Appalachian Community Histories – Jonesborough, Washington County: Oldest Town, the State of Franklin, and the Emancipator
There are older settlements in Tennessee, places where families built cabins and planted fields before anyone drew Jonesborough onto a map. What makes Jonesborough different is that it became a town while the land that would become Tennessee was still part of North Carolina, giving it a documented civic history that reaches back to the years of the American Revolution.
Founded in 1779 as the seat of Washington County, Jonesborough eventually watched Tennessee emerge around it. The town witnessed the experiment of the State of Franklin, the rise of antislavery publishing in the early republic, fierce political journalism, the coming of the railroad, divided loyalties during the Civil War, the difficult work of Reconstruction, and one of the most successful historic preservation movements in Appalachia.
Much of that history survives unusually well. Deeds, tax lists, court papers, newspapers, maps, photographs, Freedmen’s Bureau records, and architectural surveys preserve not only the names of governors and politicians, but also the lives of merchants, craftspeople, formerly enslaved families, railroad workers, teachers, newspaper editors, and ordinary residents who passed through the Washington County courthouse.
Jonesborough is therefore more than Tennessee’s oldest town. It is one of the places where the political, social, and cultural history of southern Appalachia can be followed across nearly two and a half centuries.
Before Jonesborough
Long before Jonesborough existed, the valleys and ridges of what became northeastern Tennessee formed part of an Indigenous landscape associated especially with Cherokee and Yuchi peoples. European settlement accelerated during the eighteenth century as migrants crossed the mountains from Virginia and North Carolina and established communities along the Watauga and Nolichucky rivers.
Those settlers experimented with local government before North Carolina established a stronger presence west of the mountains. Washington County was created by North Carolina in 1777, covering an enormous frontier jurisdiction that was later divided repeatedly as settlement increased. County government initially operated from private homes, but a growing population needed a permanent seat where deeds could be registered, taxes collected, marriages recorded, lawsuits heard, and public business conducted.
The answer was Jonesborough.
The Founding of Tennessee’s Oldest Town
In 1779 the North Carolina General Assembly passed legislation establishing a town in Washington County. The law appointed commissioners to oversee its creation, placing the beginnings of Jonesborough not in later tradition but in the legislative record itself. The town was named for Willie Jones, an influential North Carolina politician who supported the western settlements.
Local records add more detail. One hundred acres were purchased from David Hughes and divided into lots, with John Carter, Andrew Greer, William Cobb, Jacob Womack, George Russell, John Sevier, and James Stuart involved in determining the location and planning of the new county seat. Lots were then distributed through a lottery.
The courthouse was the center around which the new settlement developed. Washington County’s archival history records that the first county court held in Jonesborough met on May 24, 1779. From then forward, anyone needing to record property, settle an estate, obtain a marriage license, pay taxes, or appear before county officials had reason to come into town.
That administrative role mattered. Jonesborough did not grow simply because settlers happened to cluster together. Government itself drew people there.
Surviving Washington County records make it possible to look closely at that first generation. Deed Book A contains transactions extending through the years surrounding the town’s creation, while surviving tax lists from 1779, 1781, and later years provide snapshots of property ownership and settlement. The county’s court and probate collections preserve disputes over land, debt, estates, family relationships, crime, and business that rarely found their way into later histories.
Within only a few years, however, Jonesborough would become involved in something much larger than ordinary county government.
Jonesborough and the Lost State of Franklin
After the American Revolution, the western settlements faced a fundamental political problem. The mountains separated them from North Carolina’s centers of power, communication was difficult, military protection was uncertain, and many western residents believed the state government did not adequately represent them.
In August 1784 delegates from the western counties gathered at Jonesborough and supported the creation of a separate state. A convention followed in December, when delegates moved forward with an independent government that became known as the State of Franklin. Jonesborough served as an early center of that movement before Greeneville became Franklin’s capital.
The surviving records reveal just how complicated the situation became.
Franklin was never admitted to the Union by Congress, yet between 1785 and 1788 it operated as a quasi-state. John Sevier served as governor, courts functioned, officials were appointed, and government records were created. At the same time, North Carolina refused to disappear.
In Washington County, competing governments actually operated beside one another. Franklin supporters conducted county business through the courthouse in Jonesborough, while residents loyal to North Carolina maintained a rival county government that sometimes met in the homes of prominent citizens such as John Tipton. Deeds, marriages, wills, court papers, promissory notes, and other surviving documents preserve evidence from this strange period when the same region could effectively answer to two competing authorities.
The State of Franklin collapsed by 1788, but Jonesborough had already established itself as a political center. A frontier courthouse had briefly stood at the center of an attempt to create another American state.
The experience also connected Jonesborough to men who would shape Tennessee’s future. John Sevier became Tennessee’s first governor. Andrew Jackson arrived in Jonesborough in 1788 while traveling west and qualified to practice law in North Carolina’s western district before continuing toward the Cumberland settlements. Tennessee achieved statehood in 1796, seventeen years after Jonesborough had been established.
A Town Along the Road
Jonesborough’s importance depended partly on movement. Roads connected the county seat with settlements in Virginia, North Carolina, East Tennessee, and eventually the growing communities farther west.
Travel created opportunities for inns, merchants, craftsmen, attorneys, physicians, and tradesmen. One surviving reminder of that era is the Chester Inn, built by Dr. William P. Chester in 1797 along the stage road through town.
The building became one of the best known stopping places on the Tennessee frontier. Travelers ate, slept, exchanged news, discussed politics, and continued along roads that were still difficult and unpredictable. Andrew Jackson stayed there, as did future presidents James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson. The original Federal style portion of the Chester Inn survives, making it one of the oldest physical witnesses to Jonesborough’s early commercial life.
By 1833 Jonesborough remained small enough that its occupations could almost be counted one by one. A contemporary Tennessee gazetteer reported about 500 residents and listed lawyers, physicians, clergymen, teachers, carpenters, cabinetmakers, bricklayers, tavern keepers, tailors, shoemakers, wagon makers, a blacksmith, a silversmith, and a mill.
It was still unmistakably a mountain town, but it had become an important professional and commercial center for the surrounding countryside.
Elihu Embree and an Antislavery Press in East Tennessee
One of the most remarkable chapters in Jonesborough history began not in its courthouse but in a printing office.
Elihu Embree came from a Quaker family and became active in Tennessee’s manumission movement. In 1819 he began publishing the Manumission Intelligencer in Jonesborough. The newspaper combined antislavery arguments with other news, but Embree soon wanted a publication devoted entirely to the question of slavery.
On April 30, 1820, the first number of The Emancipator appeared.
The Tennessee State Library and Archives identifies it as the first newspaper in the United States devoted exclusively to the abolition of slavery. It circulated far beyond Washington County, reportedly reaching about 2,000 readers in both northern and southern states. Only seven numbers appeared before Embree became ill and died late in 1820.
The story is more complicated than turning Embree into a simple abolitionist hero. He himself had held people in slavery, even while arguing against the institution. His will provided for the emancipation of Nancy and her five children, and his writing acknowledged some of the contradictions between his principles and his own life.
Those contradictions make the Jonesborough story more important, not less.
The Emancipator appeared in a slaveholding society, in a town surrounded by people holding a wide range of positions on slavery, colonization, gradual emancipation, and immediate freedom. Its existence demonstrates that organized antislavery thought had taken root in southern Appalachia decades before the Civil War.
The surviving issues allow readers to encounter that argument as people encountered it in 1820, printed in a small East Tennessee town while slavery was still expanding across much of the American South.
A Town of Printers, Politics, and Arguments
Embree was only part of Jonesborough’s unusually rich newspaper history.
In the nineteenth century newspapers became weapons in political fights, and few editors used them more aggressively than William Gannaway Brownlow. Known as “Parson” Brownlow because of his Methodist ministry, Brownlow brought his Whig newspaper to Jonesborough and published there for roughly a decade before moving operations to Knoxville in 1849.
Brownlow’s style was confrontational, partisan, and intensely personal. He attacked political opponents with language that would make many modern political columns seem restrained. His Jonesborough years helped establish him as one of East Tennessee’s most recognizable political voices, and he later became a major Unionist figure, governor of Tennessee, and United States senator.
Jonesborough’s printing tradition continued after Brownlow.
The Herald and Tribune began publication in 1869. Its surviving issues record elections, marriages, deaths, businesses, schools, crimes, political meetings, advertisements, transportation, and the thousand smaller events from which local history is built. The Library of Congress preserves a substantial run of the paper through Chronicling America, creating one of the best windows into postwar Jonesborough.
For a relatively small Appalachian town, Jonesborough repeatedly managed to place itself inside much larger arguments.
The Railroad Changes Jonesborough
By the middle of the nineteenth century, roads and stagecoaches were no longer enough. Communities across East Tennessee fought for railroad connections because a rail line could determine which towns grew and which were bypassed.
Jonesborough secured its connection to the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad during the 1850s. Its first depot was constructed around 1856, and the railroad was operating through town by the following years. Local investors had worked for years to bring the line through Jonesborough, understanding that rail transportation could connect Washington County to Knoxville, Virginia, and markets throughout the South and eastern United States.
The railroad changed the rhythm of town life.
Freight including grain, livestock, fruit, butter, eggs, and other products moved through the depot. Passenger trains brought strangers into town and carried residents outward. Businesses developed around the station, while hotels, restaurants, warehouses, and merchants benefited from traffic that no longer depended entirely on horse travel.
The same railroad that promised prosperity soon made Jonesborough strategically important during the Civil War.
Jonesborough in the Civil War
East Tennessee entered the Civil War bitterly divided.
Washington County voters opposed secession, but that did not mean everyone in Jonesborough supported the Union. Confederate and Union sympathizers lived in the same communities, sometimes within the same families. Local men joined armies on both sides, while control of the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad made the region important to Confederate and Federal commanders alike.
The war arrived directly in the surviving military correspondence.
In August 1863 Confederate Major General Simon Bolivar Buckner sent instructions to Brigadier General Alfred E. Jackson at Jonesborough as Ambrose Burnside’s Union forces advanced into East Tennessee. Buckner warned that the railroad might have to be abandoned temporarily and instructed Confederate officers to prepare hospitals, supplies, and troops for the possibility of a Federal breakthrough.
By September the situation had changed rapidly.
Confederate Lieutenant Colonel Milton A. Haynes wrote from Jonesborough on September 12 that Confederate forces had marched there from Bristol and found that Federal troops had already entered the town. His report complained that Union soldiers had taken local citizens prisoner before moving away.
Only a week later, Burnside informed his superiors that Union troops occupied Jonesborough while Confederate forces withdrew toward Abingdon. Official military records list an action at Jonesborough on September 21 and another skirmish there on September 28. These encounters never developed into a large set-piece battle comparable to Chickamauga or Knoxville, but the documentary record makes clear that Jonesborough sat inside an active military corridor.
Troops moved through the streets. Supplies passed along the railroad. Military headquarters used the town. Civilians watched control shift between armed forces.
Jonesborough’s Civil War experience was therefore less about one famous battlefield than about living inside a contested transportation network where political loyalty and military occupation could change quickly.
Freedom and Reconstruction
The end of the Confederacy did not end Jonesborough’s upheaval.
Emancipation transformed the legal and social position of hundreds of African Americans in Washington County, but freedom created immediate questions over labor, wages, education, family relationships, housing, violence, and access to the courts.
Jonesborough became part of the federal effort to confront those problems.
Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands include a Jonesboro superintendent’s office operating during Reconstruction. Surviving correspondence and a Daily Journal of Complaints document cases brought before federal officials by African Americans and others seeking help with disputes that local institutions either could not or would not resolve. Entries from 1867 preserve individual names and conflicts, allowing Reconstruction to be studied at the level of actual families rather than only federal legislation.
Education became another battlefield over what freedom would mean.
The historic Holston Baptist Female Institute later served as a Freedmen’s Bureau school, and in 1876 Yardley Warner established the Warner Institute with assistance connected to the Friends Freedmen’s Association. Under principal Julia Bullard Nelson, the school served Jonesborough’s African American community for decades.
Black residents also began challenging the boundaries of political life. In 1874 James C. Cousins and James A. Bailey ran for local office. They lost, but their candidacies were significant enough for the Herald and Tribune to discuss them publicly.
Reconstruction in Jonesborough was not a clean transition from slavery to equality. It was a long contest over who could vote, learn, own property, receive justice, and participate fully in public life.
The records left behind by the Freedmen’s Bureau, county government, schools, newspapers, and local families make Jonesborough especially valuable for recovering that story. The attachment’s research collection identifies the surviving Jonesboro superintendent files as some of the strongest primary material available for the town’s Reconstruction history.
The Town Survives the Age of Growth
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jonesborough faced a challenge that affected many older Appalachian county seats.
Newer communities grew faster.
Nearby Johnson City expanded dramatically as railroads, industry, commerce, and population shifted the balance of the region. Jonesborough remained the Washington County seat, but it would never develop into the large urban center that some nineteenth-century residents might have imagined.
That relative lack of explosive growth ultimately helped preserve much of the town.
Federal, Greek Revival, Victorian, Italianate, and other buildings remained along Main Street and surrounding roads. The town retained an architectural record extending from the early settlement period through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sanborn fire insurance maps from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries document individual buildings, businesses, construction materials, street arrangements, and the gradual transformation of the commercial district. Historic photographs preserved by Washington County and regional archives add faces, signs, storefronts, schools, political gatherings, and everyday street scenes to those maps.
Rather than disappearing beneath later development, much of old Jonesborough remained recognizable.
Eventually residents realized that this apparent economic disadvantage could become one of the town’s greatest assets.
Saving Main Street
Jonesborough entered the modern preservation movement early.
On December 23, 1969, the Jonesborough Historic District was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The federal listing recognized both the architecture of the town and its historical importance, encompassing buildings and streets connected to generations of political, commercial, religious, and social life.
Preservation became part of an economic strategy as well as an effort to protect the past. Residents restored buildings, improved Main Street, organized historic programs, and treated the town itself as a historical resource.
The result is unusual.
Visitors can walk through a place where the physical landscape still connects periods that are often separated in textbooks. The early republic, the State of Franklin, antebellum politics, slavery and emancipation, the railroad era, Reconstruction, and twentieth-century preservation exist within only a few blocks of one another.
Then, in the 1970s, Jonesborough found another way to build its future around its past.
From an Old Wagon to the Storytelling Capital
In 1973 Jonesborough teacher Jimmy Neil Smith helped organize a small gathering devoted to storytelling.
The first National Storytelling Festival was almost startlingly modest. About sixty listeners gathered as storytellers performed from makeshift stages that included an old wagon, with hay bales providing some of the seating.
What happened next transformed the town.
The festival returned, audiences grew, storytellers traveled from across the country, and Jonesborough became associated nationally with the revival of traditional oral storytelling. The movement eventually produced the organization now known as the International Storytelling Center. The Library of Congress later acquired the International Storytelling Collection, preserving a documentary record of the movement that began in the Washington County seat.
There is something appropriate about storytelling becoming central to Jonesborough’s modern identity.
This was already a town built from records and stories.
Its history survived in handwritten deeds, courthouse files, tax books, newspapers, military dispatches, school records, maps, photographs, buildings, family traditions, and memories passed from one generation to another. The storytelling movement simply gave another form to something Jonesborough had been doing since the eighteenth century.
It remembered.
Why Jonesborough Matters to Appalachian History
Jonesborough’s greatest historical importance may be the number of different Appalachian stories that intersect there.
It was created when the Appalachian frontier was still governed from North Carolina. Its courthouse became part of an unsuccessful attempt to create the State of Franklin. Its printing presses produced one of the earliest and most important antislavery newspapers in the United States. Its editors participated in the fierce political culture of nineteenth-century East Tennessee. Its railroad placed the town inside the military struggle for the region during the Civil War. Its Freedmen’s Bureau office recorded the uncertain first years of freedom. Its Black schools and political candidates documented the long struggle over citizenship after slavery.
Later, when growth moved elsewhere, Jonesborough preserved enough of its built environment to become one of Tennessee’s most important historic towns. In 1973 it added another chapter by helping spark the modern American storytelling revival.
The courthouse has been rebuilt. The original railroad depot is gone. Printing presses that once filled the town with political argument have fallen silent. The State of Franklin exists only in records and memory.
Yet Jonesborough still performs the function it assumed in 1779. It remains a place where people come together and where the surrounding region records its life.
For anyone trying to understand the history of southern Appalachia, that continuity is what makes Jonesborough remarkable. Tennessee grew around it, political movements rose and disappeared through it, wars divided it, and generations rebuilt it, but the town endured long enough to become something rare in Appalachia: a community where much of the documentary record, architecture, and historical memory can still be read together.
Sources & Further Reading
Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University. “Clifford A. Maxwell Photographs.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://archivesofappalachia.omeka.net/collections/show/80.
Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University. “James Agee Film Project Photographs.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://archivesofappalachia.omeka.net/collections/show/9.
Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University. “Jonesborough Depot.” Depots of East Tennessee. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://archivesofappalachia.omeka.net/exhibits/show/depots/depots—jonesborough.
Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. “Daily Journal of Complaints, Jonesboro Superintendent.” Records of the Field Offices for the State of Tennessee, 1865–1872. National Museum of African American History and Culture. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://nmaahc.si.edu/freedmens-bureau/record/fbs-1662423774659-1662425734365-1.
Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. “Jonesboro (Superintendent).” Records of the Field Offices for the State of Tennessee, 1865–1872. National Archives and Records Administration and National Museum of African American History and Culture. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://www.si.edu/object/archives/components/sova-nmaahc-fb-m1911-ref188.
Embree, Elihu. The Emancipator. Jonesborough, TN, 1820. Tennessee State Library and Archives, Tennessee Virtual Archive. https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15138coll18/id/3590/.
Embree, Elihu. The Manumission Intelligencer. Jonesborough, TN, 1819. Tennessee State Library and Archives, Tennessee Virtual Archive. https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15138coll18/id/3217/.
Fink, Paul M. Jonesborough: The First Century of Tennessee’s First Town, 1776–1876. Jonesborough, TN: Jonesborough Historical Society, 1972.
Herald and Tribune. Jonesborough, TN. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/2014218225/.
Herald and Tribune. Jonesborough, TN, December 22, 1870. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85033429/1870-12-22/ed-1/?sp=1&st=text.
Heritage Alliance of Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. “Museum and Archives Collection.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://www.heritageall.org/museum-archive/.
Hoss, E. E. Elihu Embree, Abolitionist. Nashville, 1897. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/05033719/.
Irwin, Ned L. “The Lost Papers of the Lost State of Franklin.” Journal of East Tennessee History 69 (1997): 84–96. https://wctnarchives.org/state-of-franklin-documents/.
Kozsuch, Mildred S., and Ruth Broyles. “Washington County.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/washington-county/.
Library of Congress, American Folklife Center. “The International Storytelling Collection.” Folktales and Oral Storytelling: Resources in the American Folklife Center Collections. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://guides.loc.gov/folktales-oral-storytelling/International-Storytelling-Collection.
Mielnik, Tara Mitchell. “The Emancipator.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/the-emancipator/.
Morris, Eastin. Map of Washington County, Tennessee. 1828. Tennessee State Library and Archives, Tennessee Virtual Archive. https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15138coll23/id/854.
National Park Service. “Jonesborough Historic District.” National Register of Historic Places. Washington County, TN. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://npgallery.nps.gov/nrhp/AssetDetail?assetID=e512fefa-afe9-45d7-9ecd-c608c0048f3c.
North Carolina. Laws of North Carolina, 1779. Chap. 36, “An Act to Establish and Lay Out a Town in Washington County.” 1779. https://www.carolana.com/NC/Legislators/Documents/Laws_of_North_Carolina_1779.pdf.
Tennessee Historical Commission. “Chester Inn State Historic Site.” Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://www.tn.gov/historicalcommission/state-programs/state-historic-sites/chester-inn.html.
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Washington County Bibliography.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/bibliographies/bibwashington.htm.
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Washington County Fact Sheet.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factwashington.htm.
West, Carroll Van. “Jonesborough.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/jonesborough/.
Williams, Samuel Cole. History of the Lost State of Franklin. New York: Press of the Pioneers, 1933. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/America/United_States/_Topics/history/_Texts/WILLSF/Preface%2A.html.
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “1779 Tax Lists.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/1779-tax-lists/.
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “County Court Judicial Case Files, 1779–1960.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/judicial-court-case-files/.
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “Deed Book A, 1775–1782.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/deed-book-a-2/.
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “Early Tax Lists.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/early-tax-lists/.
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “Historic Photographs.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/historic-photographs/.
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “Map Collection.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/map-collection/.
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “State of Franklin Era Documents.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/state-of-franklin-documents/.
Author Note: Jonesborough is one of those Appalachian places where nearly every era of East Tennessee history seems to meet along the same streets. I hope this article encourages readers to look beyond its status as Tennessee’s oldest town and explore the remarkable documentary record its people left behind.