Appalachian Community Histories – Sullivan Gardens, Sullivan County: From Horse Creek and Clover Bottom to a Modern Community
The history of Sullivan Gardens does not begin with the name Sullivan Gardens.
To find the older community that developed southwest of Kingsport, the trail has to be followed through names that once meant more to local residents than the one found on modern maps. Horse Creek, Clover Bottom, Cloverbottom, and Glen Alpine all appear in records connected with the farms, schools, churches, cemeteries, and families that eventually became part of Sullivan Gardens. Even into the twentieth century, people continued using some of those older names alongside Sullivan Gardens, preserving layers of community identity that had developed over generations.
Today the United States Census Bureau recognizes Sullivan Gardens as a census-designated place in southwestern Sullivan County. The 2020 Census counted 1,271 residents there, but the official boundary is only the most recent definition of a community whose roots stretch much farther into the county’s past.
The historical records gathered for Sullivan Gardens make that older identity unusually clear. The Muriel C. Spoden Collection at the Archives of the City of Kingsport even labels one of its research files “Horse Creek Area (Sullivan Gardens),” essentially giving historians a direct bridge between the old and modern names. The research material provided for this article likewise points repeatedly toward Horse Creek and Cloverbottom as the keys to understanding Sullivan Gardens before the modern community took shape.
The Horse Creek Valley
Horse Creek was more than a stream. For generations it gave its name to the valley and to the people who lived along it.
Oliver Taylor’s 1909 Historic Sullivan recorded an old local tradition explaining both Horse Creek and nearby Bays Mountain. According to the story, a wild horse reached the mountain, lost its footing near the stream, and drowned. Because it was said to have been a bay horse, the mountain became known as Bay’s Mountain and the waterway became Horse Creek. Taylor was recording tradition rather than proving the story as geographic fact, but its survival by 1909 shows how closely Horse Creek was woven into local memory.
Whatever the origin of its name, Horse Creek Valley was settled early. Historical material preserved by the Appalachian Resource Conservation and Development Council traces the Easley family there to the eighteenth century. Stephen Easley received a land grant in 1782, and a house later associated with his son Peter Easley stood on part of that property. The house survived until it burned in 1976. The same account identifies the Easleys among the earliest settlers in the Horse Creek Valley.
The valley remained agricultural long after the first clearings were made. Farms followed the creek and the roads branching away from it, while ridges and the rising ground toward Bays Mountain limited where houses and fields could comfortably spread. This physical geography helped create the scattered rural community that existed long before suburban Kingsport began pressing toward it.
Taylor’s county history also provides an unusually personal glimpse of Horse Creek in the nineteenth century. Writing about Sullivan County residents who joined the California gold rush, he named Joseph and Nathan Bachman specifically as men from “Horse creek valley.” Their appearance in a county history published in 1909 confirms that Horse Creek was still a familiar geographic identity decades after the Civil War.
Clover Bottom and the Farms That Became Sullivan Gardens
Another name appears repeatedly in the records: Clover Bottom.
The 1860 United States Census divided Sullivan County into civil districts, and the surviving transcription for District 13 identifies Clover Bottom along with Campbell’s Rest and Gotts Crossroads. Enumerator William Mullenix began recording households in the district on July 6, 1860. For anyone trying to reconstruct Sullivan Gardens before the Civil War, those census pages are among the most important surviving records because they capture the families occupying the larger neighborhood before Sullivan Gardens existed under its modern name.
Clover Bottom continued to appear as a place name later in the century. An 1887 federal listing of Sullivan County post offices included Clover Bottom among the county’s postal communities, alongside places such as Childress, Fordtown, Kingsport, Piney Flats, and Blountville. The appearance of a Clover Bottom post office indicates that the name was not simply an informal description used by a single family. It functioned as a recognizable local address.
One of the strongest connections between Clover Bottom and modern Sullivan Gardens survives in the history of the Bachman, Tipton, and Riggs families.
The Appalachian RC&D Council identifies the Riggs farm as part of the original Nathan Bachman estate in the Cloverbottom section of what is now Sullivan Gardens. In 1878, Ann Elizabeth Bachman Tipton and her husband, George Tipton, inherited property from Jane Bachman and moved from Hawkins County into the Horse Creek area. Their daughter Annie later married Hubert Riggs Sr. in 1907. In 1928 Hubert and Annie purchased the Tipton farm from the remaining heirs, keeping the property within a family whose history had already become closely tied to the community.
Those family connections are important because Sullivan Gardens did not emerge from an empty landscape. Its roads, school grounds, churches, and neighborhoods developed among farms that already had histories reaching back through several generations. The transformation from Cloverbottom and Horse Creek into Sullivan Gardens was gradual. Old identities were absorbed rather than suddenly erased.
Horse Creek Academy and the Fight for a Local School
Few stories illustrate the character of the old community better than the founding of Horse Creek Academy.
In October 1939, Dr. E. W. Tipton reportedly recalled for the Kingsport Times how his father, George Tipton, and Samuel Bachman confronted a simple problem in 1881. The nearest school was approximately four miles away, and younger children were expected to make the trip along poor roads, often on foot. Instead of accepting the situation, the families discussed establishing a school of their own.
Tipton had an unused log house available and offered it as a schoolhouse. He also offered to board a teacher and help neighboring families pay the teacher’s salary. From that arrangement came Horse Creek Academy, remembered as the first school in the immediate area. About twenty pupils attended during its early years. They studied reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, and the basic subjects expected in a rural nineteenth-century school. The surviving account remembers slates, soapstone pencils, Webster’s spelling books, McGuffey readers, and arithmetic texts as part of the classroom.
The academy stood approximately half a mile from the later Sullivan High School site. That geography gives Horse Creek Academy special significance. Long before large county schools occupied the area, local families had already established education as one of the institutions around which the community revolved.
Horse Creek Academy was small, but it represented something important in rural Appalachia. Public education did not always arrive as a fully formed government institution. In places such as Horse Creek, families donated space, provided lodging, raised money, and created schools where none had previously existed.
Glen Alpine and the Religious Life of Horse Creek
Education and religion soon became intertwined.
In 1896, a Presbyterian group organized a Sunday school in the Horse Creek area and eventually constructed a frame building. Hubert L. Riggs Sr. purchased that building for $400 in 1924. By 1929 it had become the home of Glen Alpine Methodist Church, today Glen Alpine United Methodist Church. The old church building also served as additional classroom space for Horse Creek Academy, which stood across the road.
The arrangement reveals how closely institutions overlapped in a rural community. A building might serve one generation as a Sunday school, another as a church, and at the same time provide needed classroom space. Churches were not separated from daily community life. They were gathering places, educational spaces, social centers, and landmarks by which families understood the countryside around them.
The Tipton and Riggs families remained especially involved. Local historical material credits Annie Tipton Riggs and Hubert Riggs with helping provide land associated with the later Glen Alpine church. The same family farm that connected Sullivan Gardens with the older Cloverbottom settlement therefore became connected with both the educational and religious development of the community.
From Horse Creek Academy to Sullivan High
By the twentieth century, the small academy model was giving way to larger county schools.
Sullivan High School opened in 1930. The school later became Sullivan West High School in 1968 after Sullivan East and Sullivan Central opened, and Sullivan West eventually closed in 1980 when another round of county consolidation created Sullivan North and Sullivan South.
The opening of Sullivan High marked a dramatic change from the twenty or so students remembered at Horse Creek Academy. Education was becoming centralized, transportation was improving, and a much larger section of Sullivan County could be served from a single campus.
The surviving school records are particularly rich. The Archives of the City of Kingsport holds Sullivan High School yearbooks from 1948 and 1955 as part of its manuscript collections, while digitized copies survive for numerous other years beginning in the 1940s. These volumes preserve photographs of teachers, students, clubs, sports teams, buildings, and local advertisements. For community history, they do something statistics cannot. They provide faces for the families who lived in Sullivan Gardens as the old farming district became increasingly tied to Kingsport.
The educational history of Sullivan Gardens therefore stretches across very different eras. It begins with neighbors discussing how to educate children who could not reasonably walk four muddy miles to school. It continues through Horse Creek Academy, a church building used for classrooms, Sullivan High School, later reorganizations, and the schools serving the community today.
The Childress Store and a Rural Economy
Schools and churches were not the only gathering places.
Near Horse Creek stood the Childress Store, remembered in local historical material as the oldest surviving landmark in the Horse Creek and Sullivan Gardens area. The Childress family acquired its farm in 1894, but the land itself had older Easley connections reaching back into the eighteenth century.
The store belonged to an economy that has largely disappeared.
Supplies were brought from Bristol and groceries arrived from Kingsport. Travelers could stop at the store while horses were cared for nearby. Local farmers sold eggs that could eventually be shipped as far away as New York. Walnut kernels went to Bristol. Turkeys were shipped either alive or dressed and packed with ice. Cattle were driven toward Kingsport and loaded onto rail cars for shipment to Baltimore. The store also operated an early Esso gasoline station.
This was Sullivan Gardens before the modern highway landscape, when a country store could connect surrounding farms with Bristol, Kingsport, Baltimore, and New York.
A large Childress barn, built around the late 1920s or 1930, carried advertising for Freels Drug Store. Highway construction later forced it to be moved roughly a quarter mile farther up Horse Creek. The episode represents in miniature what happened across the entire community during the twentieth century. Roads that once followed farms and streams were replaced or supplemented by highways designed for automobiles and regional travel. The land remained, but the way people moved across it changed.
When Sullivan Gardens Appeared on the Map
By the 1930s, the modern name was becoming firmly established.
The United States Geological Survey produced a 1:24,000 Sullivan Gardens quadrangle in 1939. The map belongs to one of the most useful groups of primary sources for understanding the community because it records roads, streams, buildings, schools, churches, and terrain before much of the later development occurred.
Other editions allow historians to follow change through time. Historical map collections preserve Sullivan Gardens mapping from 1935, 1939, and 1959, with later revisions making it possible to compare the largely rural landscape of the Depression era with the expanding road system and residential development of the postwar decades.
An especially useful map was published by the Kingsport Chamber of Commerce in 1958 and is now preserved by the Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State University. Rather than treating Sullivan Gardens as an obscure rural locality, the map included a detailed Sullivan Gardens section alongside Colonial Heights, Bloomingdale, Orebank, Reservoir Road, and Gate City. Its inclusion shows how fully Sullivan Gardens had entered the geographic orbit of growing Kingsport by the middle of the twentieth century.
The maps show a community caught between two worlds. Horse Creek, Glen Alpine, farms, cemeteries, and older roads still defined the landscape, but Kingsport’s growth and the automobile were steadily changing what it meant to live southwest of the city.
The Cemeteries Beneath the Modern Community
Some of the strongest surviving evidence of the older settlements is found in cemeteries.
Peoples Cemetery is identified specifically as being in Horse Creek Village within the Sullivan Gardens area. That description is valuable because it preserves the older Horse Creek identity even after Sullivan Gardens had become the dominant geographic name.
Sunrise Cemetery on Glen Alpine Road preserves another layer of community history. Sullivan County genealogical records identify it as a separate cemetery from the larger Sunrise Cemetery near Bluff City and connect it specifically to Sullivan Gardens.
The Murrell Cemetery preserves nineteenth-century families in an even more visible way. A 2003 survey reported numerous marked and unmarked graves, including fieldstones and damaged markers. Among those identified were members of the Murrell, Pearce, Duncan, Mullenix, and Dolen families. Surveyors believed there might be as many as seventy-five graves in the cemetery. Some unmarked burials were traditionally reported as those of enslaved people, although that identification requires further documentary or archaeological confirmation before individual graves can be assigned with certainty.
These burial grounds complicate any idea that Sullivan Gardens is merely a twentieth-century suburban community. Under and around modern roads are family landscapes that reach back into the period when Horse Creek and Clover Bottom were the names residents would have recognized.
The Spoden Collection and the Memory of Horse Creek
Much of what can still be recovered about old Sullivan Gardens owes a debt to people who recognized that ordinary houses, farms, roads, and family stories were worth preserving.
Muriel C. Spoden was one of the most important of those researchers.
Her enormous archival collection at the Kingsport Public Library contains maps, correspondence, photographs, research notes, property material, historic-site documentation, and other records concerning Sullivan County. For Sullivan Gardens specifically, Box 82 contains separate files titled “Horse Creek Area,” “Horse Creek Area (Sullivan Gardens),” and “Horse Creek Houses.”
Elsewhere in the collection are materials concerning Bays Mountain and Horse Creek, Sullivan County families, deeds, maps, and research used in documenting historic sites. The collection is especially valuable because it reaches beneath published county histories into the notes and source material from which some of those histories were assembled.
The existence of a file explicitly joining “Horse Creek Area” with “Sullivan Gardens” also confirms something apparent throughout the records. Sullivan Gardens was not a replacement community created after Horse Creek disappeared. It was the later identity of a landscape in which Horse Creek remained deeply embedded.
A Community Builds a Library
The community spirit that once established Horse Creek Academy appeared again almost a century later when Sullivan Gardens residents wanted a permanent library.
Before a branch existed, Watauga Regional Library bookmobiles stopped at the homes of Ethel Canupp and later Judy Barrett. Residents, led in part by the Sullivan Gardens Optimist Club, then worked with Sullivan County to establish a permanent branch. The agreement required the community to provide housing, half of the equipment, and volunteer staffing during the first year.
The library officially opened on January 19, 1975, in a building owned by Mrs. Walter Moody. It was named the Moody Memorial Branch Library in memory of Walter F. Moody, a former Tennessee legislator, Sullivan County magistrate, and community leader. Judy Barrett became the branch librarian. That same year the Sullivan Gardens Optimist Club won first place in the culture and education category of an Optimist International community projects competition for its role in establishing the library.
When the original building arrangement could no longer continue, residents organized again. Friends of the Library of Sullivan Gardens formed in 1981 to raise money for a permanent home. The Sullivan County School Board permitted a new building to be constructed on school property, and the library moved there during the summer. The institution was renamed the Sullivan Gardens Branch Library and was enlarged in 1997.
There is a remarkable continuity between the library story and the founding of Horse Creek Academy in 1881. In both cases, residents faced the absence of a nearby educational institution and responded by creating one themselves.
From Mud Roads to Sullivan Gardens Parkway
Transportation transformed the community as much as education did.
The Horse Creek Academy story remembered children facing a four-mile walk over a mud road. The Childress Store belonged to an age of horses, cattle drives, wagons, and trips to Bristol for supplies. By the middle of the twentieth century, automobiles and improved highways were reorganizing the valley.
Sullivan Gardens increasingly became connected with greater Kingsport rather than functioning only as an isolated farm district. Highway 93, known as Sullivan Gardens Parkway, became one of the principal routes through the area, while later construction of Interstate 26 changed travel patterns again.
The old geography did not entirely disappear. Horse Creek remains a geographic feature and even continues to appear in transportation planning. Modern road improvement documents for State Route 93 still refer to the Horse Creek section of Sullivan Gardens Parkway, allowing a name used by nineteenth-century farmers to survive in twenty-first-century government records.
What Sullivan Gardens Preserves
The most interesting part of Sullivan Gardens history may be how much of the older community remains visible once its earlier names are known.
Clover Bottom survives in census records, post office lists, family histories, and descriptions of old farms. Horse Creek survives as a stream, valley, historical place name, cemetery locality, archival subject, and road reference. Glen Alpine remains tied to the religious history of the community. Family names such as Bachman, Tipton, Riggs, Easley, Childress, Murrell, and others appear across property histories, schools, cemeteries, churches, and local memory.
The modern name eventually gathered those pieces together.
By the time federal topographic maps carried the name Sullivan Gardens and Kingsport’s Chamber of Commerce included the community on its regional maps, an older rural world was already changing. Farms were being divided. Roads improved. Kingsport expanded. Schools consolidated. Cars replaced many of the routines that had centered life around a nearby store or a church within walking distance.
Yet Sullivan Gardens never completely lost Horse Creek.
Why Sullivan Gardens Matters
Sullivan Gardens is a good example of why Appalachian community history cannot always be found by searching the modern name alone.
A search for Sullivan Gardens reaches only partway into the past. Search for Horse Creek, however, and the story opens into nineteenth-century schools, farms, merchants, gold seekers, churches, and family estates. Search Clover Bottom and the federal census appears, along with old postal records and the farms of the Bachman, Tipton, and Riggs families. Follow Glen Alpine and another layer of religious and educational life comes into view.
The result is not the history of a community founded on a single date. Sullivan Gardens developed gradually as several older rural neighborhoods became connected by schools, roads, churches, commerce, and eventually the growth of Kingsport.
Its history can be read in a log schoolhouse offered by a farmer in 1881, in the gravestones hidden behind modern neighborhoods, in a country store that shipped eggs to New York, in a Methodist church that once doubled as classroom space, and in maps where an old agricultural valley slowly fills with new roads.
That is the deeper story of Sullivan Gardens. Before it was Sullivan Gardens, it was Horse Creek and Clover Bottom, and much of that earlier community is still there for anyone who knows which names to look for.
Sources & Further Reading
Kingsport Public Library and Archives. “Muriel C. Spoden Collection, 1800–2000.” Archives of the City of Kingsport. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.kingsportlibrary.org/finding_aids/muriel-c-spoden-collection-1800-2000/
United States Census Bureau. Eighth Census of the United States, 1860: Sullivan County, Tennessee, Civil District 13. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1860. Sullivan County TNGenWeb transcription and district guide. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://tngenweb.org/sullivantn/census/13/
Sullivan County TNGenWeb. “Census Records of Sullivan County, Tennessee.” Accessed July 29, 2026. https://tngenweb.org/sullivantn/census/
U.S. Geological Survey. Sullivan Gardens, Tennessee. 1:24,000. Historical Topographic Map, 1939. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://store.usgs.gov/
Kingsport Chamber of Commerce. Map and Guide to Kingsport, Tennessee. Kingsport, TN, 1958. Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://dc.etsu.edu/rare-maps/121/
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. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/09025291/
Sullivan County Historical Commission and Associates. Historic Sites of Sullivan County. Compiled by Muriel C. Spoden. Kingsport, TN: Kingsport Press, 1977.
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Genealogical Fact Sheets About Sullivan County.” Tennessee Department of State. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Appalachian Resource Conservation and Development Council. “Sullivan County.” Appalachian RC&D Council. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://arcd.org/sullivan-county/
Kingsport Public Library and Archives. “Dobyns-Bennett and Sullivan High School Yearbooks, 1944–1955.” KC Manuscript Collection 320, Archives of the City of Kingsport. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.kingsportlibrary.org/finding_aids/dobyns-bennett-and-sullivan-high-school-yearbooks-1944-1955/
Kingsport Times-News. Kingsport, TN, 1944–present. Library of Congress, Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn2002062600/
Library of Congress. “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.” Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/
Watauga Regional Library. “Sullivan County Public Libraries.” Includes the history of the Sullivan Gardens branch and Moody Memorial Branch Library. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.wrlibrary.org/sullivan/scbranches.htm
Sullivan County TNGenWeb. “Bachman Cemetery.” Cemetery Survey Team of Northeast Tennessee. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://tngenweb.org/sullivan/bachman-cemetery/
Sullivan County TNGenWeb. “Murrell Cemetery.” Cemetery Survey Team of Northeast Tennessee. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://tngenweb.org/sullivan/murrell-cemetery/
Sullivan County TNGenWeb. “Sunrise Cemetery.” Accessed July 29, 2026. https://tngenweb.org/sullivan/sunrise-cemetery/
Sullivan County TNGenWeb. “Places.” Sullivan County, Tennessee Genealogy. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://tngenweb.org/sullivantn/places.htm
Holston Territory Genealogical Society. Families and History of Sullivan County, Tennessee. Vol. 1, 1779–1992. Waynesville, NC: Walsworth Publishing, 1992–1993. WorldCat. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://search.worldcat.org/title/29329069
Spoden, Muriel Miller Clark. The Early Years on Bays Mountain in Sullivan County, Tennessee. Kingsport, TN: Muriel Spoden, 1975.
Spoden, Muriel Miller Clark. Kingsport Heritage: The Early Years, 1700–1900. Kingsport, TN: Kingsport Press.
Sullivan County Historical Society. Foundations of Faith in Sullivan, 1777–1935. Sullivan County, TN: Sullivan County Historical Society, 1986.
Historical Records Survey. Inventory of the County Archives of Tennessee, No. 82: Sullivan County (Blountville). Nashville: Tennessee Historical Records Survey, 1942.
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Sullivan County Records.” Tennessee Department of State. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla
U.S. Census Bureau. “TIGER/Line Shapefiles and Files.” Geographic boundaries for Sullivan Gardens census-designated place. Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/tiger-line-file.html
Author Note: Sullivan Gardens is one of those communities whose history becomes much clearer once its older names, Horse Creek and Clover Bottom, are restored to the story. I hope this article helps preserve the families, schools, churches, farms, cemeteries, and local institutions that shaped this part of Sullivan County.