Appalachian Community Histories – Lamar, Washington County: May Day, Cherokee Creek, Brown Farm, and the Nolichucky
Lamar is easy to pass through without realizing how much history lies beneath the name. The community sits in southern Washington County, where Cherokee Creek approaches the Nolichucky River several miles southwest of Jonesborough. Farms, old roads, churches, school grounds, cemeteries, and the river valley give the area the appearance of a quiet rural corner of East Tennessee, but Lamar occupies a landscape tied to some of the earliest surviving records of European settlement in what became Tennessee.
The history is also older than the name Lamar itself. Anyone searching historical records only for “Lamar” will miss much of the story because earlier documents describe the same general landscape through names such as Cherokee Creek, the Nolichucky Settlement, May Day, and Chucky Valley. The Tennessee Encyclopedia places the establishment of the Lamar community between 1800 and 1805, but families had already been living, worshiping, trading, farming, and disputing land along the Nolichucky and Cherokee Creek for decades by then.
That makes Lamar more than a small community with an old school. Its history reaches back into Cherokee land transactions, the frontier government of the Watauga era, early Baptist and Lutheran congregations, water-powered industry, nineteenth-century pottery, and generations of family farms whose buildings still preserve pieces of that story.
Before Lamar Had a Name
Washington County itself was created by the North Carolina legislature in 1777 from the earlier Washington District. At the time, its territory was far larger than the modern county, covering an enormous portion of the country that would eventually become Tennessee. Jonesborough developed as its county seat, but settlement also spread along the river valleys south of town, particularly around the Nolichucky and its tributaries.
One of the most important figures in the early history of the area was Jacob Brown. Washington County’s own archival account places Brown’s arrival along the Nolichucky around 1772, although later community histories sometimes give 1771. Brown came from South Carolina and established himself as a trader and blacksmith. According to the county archives, he initially entered into a lease arrangement with Cherokee people and became involved with both the settlers moving into the region and the developing political institutions of the Watauga settlements.
The documentary foundation for this period survives in Washington County Deed Book A, one of the most important collections of early Tennessee land records. The book covers 1775 through 1782 and contains deeds associated with the Watauga and Nolichucky settlements, later transfers from Brown and Charles Robertson, and early North Carolina land grants.
On March 25, 1775, Brown entered into two major land transactions with Cherokee leaders, following the better-known Watauga purchase made at Sycamore Shoals several days earlier. Washington County records describe one transaction as involving ten shillings and another as involving seven hundred pounds in Virginia money. Daniel Boone was among the notable witnesses surrounding the negotiations, while Dragging Canoe, the son of Attakullakulla, strongly opposed the land sales. The surviving deeds are important precisely because they show that the process was more complicated than later pioneer legends sometimes suggest.
There is a colorful tradition that Brown once tricked a Cherokee leader through an exchange of dreams, supposedly using a customary obligation to claim an enormous tract of land. The Washington County Archives itself places that tale under the heading of “legends.” The surviving deeds, rather than the story, provide the firmer historical foundation for understanding the transactions.
Jacob Brown and the Nolichucky Settlement
Brown’s connection to the area was not simply a matter of acquiring property. He became part of the political world developing west of the mountains, participating in the local institutions that eventually gave way to more formal county government. The history of his family became deeply connected to the land near the mouth of Cherokee Creek, and portions of that historic landscape survive today.
The strongest physical link between Brown’s generation and modern Lamar is the Brown Farm. In 2015, the Tennessee Historical Commission described the property as lying within the Lamar community approximately seven miles southwest of Jonesborough, at the confluence of Cherokee Creek and the Nolichucky River. The 120-acre historic landscape had been listed in the National Register of Historic Places on December 29, 2014.
The farm preserves more than a house. The Tennessee Historical Commission identified Brown’s Mill, dating to about 1820, the May Day Post Office building from 1883, a springhouse and smokehouse dating to about the middle of the nineteenth century, two later barns, and the Brown Family Cemetery, whose historic period reaches back to 1785. Together these resources tell a much larger story of agriculture, family, transportation, industry, and commerce along the Nolichucky.
At the center of the farm stands the Byrd Brown House, built by Jacob Brown’s grandson. There is a small discrepancy in the surviving institutional sources. Washington County Archives dates the house to 1839, while the Tennessee Historical Commission places its construction around 1845. Both agree on its association with Byrd Brown and with the Lamar landscape, so the safest conclusion is that the Greek Revival home belongs to the late 1830s or 1840s rather than insisting on a single construction year that the available sources do not fully settle.
May Day and the Changing Identity of the Community
Part of the difficulty in tracing Lamar is that the countryside did not always organize itself around the same place names used today. One of the most important older names is May Day.
Local historical research from the Watauga Association of Genealogists identifies May Day on the north side of the Nolichucky as an old community associated with the Brown settlement. By the late nineteenth century, it had its own postal identity. The 1887 Tennessee State Gazetteer and Business Directory described May Day as a small settlement seven miles from Jonesborough with a population of thirty-one and J. J. Brown serving as postmaster.
The May Day post office had been established in 1883. Over the following years, the office moved among different local buildings and residences as postmasters changed. For a period it operated from a room in J. J. Brown’s general store. The post office was discontinued in November 1900 and its mail service transferred to Jonesborough.
That disappearance from the postal map did not erase the community. Instead, May Day became one of the older geographic identities folded into the history surrounding Lamar. The surviving May Day Post Office building on Brown Farm is therefore more than an unusual outbuilding. It is physical evidence of a time when rural Washington County consisted of numerous small named communities whose boundaries and identities often overlapped.
Cherokee Creek and the Churches of the Early Community
Long before Lamar appeared prominently in twentieth-century school records, Cherokee Creek served as one of the area’s strongest geographic anchors. Some of the earliest surviving community records are not government documents at all, but church records.
Cherokee Baptist Church traces its recorded history to 1783. A surviving archival history states that the first documented meeting occurred on April 2 of that year, when William Murphy was installed as pastor. In 1786, Cherokee and six other Baptist congregations met there to organize the Holston Baptist Association, making the church an important institution in the early religious history of Tennessee.
The church records are unusually valuable because they preserve the ordinary life of the community. The surviving transcription at the Washington County Archives includes membership lists, baptisms, births, deaths, church officers, disciplinary proceedings, and cemetery inscriptions. Those records make it possible to move beyond a history composed only of prominent men and land purchases and begin reconstructing the families who actually lived along Cherokee Creek.
Nearby, another congregation reflected the German presence in Washington County. Immanuel Lutheran Church, also called the Old Dutch Meeting House, was organized in the Cherokee Creek community around 1806 after Henry Miller deeded land for a “Dutch church” in 1805. Services were conducted in both German and English, and in 1820 the congregation became a charter member of the Tennessee Synod. The church disbanded around 1870, but records covering 1806 through 1831 survive.
Those documents contain lists of communicants, baptisms, confirmations, catechism students, financial decisions, church officials, and cemetery information. Some were written in German script. The building itself disappeared in the early twentieth century, but the surviving records and cemetery preserve another layer of the cultural landscape from which Lamar developed.
Mills, Tools, and Industry Along Cherokee Creek
Water shaped Lamar’s history as much as any road. Cherokee Creek and the Nolichucky watered farms, but they also supplied power and transportation possibilities for generations of small industries.
Brown’s Mill, dated to around 1820 by the Tennessee Historical Commission, is one of the most visible surviving reminders of that economy. The Brown Farm nomination describes a landscape in which agricultural and industrial activity developed beside one another, with successive generations using the creek and surrounding farmland to support both kinds of work.
Other industries appeared farther along Cherokee Creek. Local historical research describes a nineteenth-century water-powered sawmill associated with the Hoss family and a woolen operation that was eventually converted into the Cherokee Creek Roller Mill in 1898. Water wheels, mill races, saws, grinding equipment, and workshops once made these rural valleys far more industrial than the modern landscape might suggest.
Before the Civil War, Thomas Jefferson Wilson reportedly manufactured edge tools at his property on Cherokee Creek directly across from the site of the present Lamar school. Wilson had connections with the Embree family’s iron-manufacturing interests, and local historical research states that remains of the old factory sills could still be found beneath the creek.
The importance of the watercourses becomes clearer when these places are considered together. Lamar was not a town organized around a courthouse square or railroad depot. Its earlier economy stretched along creeks, roads, farm boundaries, churches, mills, and river crossings. The community developed as a rural network rather than a concentrated town center.
Charles Decker and the Pottery Near Lamar
One of the most distinctive industries in the wider Lamar vicinity developed downriver in Chucky Valley.
In 1873, Charles F. Decker moved to Washington County and settled along the Nolichucky. The Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State University places his operation approximately one mile below Taylor’s Bridge near the modern Lamar Elementary School. Decker initially rented a pottery shop from Alfred E. Jackson and Isaac Taylor before acquiring land and developing his own operation, known as Keystone Pottery.
The location offered what a nineteenth-century potter needed. Timber could supply fuel, local clay could provide raw material, and the Nolichucky corridor connected the business to surrounding communities. Decker’s operation eventually produced a remarkable variety of stoneware, including jugs, crocks, jars, churns, flowerpots, pitchers, drain pipes, canning vessels, milk pans, rolling pins, and other household objects.
Pottery production required considerably more than shaping clay on a wheel. Decker’s surviving inventories and ledgers document presses, molds, grinding equipment, kiln furniture, clay preparation, wood supplies, glazing, firing, and transportation. One family account recalled a kiln being kept fired day and night for nearly a week, after which wagons carried finished pottery into surrounding markets and as far away as Virginia.
Keystone Pottery belonged to Chucky Valley rather than Lamar proper, but its location near Taylor’s Bridge and the present Lamar school places it squarely within the economic landscape surrounding the community. It also demonstrates that this stretch of Washington County supported specialized craft production capable of reaching customers well beyond the Nolichucky Valley.
Lamar School and a Community Becomes Easier to See
By the early twentieth century, Lamar begins to emerge more clearly under its modern name, particularly through school records.
Washington County Archives preserves a photograph identified as Lamar High School from 1912, along with another undated image of the school. The county’s surviving school records for Lamar cover the period from 1912 through 1933, with additional undated material. These are among the most direct documentary sources for the community itself.
The school remained an important center of community identity into the 1940s. The Margaret Sherfey Holley Papers at the Washington County Archives include photocopies of the 1945 Lamar High School student newspaper, appropriately called the Cherokee. Such a source can reveal a different kind of local history than deeds and tax lists, preserving student activities, school culture, teachers, organizations, local advertisements, and the everyday concerns of people living in the community during the closing months of the Second World War.
Lamar School continues to operate in Washington County today, providing an unusual thread of institutional continuity. The buildings, grade levels, and educational system have changed over generations, but the school name has kept Lamar visible on maps and in public life long after many small rural post offices, mills, stores, and neighborhood institutions disappeared.
The photographic record makes that continuity particularly tangible. A 1912 school photograph, twentieth-century student records, a 1945 newspaper, and the modern school all allow Lamar’s educational history to be followed across more than a century.
A History Hidden Under Several Names
Lamar demonstrates one of the central problems in researching rural Appalachian communities. A place can exist for generations without consistently appearing under one name.
Someone living near present-day Lamar in the eighteenth century might be found in a deed connected to the Nolichucky Settlement or Cherokee Creek. A nineteenth-century resident might appear in records associated with May Day, Cherokee Creek, Chucky Valley, a church congregation, a mill, or an individual farm. Only later does Lamar become the most useful identifying name.
That is why the surviving primary sources matter so much. Deed Book A documents the earliest land transactions. Church minutes identify families and relationships. Tax lists reveal property and economic standing. Probate files record household possessions and inheritance. School records provide names of children and teachers. Newspapers capture accidents, marriages, businesses, elections, and social events. Historic maps reveal communities that disappeared from later road maps.
Viewed separately, these records contain fragments. Viewed together, they allow the history of Lamar to emerge.
What Still Survives
Much of Lamar’s history can still be connected to physical places.
The Brown Farm remains the most important historic landscape directly identified with the community. Its farmhouse, mill, cemetery, May Day Post Office, agricultural buildings, and location along Cherokee Creek connect several centuries of history within a single property. The National Register listing recognizes the farm for its significance in settlement, industry, and architecture.
Cherokee Baptist Church continues the religious story begun in the eighteenth century, while the cemetery of the former Immanuel Lutheran congregation preserves another community that once worshiped nearby. Lamar School continues an educational identity documented at least as far back as the early twentieth century. Downriver, surviving Decker pottery in museum and private collections preserves the workmanship of an industry once located only a short distance from Taylor’s Bridge.
Even where buildings have vanished, the landscape helps explain why people settled here. Cherokee Creek still runs toward the Nolichucky. The river bottoms remain fertile. Roads follow corridors shaped by farms, bridges, and earlier routes. Family names recorded in deeds, church minutes, cemeteries, and school records still belong to the history of the same narrow valley.
Why Lamar’s History Matters
Lamar never needed to become a large town to have an important history.
Its story is valuable precisely because it shows how much of Appalachian history happened outside incorporated towns and county seats. Here, a community grew from a network of river settlements, farms, churches, mills, workshops, postal stops, bridges, and schools. Its boundaries shifted. Its older place names faded. Some institutions disappeared completely, while others survived under new forms.
The earliest surviving records connect the area with the complicated expansion of settler society into Cherokee country during the 1770s. Brown Farm preserves the agricultural and industrial development that followed. Cherokee Baptist and Immanuel Lutheran reveal different religious and cultural traditions sharing the same countryside. Brown’s Mill, Wilson’s tool works, the Hoss sawmill, and nearby Keystone Pottery show that rural Washington County was also a place of production. Lamar High School and its successor institutions show how a scattered agricultural community eventually gathered around education as one of its defining public institutions.
Today, Lamar can appear to be little more than a name along the highway south of Jonesborough. The archival record tells another story. Beneath that modern name are more than two centuries of documented community life, and beneath those two centuries lies an even older landscape along Cherokee Creek and the Nolichucky River.
For a small place, Lamar carries an unusually large piece of Washington County’s past.
Sources & Further Reading
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. Deed Book A, 1775–1782. Washington County Archives. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/deed-book-a-2/
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. Index to Deed Book A, 1775–1782. Washington County Archives. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/deed-book-a-index-for-publication-43.pdf
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “The Watauga Purchase Indenture.” Washington County Archives. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/6036-2/
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “Watauga Association Era Documents.” Washington County Archives. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/watauga-era-documents/
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “Early Tax Lists.” Washington County Archives. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/early-tax-lists/
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “1778 Tax List, Captain Gann’s Company.” Washington County Archives. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/1778-tax-list-captain-ganns-company/
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. Cherokee Baptist Church Records, 1795–1879. Accession 7. Washington County Archives. https://wctnarchives.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/acc.-7-cherokee-baptist-church-records.pdf
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. Immanuel Lutheran Church Records, 1806–1831 and Undated. Accession 8. Washington County Archives. https://wctnarchives.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/acc.-8-immanuel-lutheran-church-records.pdf
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. County Clerk Records. RG 5. Includes Lamar School records, 1912–1933 and undated. Washington County Archives. https://wctnarchives.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/rg-5-county-clerk-records-public-2025.pdf
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. Margaret Sherfey Holley Papers. Accession 1. Includes photocopies of the Lamar High School Cherokee student newspaper, 1945. https://wctnarchives.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/acc-1-margaret-sherfey-holley-papers.pdf
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “Historic Photographs.” Includes photographs of Lamar High School and the Byrd Brown House. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/historic-photographs/
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “Places in Washington County.” Includes the Byrd Brown House in the Lamar community. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/washington-county-places/
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “Jacob Brown, the Trader.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/jacob-brown-the-trader/
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “Washington County, Tennessee Marriages, 1778–1950.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/washington-county-tennessee-marriages-1778-1950/
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “Judicial Court Case Files.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/judicial-court-case-files/
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “Circuit Court Case Files.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/circuit-court-case-files/
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. “Historic Newspaper Collection.” Accession 14. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wctnarchives.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/acc.-14-historic-newspaper-collection-public-guide-1.pdf
Herald and Tribune. Jonesborough, Tennessee, 1869–present. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2014218225/
Tennessee Historical Commission. “Brown Farm.” The Courier 63 (February 2015). https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/historicalcommission/courier/back-issues/thc_courier_feb15.pdf
Tennessee Historical Commission. National Register of Historic Places Inventory. Brown Farm, Washington County, National Register No. 14001107. https://comptroller.aem.tn.extglb.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/historicalcommission/nr/thc_nr-inventory.pdf
Smith, Samuel D., and Stephen T. Rogers. A Survey of Historic Pottery Making in Tennessee. Research Series No. 3. Nashville: Tennessee Division of Archaeology, 1979. https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/environment/archaeology/documents/researchseries/arch_RS03_Pottery_making.pdf
Smith, Samuel D., and Stephen T. Rogers. Tennessee Potteries, Pots, and Potters, 1790s to 1950. Research Series No. 18. Nashville: Tennessee Division of Archaeology, 2011. https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/environment/archaeology/documents/researchseries/arch_rs18_tn_potteries_2011.pdf
East Tennessee State University, Archives of Appalachia. “Charles F. Decker: Master Potter, The Place.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://archivesofappalachia.omeka.net/exhibits/show/decker-pottery/the-place
East Tennessee State University, Archives of Appalachia. “Charles F. Decker: Master Potter, The Pottery.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://archivesofappalachia.omeka.net/exhibits/show/decker-pottery/the-pottery
East Tennessee State University, Archives of Appalachia. “Charles F. Decker: Master Potter, The Process.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://archivesofappalachia.omeka.net/exhibits/show/decker-pottery/the-process
East Tennessee State University, Archives of Appalachia. “Charles F. Decker: Master Potter, Sources.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://archivesofappalachia.omeka.net/exhibits/show/decker-pottery/sources
Kozsuch, Mildred, and Ruth Broyles. “Washington County.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/washington-county/
Watauga Association of Genealogists. “Cherokee Creek.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wagsnetn.org/member-log-in-2/members-only-2/cherokee-creek/
Watauga Association of Genealogists. “May Day.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wagsnetn.org/member-log-in-2/members-only-2/may-day/
Watauga Association of Genealogists. “Chucky Valley.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://wagsnetn.org/member-log-in-2/members-only-2/chucky-valley/
Washington County, Tennessee Department of Records Management and Archives. Washington County, Tennessee: A Bibliography. https://wctnarchives.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/washington-county-bibliography2.pdf
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Genealogical Fact Sheet for Washington County.” Tennessee Secretary of State. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factwashington.htm
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Tennessee Tax Lists.” Tennessee Secretary of State. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/taxlist.htm
Author Note: As an Appalachian historian, I am continually drawn to communities like Lamar where a quiet modern landscape conceals generations of history. Its story shows how much of Appalachia’s past survives in deeds, churches, family farms, school records, cemeteries, and the names people gave the land.