Appalachian Community Histories – Cedar Grove West, Sullivan County: A Church, a School, and a Community Absorbed by Kingsport
Cedar Grove is one of the many Appalachian communities whose history becomes harder to see as nearby towns expand, roads change, and familiar institutions disappear. The western Cedar Grove of Sullivan County lies near the northern edge of Kingsport, within a landscape often described in records as Bloomingdale, Coley Street, Vermont, Rosetree, or simply the Kingsport area.
This is not the Cedar Grove located south of Bristol along Tennessee State Route 44. The western Cedar Grove is the community associated with Cedar Grove School, Cedar Grove Missionary Baptist Church, Vermont United Methodist Church, and the roads spreading outward from Bloomingdale Pike. Because these overlapping names were used by churches, schools, newspapers, government offices, and residents, Cedar Grove can vanish from an index even when a document clearly concerns the community.
The federal Geographic Names Information System recognizes Cedar Grove as a populated place in Sullivan County. Historical maps, however, offer the more revealing picture. The Tennessee State Highway Department’s 1938 Sullivan County map, prepared from field information collected in 1937, preserves the rural road system, scattered buildings, churches, and schools of the county before the full arrival of postwar suburban growth. Later highway maps and federal topographic surveys show the same countryside gradually becoming part of the broader Kingsport and Bloomingdale landscape.
Before Cedar Grove
The land surrounding Cedar Grove belonged to one of the oldest settlement areas in northeastern Tennessee. Cedar Grove developed within the wider Reedy Creek and Bloomingdale country, where European American settlement began before Tennessee became a state and even before Sullivan County was formally created.
Research preserved by the Archives of the City of Kingsport identifies the Reedy Creek Settlement as dating to 1772. Families established farms, cabins, mills, and roads across the valleys and ridges north of the later city of Kingsport. Among them were members of the Ketron family, descendants of German immigrants whose name also appeared in early records as Kettering or Catron. John Ketron settled in the area around 1790, and Ketron land remained an important part of the Bloomingdale and Arcadia landscape for generations.
The nearby Thompson House stood on land connected to a 1780 grant, while other houses and farms grew along Bloomingdale Road, Boozy Creek, and Reedy Creek. These properties demonstrate that the countryside around Cedar Grove was not an empty place waiting for Kingsport’s expansion. It was already an established rural world of family farms, springhouses, cabins, mills, churches, and wagon roads.
Cedar Grove emerged from that older landscape. Its history was not shaped by a single industrial company or planned town. Instead, it developed through the shared institutions that gave rural communities their identity, especially churches and schools.
The Cedar Grove Church and School of 1876
The earliest clearly documented institution carrying the Cedar Grove name was a combined church and school building erected in 1876.
According to the history of what later became Vermont United Methodist Church, settlers in the Cedar Grove area constructed a log building that served both educational and religious purposes. Fulton Hall donated the land, and Jonathan Clayman cut the first log. Methodist circuit riders from both the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church South conducted services there on a regular basis.
That simple log structure represented much more than a place for Sunday worship. During the week, children could gather there for instruction. On Sundays and meeting days, the same building became a church. It likely served as a gathering place where residents exchanged news, discussed neighborhood concerns, organized assistance for families, and marked the major passages of life.
The use of one building for both church and school was common in rural Appalachia. Communities seldom had the money or population to support separate institutions at first. A donated tract of land, locally cut timber, and volunteer labor allowed residents to create a place that served nearly everyone.
For Cedar Grove, the 1876 building provides the earliest firm date in the community’s institutional history. It also shows that Cedar Grove had become a recognized local name by the final decades of the nineteenth century.
From Cedar Grove to Vermont
The original log building stood for more than thirty years before a white frame church replaced it in 1907. As the congregation grew, Reverend I. B. Leonard led the construction of a larger frame building in 1914. Dr. and Mrs. A. D. Miller and Reverend and Mrs. S. G. Ketron supplied land, while McKinley Stuffle and his family cut and transported timber for the project.
During this period, the congregation ceased using Cedar Grove as its church name. Mrs. Ketron reportedly believed the quiet village and surrounding hills resembled the state of Vermont, so the congregation adopted the name Vermont. The new church was dedicated in 1915 as part of the Kingsport Circuit in the Johnson City District. Walter Coleman became the first Sunday school superintendent, while Fannie Vicars served as the first president of the Ladies Aid Society.
The name change did not erase Cedar Grove. Instead, it created another local identity within the same general area. Vermont became the name of the Methodist congregation, while Cedar Grove continued to identify the community, the public school, the Baptist church, and surrounding properties.
The Vermont congregation continued expanding through the twentieth century. Land for another building was purchased in 1940, and Reverend T. H. House conducted the first worship service there in September 1941. The church became a station congregation in 1946 and received its first full-time pastor. A newer church was dedicated in 1950, followed by the construction of a brick building where the first service was held in March 1964. Vermont United Methodist Church celebrated its centennial in 1977.
Its cemetery preserves the names of generations who lived in the surrounding countryside. The markers of the Baker, Benfield, Bishop, Bushong, Coleman, Darnell, Grace, Guy, Ketron, Sneed, Stuffle, Taylor, Vaughn, Wolfe, and other families form a record of the people who created and sustained the wider Cedar Grove and Bloomingdale community.
Cedar Grove School
The precise relationship between the 1876 church-school building and the later Cedar Grove public school has not yet been firmly established through surviving digital records. It is possible that the early school tradition influenced the creation of the later county school, but no located document proves that the public school was a direct continuation of the original log institution.
What the archival record does establish is that Cedar Grove School had become an important public institution by the middle of the twentieth century.
A photograph taken by Thomas McNeer Jr. in 1949 shows students playing on the playground behind Cedar Grove School. The Archives of the City of Kingsport identifies the location as the Bloomingdale area of Kingsport. The image captures children gathered outdoors at a time when the community still retained much of its rural character.
Another photograph, taken by David Peirce in 1952, shows students from Cedar Grove Elementary School. The archive again identifies the school as being in the Bloomingdale area. The photograph survives in the David Peirce Collection under identification number B505, where it is described as “Cedar Grove School-King and Queen.”
These photographs are among the strongest primary sources for Cedar Grove’s twentieth-century history. Government maps can show the position of a school, while county records can document ownership and funding, but the photographs show the children who passed through its doors.
They represent families from Coley Street, Bloomingdale Pike, Vermont, Rosetree, and the surrounding roads. For many residents, Cedar Grove School was where friendships began, teachers became community figures, and children from scattered homes developed a shared neighborhood identity.
A Rural School in a Changing Landscape
During the decades following the Second World War, the countryside north of Kingsport underwent a major transformation. Population growth, improved roads, new subdivisions, and the expansion of public utilities gradually changed the environment surrounding Cedar Grove.
The community was no longer separated from Kingsport by the same stretches of farms and open land that had existed before the war. Bloomingdale Pike became an increasingly important transportation corridor, while Coley Street and nearby roads connected new residential areas to schools, churches, businesses, and the city.
Even as development increased, Cedar Grove remained an official and commonly understood community name. In January 1997, Sullivan County Commission records listed a proposed sewer trunk-line project specifically identified as “Cedar Grove, Rosetree.” The project carried an estimated cost of $900,000, demonstrating that local government still used Cedar Grove as a recognizable geographic designation near the end of the twentieth century.
This infrastructure represented the arrival of a more suburban landscape. Sewer lines, paved roads, traffic controls, and expanding residential development tied Cedar Grove more closely to Kingsport. At the same time, those changes made the old community boundaries less obvious.
A person could live in the historic Cedar Grove area but use Kingsport as a mailing address. Newspapers might describe the same location as Bloomingdale. Church records might call it Vermont, while school records retained Cedar Grove. The community did not disappear all at once. Its identity became layered beneath newer names.
The Closing of Cedar Grove School
The institution that had carried the Cedar Grove name most visibly into the modern era eventually became part of a larger school consolidation plan.
Sullivan County constructed a new elementary school along Bloomingdale Pike and closed Cedar Grove, Kingsley, and Brookside elementary schools. A 2014 Tennessee Department of Transportation road safety report recorded the closures while discussing the removal of outdated school signs from the former locations. The same report documented the increasingly busy character of Bloomingdale Pike, including numerous access points, limited sight distances, changing traffic patterns, and the need for new safety improvements.
The closure of Cedar Grove School represented more than a change in educational administration. For decades, the school had given the community a physical center and a public name. Once it closed, Cedar Grove lost one of the institutions most likely to appear on signs, maps, newspaper announcements, and official schedules.
On October 1, 2012, the Sullivan County Board of Education voted to transfer the Cedar Grove School property to Sullivan County for disposition. The county Building Committee later directed the purchasing agent to offer Cedar Grove and Valley Pike school properties through sealed bids, with a minimum reserve of $50,000 for each property.
A legal notice advertised the Cedar Grove property in July 2013. Two sealed bids were received and opened on August 15. Freedom Fellowship submitted the highest bid at $59,855, but the county resolution approving the proposed sale failed to receive final approval in September. The minutes preserve the bureaucratic ending of a building that had once been filled with children, teachers, school programs, and neighborhood gatherings.
Churches, Cemeteries, and Community Memory
Although the public school closed, Cedar Grove’s history did not vanish with it. The churches and cemeteries of the area continue to preserve the community’s identity.
Vermont United Methodist Church carries the history of the 1876 Cedar Grove church-school building, even though the congregation adopted a different name. Cedar Grove Missionary Baptist Church continued using the original community name, while cemetery stones at both church sites preserved the families who lived throughout the neighborhood.
Church membership books, Sunday school records, baptismal registers, marriage records, funeral programs, trustees’ minutes, and anniversary publications may eventually reveal more about Cedar Grove than any formal county history. These records can show how families were connected, when residents arrived or left, which households contributed to building projects, and how the community responded to wars, economic hardship, sickness, and death.
The cemetery is also a historical document. Its stones preserve occupations, military service, family relationships, infant deaths, epidemics, and migrations. When compared with census schedules, death certificates, obituaries, and deeds, those markers can help reconstruct Cedar Grove one family at a time.
The Importance of Cedar Grove’s Schools
The history of Cedar Grove is closely tied to education. The first documented community building served as both a church and school in 1876. The later Cedar Grove public school educated generations of children before its closure more than a century later.
Schools in rural Appalachian communities often served purposes that extended far beyond classroom instruction. They hosted holiday programs, parent meetings, voting, musical performances, athletic activities, fundraisers, and public discussions. Teachers knew families across several generations, while school names helped define areas that had no incorporated government or fixed municipal boundaries.
The Cedar Grove photographs from 1949 and 1952 capture this world at its height. The children in those images were not simply attending a Sullivan County school. They were participating in one of the institutions that held their community together.
The closure of the school did not end the relationships created there. Former students continued to identify themselves with Cedar Grove, and the school remained a landmark in property descriptions, obituaries, newspaper memories, and conversations about the Bloomingdale area.
A Name That Survived
Cedar Grove survived because it existed in more than one place. It lived in the name of a school, in church histories, in cemetery records, in sewer plans, on highway maps, in property descriptions, and in the memories of residents.
Its overlapping identities can make the community difficult to research. A person looking only for “Cedar Grove” may overlook records indexed under Bloomingdale, Vermont, Coley Street, Rosetree, or Kingsport. Yet when these records are examined together, they reveal a continuous community shaped by education, religion, farming, roads, family ties, and the outward growth of Kingsport.
Cedar Grove’s story is therefore not a history of sudden abandonment. It is a history of absorption and adaptation. The farms and rural roads became part of a more developed landscape. The Methodist congregation became Vermont. The public school closed and its property entered county disposition proceedings. Mailing addresses and official descriptions increasingly favored Kingsport or Bloomingdale.
Still, the older name remained.
Why Cedar Grove Matters
Cedar Grove represents hundreds of small Appalachian communities that never incorporated and never developed a clearly marked downtown. Their boundaries were understood locally rather than legally. A church, school, cemetery, store, crossroads, or cluster of farms gave them form.
Because such places were rarely the subjects of complete histories, their stories must be rebuilt from scattered evidence. A church narrative identifies the first log building. An archival photograph shows children on a playground. A county resolution records the sale of an empty school. A sewer plan proves that officials still recognized the name. A cemetery preserves the people who lived there.
Together, these records show that Cedar Grove was not merely a name printed on an old map. It was a community where residents worshiped, studied, buried their dead, raised families, and watched the countryside around them change.
Today, Cedar Grove rests within the larger Kingsport and Bloomingdale landscape, but its history remains visible to anyone willing to look beyond modern boundaries. It can be found in the story of a log church-school raised in 1876, in the faces of children photographed in 1949 and 1952, and in the records left behind when the school finally closed.
Cedar Grove may no longer appear as prominently as it once did, but the community has not been erased. Its history survives in the institutions its residents built and in the name they carried forward.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Geological Survey. “Cedar Grove.” Geographic Names Information System. Feature ID 1280031. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names
United States Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System.” Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
United States Geological Survey. Kingsport, Tennessee–Virginia. 7.5-minute topographic quadrangle. Reston, VA: United States Geological Survey, 1959. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/
United States Geological Survey. “topoView: Historical Topographic Maps.” Accessed August 4, 2026. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
United States Geological Survey. “EarthExplorer.” Historical aerial photographs and satellite imagery. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/
Tennessee State Highway Department. General Highway and Transportation Map, Sullivan County, Tennessee. Nashville: Tennessee State Highway Department, 1938. Rare Maps Digital Collection, Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University. https://dc.etsu.edu/rare-maps/137/
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Kingsport, Sullivan County, Tennessee. November 1919. Washington, DC: Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn08329_002/
Kingsport Public Library and Archives. “Cedar Grove School.” Photograph by Thomas McNeer Jr., 1949. Thomas McNeer Jr. Collection, ID 0667-2-49. https://www.kingsportlibrary.org/kpt_archives/cedar-grove-school/
Kingsport Public Library and Archives. “Cedar Grove School.” Photograph by David Peirce, 1952. David Peirce Collection, ID B505. https://www.kingsportlibrary.org/kpt_archives/cedar-grove-school-3/
Kingsport Public Library and Archives. “David Peirce Collection, 1950–1968.” Finding aid. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.kingsportlibrary.org/finding_aids/david-peirce-collection-kcmc-258/
Kingsport Public Library and Archives. “Thomas McNeer, Jr. Collection, 1945–1988.” Finding aid. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.kingsportlibrary.org/finding_aids/thomas-mcneer-jr-collection-kcmc-106/
Kingsport Public Library and Archives. “Muriel C. Spoden Collection, 1800–2000.” Finding aid. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.kingsportlibrary.org/finding_aids/muriel-c-spoden-collection-1800-2000/
Kingsport Public Library and Archives. “Kingsport Archive of History and Friends of the Archives Collection, 1964–Present.” Finding aid. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.kingsportlibrary.org/finding_aids/kingsport-archive-of-history-and-friends-of-the-archives-collection-1964-present/
Kingsport Public Library and Archives. “Historic Kingsport, Tennessee: In the Great Holston Valley, 1972.” Finding aid. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.kingsportlibrary.org/finding_aids/historic-kingsport-tennessee-in-the-great-holston-valley-1972/
Roueche, Kari. “History in Bloom(ingdale).” Archives of the City of Kingsport, April 23, 2015. Updated September 23, 2016. https://kingsportarchives.wordpress.com/2015/04/23/history-in-bloomingdale/
Sullivan County TNGenWeb. “Vermont UMC Cemetery.” Cemetery transcription and history of Vermont United Methodist Church. February 14, 2014. https://tngenweb.org/sullivan/vermont-umc-cemetery/
Sullivan County TNGenWeb. “Cemeteries of Sullivan County.” Accessed August 4, 2026. https://tngenweb.org/sullivan/cemeteries/
Sullivan County Historical Commission and Associates. Foundations of Faith in Sullivan, 1777–1935. Sullivan County, TN: Sullivan County Historical Commission and Associates, 1986. https://tngenweb.org/sullivan/vermont-umc-cemetery/
Sullivan County Historical Commission and Associates. Historic Sites of Sullivan County. Kingsport, TN: Sullivan County Historical Commission and Associates, 1976. https://kingsportarchives.wordpress.com/2015/04/23/history-in-bloomingdale/
Goodspeed Publishing Company. “Sullivan County.” In History of Tennessee from the Earliest Time to the Present, 912–921. Nashville and Chicago: Goodspeed Publishing Company, 1887. https://www.tngennet.org/records/sullivan/history/goodspeed/index.html
Taylor, Oliver. Historic Sullivan: A History of Sullivan County, Tennessee, with Brief Biographies of the Makers of History. Bristol, TN: King Printing Company, 1909. FamilySearch Catalog. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/237890
Sullivan County Board of County Commissioners. County Commission Meeting, January 20, 1997. Blountville, TN: Sullivan County, 1997. See the proposed sewer trunk-line project identified as “Cedar Grove, Rosetree.” https://www.sullivancountyclerktn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/January-1997.pdf
Sullivan County Board of County Commissioners. Regular Session, August 19, 2013. Blountville, TN: Sullivan County, 2013. Commission minutes and resolutions concerning the disposition of former county school properties. https://sullivancountyclerktn.com/commission-minutes/
Sullivan County Board of County Commissioners. Regular Session, September 16, 2013. Resolution 2013-08-71 concerning the proposed sale of the former Cedar Grove School property. Blountville, TN: Sullivan County, 2013. https://www.sullivancountyclerktn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/September-16-2013.pdf
Sullivan County Clerk. “Commission Minutes.” Official archive of Sullivan County Commission proceedings. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://sullivancountyclerktn.com/commission-minutes/
Sullivan County Register of Deeds. “Register of Deeds.” Sullivan County, Tennessee. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://sullivancountytn.gov/register-of-deeds/
Sullivan County Register of Deeds. “Sullivan County Register of Deeds Online Records.” Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.sullivandeeds.com/
Sullivan County Assessor of Property. “Property Assessor.” Sullivan County, Tennessee. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://sullivancountytn.gov/property-assessor/
Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury. “Tennessee Property Assessment Data.” Accessed August 4, 2026. https://assessment.cot.tn.gov/TPAD/
Tennessee Department of Transportation. Road Safety Audit Report: Local Route 1384, Bloomingdale Pike. Nashville: Tennessee Department of Transportation, July 31, 2014. https://www.kingsporttn.gov/wp-content/uploads/Bloomingdale_Doc.compressed.pdf
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Genealogical Fact Sheets About Sullivan County.” Tennessee Secretary of State. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla/pages/genealogical-fact-sheets-about-sullivan-county
Sullivan County, Tennessee. Tax Books, 1877–1895. Microfilm of original records held by the Tennessee State Library and Archives. FamilySearch Catalog. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/204243
Sullivan County Chancery Court. Enrolling Books and Minutes, 1852–1894. Microfilm of original Sullivan County records. FamilySearch Catalog. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/195886
United States Bureau of the Census. 1940 United States Census: Sullivan County, Tennessee. Population schedules, enumeration-district descriptions, and enumeration-district maps. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1940
United States Bureau of the Census. 1950 United States Census: Sullivan County, Tennessee. Population schedules, enumeration-district maps, and enumeration-district descriptions. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://1950census.archives.gov/search/?county=Sullivan&state=TN
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Tennessee Newspapers Arranged by County.” Tennessee Secretary of State. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla/guides/tennessee-newspapers-arranged-by-county
Kingsport Public Library and Archives. “Finding Aids.” Manuscript, photographic, organizational, and local-history collections. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.kingsportlibrary.org/finding-aid-info/
Author Note: To the reader, Cedar Grove’s history reminds us that an Appalachian community can survive even after its boundaries and institutions fade from view. Its story remains in church records, school photographs, county maps, cemeteries, and the memories of families who knew the place by name.