Speedway. The original track was built on a former dairy farm and hosted its first major NASCAR race on July 30, 1961.
Over the following decades the speedway grew into one of the best-known venues in American stock car racing. Its steep banks, short racing surface, enormous grandstands, and the roar created inside the bowl-shaped facility made racing another element of Bristol’s national identity.
The development of the speedway represented another stage in a pattern that had defined Bristol since the 1850s. The city repeatedly benefited from its ability to draw people from a large region. First the railroad brought farmers, merchants, salesmen, and passengers. State Street later attracted shoppers. The Bristol Sessions attracted musicians. The speedway eventually brought racing fans by the tens of thousands.
Preserving the Bristol That Remains
Much of Bristol’s history can still be read directly from its landscape.
State Street remains the most obvious feature. The state boundary still runs through the center of downtown, allowing visitors to move between Tennessee and Virginia in a few steps. Historic commercial buildings preserve the architecture of the railroad and department-store eras. The old Tennessee post office, historic theaters, industrial buildings, neighborhoods, churches, and railroad structures preserve pieces of the city’s growth.
The Bristol Commercial Historic District recognizes the importance of this landscape. National Register documentation describes Bristol as a regional commercial, industrial, and entertainment center whose surviving buildings reflect the development of the city from the late nineteenth into the twentieth century.
Local collections provide an even deeper record. The Bristol Public Library preserves digitized city directories, business histories, industrial publications, newspapers, photographs, maps, and other records. Those materials allow researchers to follow individual streets and businesses almost year by year. Contemporary publications such as the 1885 historical and industrial review of Bristol-Goodson provide the voices of the community during the very decades in which the city was becoming a regional center.
Historic newspapers add another layer. The Library of Congress preserves issues of the Bristol News from the nineteenth century, a publication that treated Bristol, Tennessee, and the Virginia community as parts of the same local world. Advertisements, political arguments, railroad announcements, deaths, business notices, and local reporting reveal a city that cannot be reconstructed through later histories alone.
One Bristol, Two States
Bristol’s history is ultimately the story of geography turned into opportunity.
Joseph Rhea Anderson saw a railroad coming and imagined a town where there had been farmland. Merchants used that railroad to turn Bristol into a regional marketplace. Manufacturers used the same transportation network to reach customers far beyond Sullivan County. Black residents built schools, churches, businesses, and community institutions despite slavery’s legacy and the restrictions of segregation. Musicians traveled into town in 1927 and left behind recordings that became landmarks in American cultural history.
Even State Street, which might have divided the community, became one of its greatest symbols.
That is why the history of Bristol, Tennessee, cannot be separated neatly from Bristol, Virginia. Government records may place them in different states, but newspapers, railroad maps, city directories, family histories, commercial records, and music tell a different kind of story. They show two municipalities developing side by side until the boundary itself became part of their shared identity.
Today, standing on State Street, it is possible to see nearly the entire history of Bristol in one view. There is the state line that made the city unusual, the commercial district created by railroad wealth, the architecture of its twentieth-century boom years, and the reminders of the musicians who arrived in 1927.
Bristol began because someone believed a railroad could create a city in the Appalachian mountains.
What developed there became much larger than the railroad.
Sources & Further Reading
Empire Publishing Company. A Historical and Descriptive Review of the Industries and Resources of the City of Bristol-Goodson, Tennessee and Virginia: Including Many Sketches of Its Public Spirited Men and Enterprising Business Establishments. New York: Empire Publishing Company, 1885. https://bristol-library.org/wp-content/uploads/Industry-General-A-Historical-and-Descriptive-Review-of-Bristol-Goodson.pdf
Bristol News. Bristol, Virginia and Tennessee, 1867–1890s. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn85026955/
Bristol News. October 6, 1874. Bristol, Virginia and Tennessee. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85026955/1874-10-06/ed-1/
The Bristol Herald Courier. Bristol, Virginia and Tennessee, 1907–1985. Library of Congress, Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn90069236/
Bristol Public Library. “Digital Archives.” Bristol, Virginia. Includes Bristol city directories, industrial publications, local histories, railroad material, newspapers, and business records. https://bristol-library.org/digital-archives/
Bristol Board of Trade. Pointed Facts about Bristol Tennessee and Virginia. Bristol, n.d. Digitized by Bristol Public Library. https://bristol-library.org/digital-archives/
Bristol Fair and Stock Association. Premium List of the Bristol Fair and Stock Association. Bristol, 1884. Digitized by Bristol Public Library. https://bristol-library.org/digital-archives/
Anderson, Joseph Rhea. The Story of Bristol. Bristol Public Library Digital Archives. https://bristol-library.org/digital-archives/
National Park Service. Bristol Commercial Historic District, Bristol, Tennessee and Virginia. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, 2003. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/VLR_to_transfer/PDFNoms/102-5017_Bristol_Commercial_HD_2003_FINAL_Nomination.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Bristol Commercial Historic District.” National Register of Historic Places, NRHP Reference No. 03000441. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/102-5017/
National Park Service. Bristol Virginia-Tennessee Slogan Sign. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, 1988. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/8ee83d1a-096d-429a-b2e6-40295c04212b
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Bristol Virginia-Tennessee Slogan Sign.” National Register of Historic Places, NRHP Reference No. 88001568. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/102-0002/
National Park Service. Bristol Railroad Station. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, 1980. Virginia Department of Historic Resources. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/VLR_to_transfer/PDFNoms/102-0011_Bristol_Railroad_Station_1980_Final_Nomination.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Bristol Railroad Station.” National Register of Historic Places, NRHP Reference No. 80004173. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/102-0011/
Taylor, Oliver. Historic Sullivan: A History of Sullivan County, Tennessee, with Brief Biographies of the Makers of History. Bristol, TN: King Printing Company, 1909. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/09025291/
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Inventories of County Records on Microfilm.” Sullivan County records include court, deed, probate, marriage, tax, and other county materials. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla/guides/inventories-of-county-records-on-microfilm
Semmer, Blythe. “Sullivan County.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society, October 8, 2017, updated March 1, 2018. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/sullivan-county/
United States Congress. H.Con.Res. 214: Recognizing the Contributions of the Cities of Bristol, Tennessee, and Bristol, Virginia, and Their People to the Origins and Development of Country Music. 105th Cong., 2nd sess., 1998. https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/house-concurrent-resolution/214/text
Library of Congress. “Victor Talking Machine Company Sessions in Bristol, Tennessee.” National Recording Registry, recordings made 1927, inducted 2002. https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/recording-registry/registry-by-induction-years/2002/
Olson, Ted. “Victor Talking Machine Company Sessions in Bristol, Tennessee.” National Recording Registry Essays. Library of Congress, 2015. https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/recording-registry/index-of-essays/
Birthplace of Country Music Museum. “Collections & Research.” Bristol, Virginia. Collections include photographs, documents, musical instruments, ephemera, recordings, and materials relating to the 1927 Bristol Sessions. https://birthplaceofcountrymusic.org/museum/curatorial-research/
Black in Appalachia. “Bristol Community History Project.” Black in Appalachia. https://www.blackinappalachia.org/bristol
Phillips, V. N. “Bud.” Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia: A History, 1852–1900. Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 1992. https://books.google.com/books?id=4ia8w11q6yAC
Phillips, V. N. “Bud.” Between the States: Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia During the Civil War. Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 1997.
Lee, Tom. The Tennessee-Virginia Tri-Cities: Urbanization in Appalachia, 1900–1950. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Bristol Commercial Historic District Piedmont Avenue Boundary Increase.” National Register of Historic Places, 2017. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/102-5035/
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” Washington, DC. https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
Author Note: Bristol is one of those Appalachian places whose history cannot be confined neatly within a single state, since the Tennessee and Virginia communities developed together along State Street. This article focuses primarily on Bristol, Tennessee, while drawing on records from both sides of the state line when they are necessary to tell the larger story.