Appalachian Community Histories – LaFollette, Campbell County: Big Creek Gap, Glen Oaks, and the Coal Iron Dream
LaFollette sits where the Cumberland Mountains rise above Powell Valley and where Big Creek helped give the old place its name. Before it was a city, before its streets were laid out for a company town, and before furnaces, rail lines, stores, and houses made it one of Campbell County’s most important communities, the place was known as Big Creek Gap.
The name mattered because the gap mattered. In a mountain country where movement was often shaped by ridges, streams, and wagon roads, Big Creek Gap offered a passage through difficult ground. During the Civil War, that passage became part of the larger contest over Cumberland Gap and the routes that connected Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. Soldiers, officers, and local families knew that a natural opening through the mountains could carry more than travelers. It could carry armies, supplies, danger, and news.
LaFollette’s later story belongs to the age of coal, iron, railroads, town planning, and industrial ambition, but its setting came first. The city grew from a landscape already defined by water, mountains, roads, and memory. Big Creek Gap was not just an old name. It was the foundation for everything that followed.
Big Creek Gap Before the Boom
The modern city of LaFollette was built on older ground. The area had been associated with several postal and local names before the LaFollette name became permanent. Sources connected with local history identify the place with names such as English, London, and Big Creek Gap before the 1897 adoption of LaFollette.
During the Civil War, Big Creek Gap drew attention because it was one of the natural routes through the Cumberland Mountains. The pass was valuable because control of the gap affected movement around Cumberland Gap, one of the most important military positions in the region. Civil War references to Big Creek Gap and Jacksborough show that the area was not isolated from the war. It sat inside a contested mountain corridor where Union and Confederate forces watched roads, guarded approaches, and moved through terrain that was never easy.
The war did not create LaFollette, but it helps explain why the place was already known before the town took its modern form. Long before industry changed the valley, Big Creek Gap was a practical and strategic place. It was a passage through the mountains, and in Appalachia, a passage could become a community.
Harvey LaFollette and the Industrial Dream
The industrial story of LaFollette began in the late nineteenth century, when outside investors looked at Big Creek Gap and saw coal, iron, timber, water, and transportation possibilities. The National Register nomination for the LaFollette House describes the present site of LaFollette before 1889 as farm and woodland. That year, a group from Frankfort, Kentucky, bought land from John Douglas in hopes of developing the iron and coal reserves. Their settlement was called Big Creek.
In 1892, Harvey M. LaFollette acquired the developers’ land. The following year, the town’s name was changed to LaFollette. Harvey and Grant LaFollette were not simply buying mineral land. They were imagining a planned industrial city in a mountain valley. The City of LaFollette’s official history describes the brothers seeing farmland and scattered dwellings in Big Creek Gap, then recognizing the close combination of iron deposits, timber stands, coal, water, and mountain land.
That combination explains why the LaFollette Coal, Iron and Railway Company became the center of the town’s early history. The company’s name itself tells the story. Coal and iron were the resources, but the railway was the key. Without a dependable rail connection, the minerals of the valley could not easily become a large industrial operation. Harvey LaFollette understood that the town’s success depended on transportation as much as geology.
The National Register nomination states that in 1897 Harvey LaFollette completed eleven miles of track to Vespar, Tennessee, connecting LaFollette with the Southern Railway line. That same year, the city was incorporated under Tennessee private acts. The town that had grown from Big Creek Gap now had a legal identity, an industrial purpose, and a name tied to the family that had reshaped it.
A Planned Mountain City
LaFollette was not meant to grow by accident. The LaFollette brothers wanted a modern company city with room to expand. Local history credits John Fox Jr., later famous as an Appalachian writer, with helping lay out the town. Sources describe wide streets, parks, and lots set aside for churches. The main street was designed unusually wide for a mountain town, a sign that the founders expected traffic, business, and growth.
That planned character made LaFollette different from many smaller mountain settlements. It was a town built around a vision of industry, but also around a vision of civic order. Streets, homes, churches, banks, stores, and public buildings were part of the same plan. This was not just a mining camp tucked into the hills. It was meant to be a city.
The LaFollette House, also known as Glen Oaks, became one of the strongest surviving symbols of that ambition. Built at the turn of the century, it stood on Indiana Avenue and was later listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The nomination calls it a fine example of Victorian architecture and says it represented the founding of the town. Its setting near the southwest end of Powell Valley, with the coal-rich Cumberland Mountains rising to the northwest, made the house both a residence and a statement.
Glen Oaks was more than a large home. It showed the scale of the LaFollette dream. The town’s founders were building mines, ovens, furnaces, rail connections, streets, and a civic center. The house stood inside that same story, a reminder of the confidence that surrounded the industrial boom.
Coal, Coke, Iron, and Work
By 1900, the LaFollette Coal and Iron Company’s mines were producing. Coke ovens and furnaces were built to support iron production. Coal, coke, and iron tied the community to the wider industrial South, while timber and related industries added to the resource economy surrounding the town.
LaFollette grew quickly because work drew people in. The National Register nomination gives the town’s population as 366 in 1900 and 3,056 by 1920. The City of LaFollette’s history describes a boom town where workers came from many backgrounds to take jobs connected to the LaFollette enterprises. At one point, the company employed about 1,500 people.
That growth changed the valley. Stores opened because workers and families needed supplies. Streets filled because industry brought traffic. Churches, schools, boarding houses, and civic institutions followed the population. LaFollette became one of the major communities in Campbell County because the industrial town created a new center of gravity.
The work was hard, and the boom was never guaranteed. Appalachian industrial towns often depended on outside capital, changing markets, railroad access, and the quality of the minerals beneath the ground. LaFollette had impressive ambition, but ambition alone could not protect the company forever.
Fire, Courthouse Politics, and a Changing Downtown
The early city also had its share of civic conflict and disaster. LaFollette’s growth made it a rival to older centers in Campbell County. Sources connected with the University of Tennessee’s Eyes on LaFollette project describe an effort to move county courthouse offices from Jacksboro to LaFollette in the early twentieth century. For a short time, offices moved into a building in LaFollette.
Then came the fire of May 10, 1904. Flames swept along North Tennessee Avenue and Central Avenue, destroying many businesses. The fire damaged the young city at a critical moment. The county seat returned to Jacksboro and remained there.
For LaFollette, the fire did not end the city’s growth, but it became one of the turning points in local memory. It showed how quickly a boom town’s built environment could be lost. Sanborn fire insurance maps from the early twentieth century are especially useful for understanding this period because they preserve details about streets, buildings, materials, businesses, and fire risks. They are the kind of source that helps turn a general story of growth into a street-level view of what the town looked like.
Downtown LaFollette rebuilt and continued to serve the community. Its buildings, roads, and businesses reflected the city’s industrial base, but also its role as a commercial center for surrounding families in Campbell County.
The Decline of the Company Town
The LaFollette industrial dream reached far, but it did not last in the form its founders imagined. The iron operations struggled, and the quality of the ore did not support the enterprise as hoped. The National Register nomination states that when the LaFollette Coal and Iron Company was sold in 1928 to James Sterchi, only about 600 workers remained employed and the ovens and blast furnaces were closed.
The company’s decline changed the meaning of the city. LaFollette had been born from a company project, but it did not disappear when the company faltered. By the 1920s, the town had churches, homes, businesses, streets, civic institutions, and generations of people who had made lives there. It had become more than the enterprise that created it.
That is one of the important parts of LaFollette’s history. Many Appalachian towns began with a company’s plan, but the people who lived there gave those places deeper roots. A company could sell land or close furnaces, but a community could remain. LaFollette’s survival after the industrial decline shows that the city had grown beyond the original dream of Harvey and Grant LaFollette.
Norris Dam, Norris Lake, and a New Regional Era
The New Deal brought another major change to Campbell County and the surrounding region. The Tennessee Valley Authority began construction of Norris Dam in 1933 and completed it in 1936. It was TVA’s first dam, and Norris Reservoir extended up the Clinch and Powell rivers. For communities near LaFollette, this changed transportation, recreation, land use, and the public image of the region.
Norris Lake helped shift part of the area’s economy toward tourism and recreation. U.S. 25W, lake access, public parks, and regional travel connected LaFollette to a different kind of movement than the old industrial railroad boom. The town’s identity did not stop being tied to coal and iron, but the lake era added another layer.
The TVA years also connected LaFollette to a broader story of federal planning in Appalachia. Just as the LaFollette brothers had once imagined a planned industrial town, New Deal planners imagined a reshaped Tennessee Valley through dams, electricity, flood control, parks, and development. The two stories were different, but both show how outside visions of progress met Appalachian landscapes and communities.
Radio, Music, and Local Culture
LaFollette’s history is not only a story of industry and infrastructure. In the twentieth century, the city also became part of East Tennessee’s radio and music culture. One of the strongest examples is the Tennessee Jamboree, a country music radio variety show broadcast on WLAF.
The Tennessee Jamboree aired from 1953 to 1978 and featured performers who spoke to the musical life of Campbell County and Appalachian East Tennessee. It belonged to the larger barn dance tradition, but it was local in voice and setting. It gave musicians, advertisers, listeners, and families a shared cultural space.
That part of LaFollette’s story matters because it shows the city after the industrial boom. The town was not frozen in the age of furnaces and coke ovens. It became a place of radio voices, local performers, small businesses, churches, school events, sports, family networks, and public memory. The same town that had once been planned around coal and iron later carried its identity through music, broadcasting, and community life.
Remembering LaFollette Today
LaFollette’s history can be read in layers. The first layer is the land itself, the gap through the mountains and the creek that gave Big Creek Gap its name. The second is the Civil War landscape, when movement through the mountains mattered to armies and civilians. The third is the industrial city, shaped by Harvey and Grant LaFollette, the railroad, coal, coke, iron, timber, and the planned streets of a boom town. The fourth is the community that remained after the company dream weakened.
Some of those layers are still visible. Glen Oaks points back to the founding family and the architecture of the boom years. The LaFollette Coke Ovens preserve part of the industrial landscape. Big Creek Gap remains part of the Civil War memory of Campbell County. Norris Lake and the roads through the region connect the city to tourism, recreation, and the New Deal transformation of the Tennessee Valley.
LaFollette’s story is not simply that a company built a town. It is that a mountain gap became a city, and that the city kept changing after the company’s power faded. The LaFollette brothers saw resources and opportunity in Big Creek Gap. The people who came after them made a community.
That is why LaFollette belongs in the history of Appalachian Tennessee. It carries the old pattern of passage through the mountains, the industrial ambition of the coal and iron age, the civic struggle of a growing town, the shock of fire and decline, the changes brought by TVA, and the cultural life of a place that kept speaking in its own voice.
Sources & Further Reading
National Park Service. “National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form: LaFollette House, also known as Glen Oaks.” 1975. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/8b9d2a43-1654-4e3d-a95f-fdbf9075f64d
Municipal Technical Advisory Service. “LaFollette.” University of Tennessee Institute for Public Service. Updated through December 31, 2025. https://www.mtas.tennessee.edu/directories/cities/lafollette
City of LaFollette. “History of LaFollette, Tennessee.” City of LaFollette, Tennessee. https://lafollettetn.gopowwow.co/about-lafollette/history-of-lafollette-tennessee
City of LaFollette. “Charter of the City of LaFollette, Tennessee.” https://www.lafollettetn.gov/uploads/lafollette_cht.pdf
Sanborn Map Company. “Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from La Follette, Campbell County, Tennessee.” Library of Congress, July 1913. https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g3964lm.g3964lm_g083321913
Library of Congress. “About This Collection: Sanborn Maps.” https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/about-this-collection/
U.S. Department of the Interior. “National Register of Historic Places: LaFollette Coke Ovens, Campbell County, Tennessee.” Federal Register 81, no. 219, November 14, 2016. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2016-11-14/pdf/2016-27241.pdf
Tennessee Historical Society. “Campbell County.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. March 1, 2018. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/campbell-county/
University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “About LaFollette.” Eyes on LaFollette. https://eyesonlafollette.utk.edu/about-lafollette/
University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “Eyes on LaFollette.” https://eyesonlafollette.utk.edu/
Miller, Gregg. “History of LaFollette, Tennessee.” City of LaFollette, Tennessee. https://lafollettetn.gopowwow.co/about-lafollette/history-of-lafollette-tennessee
Tennessee Genealogical Society. “Campbell County Locality Guide.” June 21, 2024. https://www.tngs.org/resources/Documents/Locality%20Guides/Campbell%20County%20Locality%20Guide.pdf
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Tennessee Newspapers Arranged by County.” https://sos.tn.gov/library-archives/guides/tennessee-newspapers-arranged-by-county
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Newspapers on Microfilm at TSLA: L.” https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/history/newspapers/paper-l.htm
Hanson, Bradley. “The Tennessee Jamboree: Local Radio, the Barn Dance, and Cultural Life in Appalachian East Tennessee.” Southern Spaces, November 20, 2008. https://southernspaces.org/2008/tennessee-jamboree-local-radio-barn-dance-and-cultural-life-appalachian-east-tennessee/
Tennessee Folklife Program. “Jamboree Time Documentary Project Now Available.” April 5, 2016. https://tnfolklife.org/folklife/jamboree-time-documentary-project-now-available/
Tennessee Valley Authority. “Norris.” https://www.tva.com/energy/our-power-system/hydroelectric/norris
U.S. Census Bureau. “QuickFacts: La Follette City, Tennessee.” https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/lafollettecitytennessee/PST045224
U.S. Geological Survey. “Big Creek at La Follette, TN.” USGS Water Data for the Nation. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/03532200/
U.S. Geological Survey. “Big Creek at Hwy 63 at Lafollette, TN.” USGS Water Data for the Nation. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/03532210/
Civil War Trails. “Big Creek Gap.” Historical Marker Database. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=74229
Northeast Tennessee Civil War. “Battle of Big Creek Gap.” November 12, 2021. https://northeasttennesseecivilwar.com/2021/11/12/battle-of-big-creek-gap/
Historical Marker Database. “Glen Oaks.” https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=130965
Cumberland National Scenic Byway. “Campbell County.” https://cumberlandnationalscenicbyway.com/campbell-county/
Campbell County, Tennessee. “Historical Records and Archives.” https://campbellcountytn.gov/historical-records/
U.S. Department of the Interior. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. https://ehistory.osu.edu/books/official-records
“The La Follette Coal and Iron Company.” Engineering and Mining Journal 58, no. 8, August 25, 1894. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/The_Engineering_and_Mining_Journal_1894-08-25-_Vol_58_Iss_8_%28IA_sim_engineering-and-mining-journal_1894-08-25_58_8%29.pdf
HathiTrust. “Engineering and Mining Journal.” Catalog record. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000052973
University of Pennsylvania. “Engineering and Mining Journal.” The Online Books Page. https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=enginminjnl
“Campbell County, TN, LaFollette History.” TNGenWeb. https://www.tngenweb.org/campbell/history/lafoll.html
Bogan, Dallas. “Laban Sharp, Entrepreneur of 1800s, Predicted Town Would Grow.” TNGenWeb. https://www.tngenweb.org/campbell/hist-bogan/lsharp.html
Author Note: LaFollette is one of those Appalachian towns where the older geography still explains the later history. Before it was a planned industrial city, it was Big Creek Gap, and that earlier name helps make sense of the coal, railroads, roads, lake country, and memory that followed.