Appalachian Community Histories – Sulphur Springs, Washington County, Tennessee: Camp Meetings, Schools, and Community Life
A few miles northwest of Jonesborough, the Sulphur Springs community occupies a valley between the ridges of northern Washington County, Tennessee. It was never a large incorporated town, and for much of its history a traveler might have known the surrounding countryside by other names, including Luke, Morning Star, or Locust Mount. Yet Sulphur Springs developed institutions that bound generations of families to the same landscape: churches, schools, mills, stores, farms, cemeteries, and above all the campground where Methodists have gathered for revival meetings for roughly two centuries.
The community took its name from a sulphur spring whose mineral-rich water provided one of the landscape’s most recognizable natural features. Long before subdivisions began spreading through this part of Washington County, Sulphur Springs was a farming settlement in which the church, schoolhouse, mill, general store, and neighboring farm were closely connected parts of daily life. Local histories compiled from tax records, church documents, school publications, and interviews preserve names that appear again and again across the valley, including Hunt, Walker, Bacon, Martin, Squibb, Payne, Bayless, Deakins, Ford, Carter, Hale, Moore, Archer, and Osborne.
Settlement in the Sulphur Springs Valley
Reconstructing the earliest history of Sulphur Springs is difficult because the community existed long before it consistently appeared under that name in written records. Washington County’s surviving tax lists provide one of the most useful ways to follow settlement. The county archives preserves tax material beginning in 1778, when the region was still politically connected to North Carolina, and substantial runs continue through the early nineteenth century. Depending upon the year, the lists can identify landholdings, taxable polls, livestock, and other property.
Local research using those records describes the early population around Sulphur Springs as including many German and Scotch-Irish families who had moved south from Pennsylvania, along with settlers coming through North Carolina. By the end of the eighteenth century, family names that would remain associated with the district for generations were already becoming established in Washington County. Uriah Hunt, according to the Watauga Association’s history of the community, at one time controlled a considerable portion of the land in the Sulphur Springs valley.
The surviving records also show why a community like Sulphur Springs can be difficult to find through a simple place-name search. Washington County was divided first into militia captain’s companies and later into numbered civil districts. The people who would eventually be remembered as residents of Sulphur Springs might therefore appear in a tax book, deed, court file, or census without the words “Sulphur Springs” appearing anywhere on the page. The community gradually emerged from networks of farms, roads, churches, springs, and family properties rather than from a formal act of incorporation.
The Camp Meeting That Defined Sulphur Springs
More than any other institution, the Sulphur Springs Methodist Campground gave the community a distinctive place in the religious history of East Tennessee. The National Register of Historic Places nomination connects the campground to the great wave of evangelical revivalism that spread through the southern backcountry after 1800. Its documentation states that meetings may have occurred on the site as early as 1815, although the evidence for those earliest gatherings is less certain than the documentation that survives from the 1840s.
Church tradition usually dates the established Sulphur Springs Camp Meeting to about 1820. The earliest services were remembered as gatherings beneath temporary brush arbors, a simple form of shelter common at frontier revivals. Families came not merely for a Sunday service but for an extended religious gathering. Later church accounts describe meetings that could last two or three weeks, with people arriving in wagons and buggies carrying food, bedding, livestock, and whatever else was necessary to live temporarily on the grounds.
An important documentary turning point came on September 19, 1842. A deed between Payne Squibb and the Reverend William Milburn, together with trustees John Mahoney, Everett Mahoney, William Walker, Andrew Walker, Richard Martin, Hiram Swaney, and Andrew Guinn, set aside a five-acre tract for the Methodist Episcopal Church. The deed is particularly valuable because it also referred to buildings connected with church and school use, showing how closely worship and education were already linked within the community.
That same period brought a major change to the campground. According to the National Register nomination and Historic American Buildings Survey documentation, the temporary arbor tradition gave way in 1842 to a permanent structural complex. Around 1900 the surviving camp shed was reconstructed according to the earlier form, with historic materials reused in the new structure.
The shed itself preserves the simplicity of nineteenth-century camp-meeting worship. The 1975 National Register documentation described an open-air building approximately seventy-two by forty-five feet, supported by hewn and pegged timber trusses, with unfinished plank pews, a stage, and what was then a packed-earth and sawdust floor. By the time the property was documented, the cabins, dormitories, livery stable, and rail fence that had once surrounded the meeting place had disappeared.
Those lost buildings were once essential to the experience. Families who traveled too far to return home each evening stayed in camps around the meeting grounds. Church history remembers rough sleeping arrangements, communal meals, horses gathered near Little Limestone Creek, livestock kept close to the grounds, and food prepared on a scale large enough to serve enormous crowds. A ram’s horn summoned worshippers to services, while preaching, testimony, shared meals, and the Methodist Lovefeast turned the campground into both a religious center and one of the community’s largest social gatherings.
Methodists and Baptists in the Same Community
The Methodists were not alone in shaping Sulphur Springs. On June 30, 1842, the Limestone Baptist Church was organized at the Sulphur Springs Schoolhouse with thirty-four members. Local history identifies Elders William Cate, Jesse Riggs, Reese Bayless, and Reuben Bayless with the organization of the congregation. A church building followed, and another structure was erected in 1891.
The Baptist congregation gradually became as firmly associated with Sulphur Springs as its Methodist neighbor. A new deed arrangement secured the church property in 1909, and in 1915 W. S. Squibb became the congregation’s first Sunday school superintendent. The church expanded its schedule during the following years, officially adopted the name Sulphur Springs Baptist Church in 1945, and received its first full-time pastor in 1947. A later sanctuary was completed in 1970.
The relationship between the two congregations helps reveal the character of the wider community. Local accounts remembered households in which one spouse belonged to the Methodist church and the other to the Baptist church. Rather than creating two completely separate social worlds, the churches remained part of the same network of families and neighbors. The community history even records joint worship services between the congregations.
Luke, Morning Star, and Locust Mount
Sulphur Springs has not always been the only name used for the surrounding countryside. Postal history provides one of the clearest examples. During the late nineteenth century, residents received mail through several small post offices whose names can easily obscure the community from researchers today.
The community itself was at one point known as Luke. According to the local historical reconstruction, the Luke Post Office was established in 1894, with William H. Leach as its first postmaster. Joseph D. Lyon followed in 1896 and J. C. Osborne in 1897. The office closed in November 1900, when its mail service was transferred to Jonesborough.
Nearby Morning Star had its own post office beginning in 1878, while Locust Mount had postal service dating as far back as 1836. Locust Mount’s office disappeared, returned, and passed through the hands of several postmasters before it too closed in 1900. For historians trying to locate nineteenth-century Sulphur Springs families, these names are more than curiosities. They are alternate doors into postal appointments, newspapers, land records, correspondence, and family history.
Building a School in Sulphur Springs
Education became another institution around which Sulphur Springs organized itself. The 1842 Methodist property deed already provides evidence of a school building, but for much of the nineteenth century children in the surrounding countryside attended small rural schools scattered through places such as Chalybeate Springs, Cathal Springs, and Morning Star. Older students who wanted additional education might travel to Jonesborough or Washington College, while many others simply left school and went to work.
That arrangement began to change dramatically in the early twentieth century. Methodist minister T. D. Rowe encouraged local residents to build a substantial community school, and families responded with money, timber, land, and labor. Construction began in 1906, and the new Sulphur Springs School opened in the fall of 1907 even though work on the building was not completely finished.
The school was ambitious for a rural community. Local accounts describe a two-story frame structure with eight classrooms, an auditorium that could hold hundreds of people, a science laboratory, a library of roughly two thousand books, and a piano for music instruction. A photograph preserved by the Washington County Archives shows Sulphur Springs High School about 1908, placing a surviving image beside the written descriptions of the new institution.
The school also drew students from beyond easy walking distance. A fourteen-room dormitory was built for female students, while boys could use some of the camp-meeting buildings for lodging. Before regular county buses transformed transportation, students reached school by foot, horseback, wagon, or covered truck. In 1910 water was piped to the school from the Carder springs, and a community gymnasium was added in 1927.
These details are not dependent entirely upon later memory. The Washington County Archives maintains a dedicated Sulphur Springs School collection covering 1911 through 1944, along with other county educational files involving attendance, examinations, diplomas, student transfers, tuition, and school regulations. The archives also preserves earlier files specifically labeled Sulphur Springs and Sulphur Springs High School.
The history of education in the community also reflects segregation. After students transferred into the new Sulphur Springs School in 1907, the old Chalybeate Springs building was used as a school for Black children. Sources disagree on precisely when that school finally closed. One local history places its end between 1913 and 1916, while material published through Washington County TNGenWeb and attributed to the county archivist gives 1922. What is clear is that Black and white children did not experience the same educational system during this period.
A new brick Sulphur Springs school was constructed by Works Progress Administration labor in 1939, tying the community directly to the federal relief programs of the Great Depression. The high school continued until 1971, when Sulphur Springs, Boones Creek, and Fall Branch High Schools were consolidated into the new Daniel Boone High School. The former Sulphur Springs campus continued in use for younger students.
Mills, Blacksmiths, Stores, and Farm Life
For most of its history, Sulphur Springs was fundamentally an agricultural community. Farms produced food and livestock, but they also generated demand for the network of trades that allowed a rural settlement to function. Millers ground grain and sawed lumber. Blacksmiths repaired tools and worked with horses. General stores carried manufactured goods and often doubled as informal gathering places. Undertakers, doctors, printers, and wagon drivers supplied services that might otherwise require a long trip to Jonesborough or Johnson City.
One of the most substantial enterprises was a three-story mill associated with the Martin family northeast of the Baptist church. J. C. Osborne later operated it. Water from a dam was directed through a hand-dug race to power the mill, which served at different times as both a gristmill and sawmill. It was eventually converted to roller milling, and local accounts remember flour being hauled by horse team to Johnson City. Other mills operated around Locust Mount and on the road toward Bowmantown.
Blacksmith shops likewise appeared at several locations. Isaac White operated one by the middle of the nineteenth century, and others followed under men such as Adam Good and Jack Nelson. General stores grew around the same road network. One store connected with J. C. Osborne’s mill housed the Luke Post Office, demonstrating how commerce, transportation, and communication overlapped within the same small buildings.
By the twentieth century, automobiles began changing the nature of those local services. Jack Nelson established an early garage and worked on Model T Fords, while later generations of the family continued repairing automobiles. The horse, wagon, mill, and blacksmith shop did not disappear overnight, but Sulphur Springs was gradually becoming connected to a wider regional economy.
One locally important business began in 1929 when Sherman Payne established the Payne Sausage Company. In its most active years, the operation employed roughly thirty people and processed meat for distribution to area grocery stores. Dairy farming also became an important source of income, with local families bottling and transporting milk and eventually adapting to refrigerated trucks and bulk storage systems.
Roads, Electricity, and a Changing Rural Community
Physical isolation began to lessen during the early twentieth century. Local history dates construction of Sulphur Springs Road to 1919, improving travel through the community. Electricity arrived in 1928 from a power station in Jonesborough, and residents Dan Garst and Rollin Kennerly were remembered for wiring many local homes and businesses.
The transformation can also be seen through one woman’s memory. In a 1976 interview preserved through East Tennessee State University’s Archives of Appalachia, Stella Deakins Sherfey, who was born in 1897 and had attended Sulphur Springs High School, discussed the dramatic changes she had witnessed during her lifetime. She remembered quilting gatherings in which neighbors spent an entire day together, sharing work, food, and conversation. Her recollections preserve something government records cannot easily show: the way community life operated between the formal institutions found in deeds, tax lists, and school files.
Organizations filled some of the same social role. Sulphur Springs residents participated in the Modern Woodmen of America, Masonic activities, the Grange, Ruritan organizations, and local charity efforts. The Sulphur Springs Volunteer Fire Department was organized in 1969 and eventually developed from a modest one-truck operation into a larger community institution. A new fire hall and community center built largely with volunteer labor in 1980 reflected a tradition almost as old as the settlement itself: when the community needed something, residents often built it together.
The Campground Survives
Many rural institutions that once defined Sulphur Springs changed or vanished. Postal offices closed. Small schools consolidated. Mills stopped turning. Blacksmith shops disappeared. Families increasingly traveled outside the community for employment, medical care, shopping, and education.
The old Methodist campground survived.
When the Historic American Buildings Survey documented the site, it recognized the campground not merely as an unusual old structure but as evidence of a religious and social system once widespread throughout the Appalachian South. Camp meetings allowed scattered farm families to gather in large numbers, exchange news, worship together, renew friendships, and reinforce community ties. The architecture was simple because the gathering itself was what mattered.
The Sulphur Springs Methodist Campground was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 12, 1975. Nearly fifty years later, preservation work continued. Additional National Register documentation for the property at 101 Bayless Road was formally approved on October 22, 2024, showing that the site’s historical record is still being researched and refined.
That survival gives Sulphur Springs something increasingly rare. The campground still provides a physical connection between the modern Washington County community and the world of the nineteenth-century farm families who gathered beneath brush arbors and later under hand-hewn timbers for days of preaching, eating, visiting, and worship.
Why Sulphur Springs Matters
Sulphur Springs is the kind of place that can disappear easily from a broad history of Tennessee. It never became a major city. No railroad empire or industrial corporation transformed it into a regional center. Much of its story survives instead in ordinary records: tax lists, deeds, school files, church minutes, old photographs, cemetery stones, oral interviews, and the memories of families who remained in the valley.
Yet those records reveal something important about Appalachian history. Communities did not have to be incorporated towns to possess strong identities. Sulphur Springs developed around institutions built through cooperation. Families created churches, constructed schools, maintained roads, operated mills and stores, organized fire protection, and returned generation after generation to the same campground.
The landscape eventually changed from one dominated by farms into a rural residential community increasingly tied to Johnson City, Kingsport, Bristol, and the rest of the Tri-Cities. Still, the names, churches, school traditions, cemetery, and campground survived enough of the earlier world to keep Sulphur Springs recognizable.
In that sense, the old camp shed may be the most appropriate monument the community could have. Its timbers belong to a religious tradition reaching back toward the great revival movements of the early nineteenth century, but its greater story is the story of the people who kept rebuilding around it. For roughly two centuries, while post offices opened and closed, schools rose and consolidated, farms became subdivisions, and wagon roads became modern highways, people continued gathering at Sulphur Springs.
That continuity is what makes this small Washington County valley worth remembering.
Sources & Further Reading
Washington County, Tennessee, Register of Deeds. Deed from Payne Squibb to Rev. William Milburn and trustees of the Methodist Episcopal Church, September 19, 1842. Washington County, Tennessee. Repository information through the Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives. Washington County Archives
Washington County, Tennessee, Department of Records Management and Archives. County Clerk Records, Record Group 5: Sulphur Springs School, 1911–1944, Undated. Box 14, Folder 28. Jonesborough, TN. County Clerk Record Group 5
Washington County, Tennessee, Department of Records Management and Archives. “Tax Lists of Washington County.” Tax records, 1778–1882. Jonesborough, TN. Washington County Archives Digital Collections
Washington County, Tennessee, Department of Records Management and Archives. “Sulphur Springs High School, 1908.” Historic Photographs Collection. Sulphur Springs High School photograph
Washington County, Tennessee, Department of Records Management and Archives. County Clerk Records, Record Group 5. Includes county education files, attendance records, examinations, diplomas, transfers, tuition records, and other school materials. County Clerk records guide
Washington County, Tennessee, Department of Records Management and Archives. “Washington County, Tennessee Marriages, 1787–1980.” Jonesborough, TN. Washington County marriage records
Washington County, Tennessee, Department of Records Management and Archives. Wills, Record Group 4, Sub-Group 4.3, Series A, 1773–1992. Jonesborough, TN. Washington County wills guide
Historic American Buildings Survey. “Sulphur Springs Methodist Campground, Sulphur Springs Road, Sulphur Springs, Washington County, TN.” HABS TN-209. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Library of Congress HABS collection
United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service. National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination Form: Sulphur Springs Methodist Campground. Washington County, Tennessee, 1975. National Register nomination
National Park Service. “Weekly List 2024 10 25.” National Register of Historic Places. October 25, 2024. Records approval of additional documentation for the Sulphur Springs Methodist Campground on October 22, 2024. National Park Service weekly list
Herald and Tribune. Jonesborough, Tennessee, 1869–present. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Herald and Tribune collection
United States Geological Survey. Greeneville Quadrangle, Tennessee-North Carolina. Surveyed 1883–84, 1888, and 1891. Edition of September 1904. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1904. USGS Greeneville Quadrangle
Sulphur Springs Home Demonstration Club. History of Sulphur Springs Community: A Tennessee Homecoming ’86 Project. Sulphur Springs, TN, 1986. Listed in the Tennessee State Library and Archives bibliography of Washington County history. Tennessee State Library and Archives bibliography
A History of Sulphur Springs United Methodist Church and Sulphur Springs Historic Camp Meeting Grounds, 1820–1984. 1984. Listed in the Tennessee State Library and Archives bibliography of Washington County history. Tennessee State Library and Archives bibliography
Watauga Association of Genealogists, Northeast Tennessee. “Sulphur Springs.” Community history based on tax records, church histories, school publications, local records, and oral interviews. Watauga Association, Sulphur Springs
Sulphur Springs Methodist Church. “History.” Sulphur Springs, Washington County, Tennessee. Sulphur Springs Methodist Church history
Blaustein, Richard. Interview with Stella Deakins Sherfey and Sandy Walker, Sulphur Springs Home Demonstration Club, Sulphur Springs, Tennessee, April 15, 1976. Broadside Television Collection, Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University. Sulphur Springs oral history interview
Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University. “Sulphur Springs Quilt-Making.” Broadside Television Collection. Sulphur Springs, Tennessee, 1970s. Sulphur Springs Quilting Bee collection
FamilySearch Library. Church Records, 1876–1952: Sulphur Springs Baptist Church, Jonesboro, Tennessee. Listed in Washington County church-record holdings. Washington County church records guide
Sulphur Springs High School Yearbooks. 1952, 1953, 1962, 1963, and 1967. Sulphur Springs, Tennessee. U.S. School Yearbooks Collection. Washington County school records guide
Cemetery Survey Team of Northeast Tennessee. “Sulphur Springs Cemetery.” Washington County TNGenWeb. Surveyed 2009. Includes gravestone transcriptions, obituary references, and Tennessee death-record comparisons. Sulphur Springs Cemetery survey
Tennessee Homecoming ’86. Tennessee Homecoming ’86 Project Records, 1984–1986. Tennessee State Library and Archives. Includes Sulphur Springs community project materials. Homecoming ’86 project records
McCown, Mary Hardin, and Inez E. Burns. Washington County, Tennessee Records. Vol. 1. Johnson City, TN: Privately published, 1964. Includes abstracts of early Washington County taxables and county records. Washington County Archives collections
Historical Marker Database. “Sulphur Springs Camp Meeting Grounds.” Washington County, Tennessee. Includes the Methodist historic-site marker and campground marker. Washington County historical markers
Author Note: Small communities like Sulphur Springs remind us that Appalachian history often survives in churches, school records, cemeteries, and the memories of families who called a place home. I wanted to preserve this Washington County story because its campground and community provide a remarkable link between early nineteenth-century East Tennessee and the present.