Appalachian Community Histories – Jacksboro, Campbell County: The Courthouse Town Written Into Tennessee Law
Some Appalachian towns grew around a mine, a railroad depot, a river landing, or a mountain gap. Jacksboro grew first around a public purpose.
Before the town became the familiar county seat of Campbell County, Tennessee, it appeared in law as Jacksborough. In 1806, the Tennessee General Assembly created Campbell County from parts of Anderson and Claiborne counties. The act did more than draw new county lines. It appointed commissioners, ordered them to choose a suitable place for a courthouse, prison, and stocks, and directed that a town be laid off around that public center.
The law gave the new county its frame. The courthouse would give it a heart.
That is the oldest way to understand Jacksboro. It was not only a settlement. It was the place where Campbell County was supposed to keep its records, hold its courts, settle disputes, record deeds, preserve marriages and wills, and make local government visible in the mountains of East Tennessee.
The Making of Campbell County
Campbell County was created on September 11, 1806, in a section of East Tennessee shaped by Powell Valley, the Cumberland Mountains, Big Creek Gap, and the roads and waterways that connected the region to Kentucky and the older counties to the south and east. The new county was named for Arthur Campbell, a Revolutionary War figure tied to the history of Virginia and the southern frontier.
The 1806 act gave a detailed boundary description, but its most important local instruction was practical. The county needed a seat of justice. Commissioners were appointed to fix on a suitable place, obtain land, lay off a town, reserve a central acre for public buildings, and sell lots to help pay for the construction.
The act called that town Jacksborough.
Until the courthouse was built, the county court was to meet at the house of Richard Linville. That small detail gives the story a frontier beginning. Before the courthouse stood, before a permanent square developed, county business began in a private house. From there, the work of Campbell County moved toward a permanent town.
From Jacksborough to Jacksboro
The town’s name appears in early records and maps with several spellings. The 1806 act used Jacksborough. Later maps and references show forms such as Jacksonboro, Jacksborough, and eventually Jacksboro.
Those spelling changes are more than a curiosity. They show a young county seat becoming fixed in the public record. A town might have one name in a legislative act, another on a map, and another in local use before a regular spelling settled into place.
By the early nineteenth century, Jacksboro was established as the place where Campbell County’s government lived. The Tennessee Encyclopedia gives 1807 as the founding year of Jacksboro and describes it as the hub of county government. Goodspeed’s nineteenth-century history placed the laying out of Jacksboro in 1808 or 1809 and connected the town site to Hugh Montgomery, an early settler who owned land in the area.
The exact dating depends on which source is being used, but the broader story is clear. Jacksboro took shape almost immediately after Campbell County was created.
The Courthouse Town
In a county seat, the courthouse was more than a building. It was where the county became real.
Goodspeed’s 1887 history says that a stone jail and courthouse were built at Jacksboro after the town was laid out. It also says that the first courthouse was still standing in the late nineteenth century and being used as a storehouse. That image is worth holding onto. A building first raised for courts and public authority later became part of everyday town life.
Jacksboro’s early economy and social life formed around that courthouse role. Lawyers, clerks, merchants, tavern keepers, doctors, and officeholders gathered there because the county’s business gathered there. Deeds, court actions, tax matters, probate cases, and public notices all tied families from across Campbell County back to the county seat.
Goodspeed named early merchants such as Sampson David, W. H. Smith, Thomas Weir, Robert Morrow, James Williams, William Carey, and William Richardson. It also identified David Richardson as the first resident lawyer in the county and described Jacksboro as the professional and governmental center of the county.
The town was small, but its reach was countywide.
Fires and Missing Records
Jacksboro’s courthouse history also carries the story of record loss.
Tennessee record guides warn researchers that Campbell County courthouse fires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries damaged records. The Tennessee State Library and Archives notes courthouse fires in 1883 and 1926. Genealogical guides also warn that these fires caused serious record loss and that some early records are missing or incomplete.
Goodspeed, written close to the time of the first major fire, described the courthouse as destroyed by fire in December 1884. That difference in dating should be treated carefully by researchers, but it does not change the central point. Campbell County’s courthouse records did not survive untouched.
For family historians, that matters. For local historians, it matters even more. A county seat is supposed to preserve memory. In Jacksboro, part of that memory was damaged by fire, which makes surviving deeds, court minutes, wills, church records, newspapers, maps, and later transcriptions especially important.
The town’s history must be pieced together from what survived.
Franklin Academy and Village Life
Jacksboro was not only a courthouse square. It was also a place where children went to school, families attended church, merchants kept stores, newspapers were printed, and community life took shape around a small but important town center.
Goodspeed says that before 1832, local children were taught in a small log schoolhouse near the residence of John Hollingsworth. In 1831, trustees of Franklin Academy met and began planning a school building. A small frame building was completed in 1832, and the academy soon opened under John C. Ewing.
Franklin Academy became one of the important early institutions in Jacksboro. In the 1850s, trustees moved toward a brick academy building. The Civil War interrupted the school, and the building was occupied at times by troops. After the war, trustees repaired the building and reopened the school.
Religious life also moved through public and educational spaces before churches had permanent buildings. Goodspeed says early religious services were held in the courthouse, later in the academy, and then in church buildings. A Methodist church was built in the early 1850s. After the Civil War, new Methodist and Baptist churches were built.
This was the pattern of many Appalachian county seats. Public buildings served many purposes until the community had the money, population, and stability to separate court, school, and church life into their own spaces.
Jacksboro on the Map
Early maps help show how Jacksboro became fixed in the geography of Campbell County.
A hand-drawn 1836 civil district map of Campbell County, filed with the Tennessee Secretary of State, shows the county organized into civil districts. Such maps were not made for tourism or nostalgia. They were made for administration. They show how state and county officials understood local geography, district lines, and public order.
Other nineteenth-century maps show the shifting written form of Jacksboro’s name. John Melish’s 1818 map used Jacksonboro. Matthew Rhea’s 1832 map used Jacksborough. David H. Burr’s 1839 map used Jacksboro.
Taken together, those maps show a place still young but already important enough to appear in state and regional geography. The spelling changed, but the role remained the same. This was Campbell County’s seat.
The Civil War in the Gaps
The Civil War brought Campbell County’s geography into military importance.
Jacksboro sat near routes that mattered because of the Cumberland Mountains and Big Creek Gap. In March 1862, Union forces under Col. James P. T. Carter moved toward Big Creek Gap and Jacksborough. The Official Records describe the expedition as an effort to reach Confederate forces in the area, where roads were blocked and Union citizens were being harassed.
After fighting near Big Creek Gap, Carter’s report says his men marched to Jacksborough, where they overtook the rear guard of cavalry, captured a Confederate officer, and raised the United States flag over the town. The next day they moved on toward Fincastle and Woodson’s Gap.
The event did not make Jacksboro a great battlefield town, but it placed the county seat inside the larger struggle for East Tennessee. Roads, gaps, loyalties, and courthouse towns all mattered. In Jacksboro, the Civil War was not distant. It passed through the same landscape where people attended court, sent children to school, traded in stores, and kept county records.
A Courthouse Rebuilt
The courthouse remained the symbol of Jacksboro into the twentieth century.
After the earlier courthouse fires, Campbell County eventually received a courthouse that still defines the town’s public face. The 1926 Campbell County Courthouse in Jacksboro was designed by R. F. Graf and Sons of Knoxville. National Register documentation for historic Tennessee courthouses describes it as a building with a two-story classical portico and Colonial Revival features.
That matters because the courthouse was not only replacing a damaged public building. It was also giving Campbell County a modern architectural statement. In the 1920s, Tennessee courthouse design was moving from older Classical Revival traditions toward Colonial Revival forms. The Campbell County Courthouse stood in that transition.
For Jacksboro, the courthouse continued the town’s original purpose. The town had been legally imagined as a county seat in 1806. More than a century later, the courthouse still anchored the same identity.
Houses, Roads, and Memory
Jacksboro’s built history is not limited to the courthouse.
The A. E. Perkins House on Valley Street is one of the town’s most important historic homes. National Register records describe the house as having a center section dating to about 1850, later remodeled in 1930 into a Colonial Revival town dwelling. The nomination calls it a significant local example of Colonial Revival and domestic architecture in rural Appalachian Campbell County.
The Perkins House shows another side of Jacksboro’s story. The courthouse represented public authority. Historic homes represented family, work, prosperity, and changing taste. Together, they show a town that carried older nineteenth-century forms into the twentieth century while roads, automobiles, modern materials, and new architectural fashions reshaped the landscape.
Highway construction also changed the setting of older properties. The Perkins nomination notes that U.S. Highway 25W divided the old farm landscape connected with the house. That detail fits the larger history of Jacksboro. Roads made the county seat accessible, but they also altered the older shape of town and farm life.
Why Jacksboro Matters
Jacksboro is sometimes overshadowed by the coal and railroad stories of Campbell County. Jellico, LaFollette, Caryville, and the mining communities often carry the louder industrial history. Jacksboro’s story is quieter, but it is just as important.
It is the story of government in the mountains.
It is the story of a county seat created by law, built around a courthouse, scarred by fires, preserved through maps and surviving records, and remembered through schools, churches, newspapers, homes, and public buildings.
Jacksboro mattered because people from across Campbell County came there when land changed hands, when estates were settled, when marriages were recorded, when court cases were heard, when taxes were paid, and when public business had to be done. Even when records were lost, the town remained the place where the county tried to keep its memory.
That is what gives Jacksboro its historical weight. It was not only a dot on a map or a small town along a road. It was the legal and civic center of Campbell County, written into Tennessee law as Jacksborough and carried forward in the records as Jacksboro.
Sources & Further Reading
Tennessee General Assembly. “Acts of 1806, Second Session, Chapter 21.” Private Acts of Tennessee, Campbell County. University of Tennessee County Technical Assistance Service. https://www.ctas.tennessee.edu/private-acts/acts-1806-second-session-chapter-21
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Genealogical ‘Fact Sheets’ About Campbell County.” Tennessee Secretary of State. Accessed May 28, 2026. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla/pages/genealogical-fact-sheets-about-campbell-county
Campbell County, Tennessee. “Historical Records and Archives.” Campbell County Government. Accessed May 28, 2026. https://campbellcountytn.gov/historical-records/
Tennessee Genealogical Society. Campbell County Locality Guide. Updated June 21, 2024. https://www.tngs.org/resources/Documents/Locality%20Guides/Campbell%20County%20Locality%20Guide.pdf
Tennessee Genealogical Society. “Campbell County.” Tennessee County Database. Accessed May 28, 2026. https://tngs.org/resources/Site/Custom_HTML_Files/TCD/County/Campbell.html
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Campbell County Archives.” Tennessee Archives Directory. Accessed May 28, 2026. https://tnsos.net/TSLA/archives/index.php?archives=Campbell+County+Archives&option=archives
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Map of Campbell County, Tennessee Showing Civil Districts.” Tennessee Virtual Archive, 1836. https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15138coll23/id/8903/
Melish, John, and John Strothers Jr. Map of Tennessee. Tennessee Virtual Archive, 1818. https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15138coll23/id/72/
Rhea, Matthew. Map of the State of Tennessee Taken from Survey. Tennessee Virtual Archive, 1832. https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15138coll23/id/349/
Burr, David H. Map of Kentucky & Tennessee Exhibiting the Post Offices, Post Roads, Canals, Rail Roads, &c. David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, 1839. https://www.davidrumsey.com/maps3220.html
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Guide to Maps at the Tennessee State Library and Archives.” Tennessee Secretary of State. Accessed May 28, 2026. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/history/places/maps.htm
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Tennessee Newspapers Arranged by County.” Tennessee Secretary of State. Accessed May 28, 2026. https://sos.tn.gov/library-archives/guides/tennessee-newspapers-arranged-by-county
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Newspapers on Microfilm at TSLA: J.” Tennessee Secretary of State. Accessed May 28, 2026. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/history/newspapers/paper-j.htm
WorldCat. “The Campbell County Citizen.” OCLC WorldCat. Accessed May 28, 2026. https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/19082214/
FamilySearch. “Campbell County, Tennessee Genealogy.” FamilySearch Research Wiki. Accessed May 28, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Campbell_County%2C_Tennessee_Genealogy
U.S. Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System.” U.S. Board on Geographic Names. Accessed May 28, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
U.S. Geological Survey. “Domestic Names.” U.S. Board on Geographic Names. Accessed May 28, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/us-board-on-geographic-names/domestic-names
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series 1, Volume 10, Part 1. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1884. https://ehistory.osu.edu/books/official-records/010/0019
Cornell University Library. “Making of America: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.” Cornell University Library Digital Collections. Accessed May 28, 2026. https://collections.library.cornell.edu/moa_new/waro.html
Library of Congress. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Atlas. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1891–1895. https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g3701sm.gcw0099000
National Archives. “Civil War Records in the Cartographic Research Room.” National Archives. Accessed May 28, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/cartographic/civil-war
National Archives. “Civil War: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.” National Archives. Accessed May 28, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/alic/reference/military/civil-war-armies-records.html
National Park Service. “A. E. Perkins House, Jacksboro, Campbell County, Tennessee.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, 1997. https://irp.cdn-website.com/2c253136/files/uploaded/A.-E.-Perkins-House-National-Register-Nomination.pdf
National Park Service. “Historic County Courthouses of Tennessee.” National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form. https://npgallery.nps.gov/pdfhost/docs/NRHP/Text/64500604.pdf
Baird, Adrion. “Campbell County.” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. Tennessee Historical Society. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/campbell-county/
Goodspeed Publishing Co. “Campbell County.” History of Tennessee. Nashville: Goodspeed Publishing Co., 1887. https://www.tngenweb.org/goodspeed/campbell/
Teach Tennessee History. “Campbell County.” Tennessee History for Kids and Teach Tennessee History. https://teachtnhistory.org/file/Campbell%20County%20Essay.pdf
Tennessee History for Kids. “Campbell County.” Tennessee History for Kids. Accessed May 28, 2026. https://www.tnhistoryforkids.org/history/counties/campbell-county/
American Courthouses. “Campbell County, Tennessee.” Accessed May 28, 2026. https://courthouses.co/us-states/o-u/tennessee/campbell-county/
Bogan, Dallas. “Campbell County Authorized by General Assembly in 1806.” TNGenWeb Project. https://www.tngenweb.org/campbell/hist-bogan/1806.html
Bogan, Dallas. “Campbell County Seat Named for Judge Jack, Spared by Friendly Indian.” TNGenWeb Project. https://www.tngenweb.org/campbell/hist-bogan/seat.html
Bogan, Dallas. “Prominent Residents of Jacksboro in April 1900 Included Bankers, Lawyers, Physicians.” TNGenWeb Project. https://www.tngenweb.org/campbell/hist-bogan/residents.html
Bogan, Dallas. “Union, Confederate Forces Faced Off Skirmishes at Big Creek Gap.” TNGenWeb Project. https://www.tngenweb.org/campbell/hist-bogan/UnionatBigCreekGap.htm
Ridenour, George L. The Land of the Lake: A History of Campbell County, Tennessee. LaFollette, TN: LaFollette Publishing Co., 1941. WorldCat record. https://search.worldcat.org/title/The-land-of-the-lake-a-history-of-Campbell-County-Tennessee/oclc/3591464
McDonald, Miller. Campbell County, Tennessee, USA: A History of Places, Faces, Happenings, Traditions and Things. FamilySearch Digital Library. https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/records/item/444755-campbell-county-tennessee-usa-a-history-of-places-faces-happenings-traditions-and-things-vol-01
Miller, Gregory K. The Civil War and Campbell County, Tennessee. 1992. Listed in Tennessee Genealogical Society, Campbell County Locality Guide. https://www.tngs.org/resources/Documents/Locality%20Guides/Campbell%20County%20Locality%20Guide.pdf
Author Note: Jacksboro is a reminder that some Appalachian towns mattered most because they held the public memory of a county. I wanted this piece to treat the courthouse, the fires, and the surviving records as part of the town’s story, not just background details.