Appalachian Community Histories – Midway, Washington County: A Community Between Johnson City and Jonesborough
Midway is one of those Appalachian communities whose history can be easy to overlook because it never needed a courthouse square, a municipal government, or a large commercial district to become a recognizable place. Sitting between Johnson City and Jonesborough in Washington County, Tennessee, Midway developed as a community along West Walnut Street where families, schools, stores, churches, and the road connecting larger population centers created a local identity of their own.
Unlike many small communities whose names survive mostly through family memory, Midway appears directly in surviving historical records. The Washington County Archives identifies the West Walnut Street homeplace of local historian Martha Carolyn Marshall as being in the Midway community. County records also contain a 1944 file titled “Midway School,” while a 1951 petition concerning a voting district was cataloged specifically as relating to the “Midway school area.”
Those records reveal something important about Midway. It was more than a name placed on a map. By the middle of the twentieth century, the community had institutions and landmarks that people used to explain where they lived, where their children went to school, where they worshiped, and even how their voting district should be organized.
A Community Between Johnson City and Jonesborough
The simplest historical description of Midway may also be the most revealing. A biographical record preserved by the East Tennessee Veterans Memorial Association describes Midway as the small community between Johnson City and Jonesborough. The description reflects the geographic position that gave Midway its name and much of its character.
Rather than developing around an independent downtown, Midway grew within the countryside and expanding residential landscape separating Washington County’s two best-known communities. West Walnut Street became one of the defining threads running through that landscape, and surviving records repeatedly place Midway families and institutions along it.
One of the clearest examples comes from the Martha C. Marshall Collection at the Washington County Archives. Marshall was born and raised in Washington County and later became a history teacher and local historian. Her family’s two-story brick home stood at the corner of West Walnut Street and Matson Road, and the archive specifically identifies the homeplace as being in the Midway community. The collection includes selections from Marshall’s writings concerning her family, the house, Washington County history, and everyday life during the early and middle decades of the twentieth century.
The importance of such a record goes beyond a single house. It places Midway within an identifiable historical landscape and ties the community to the families who lived along West Walnut Street before suburban development made the distinction between Johnson City and the surrounding county less obvious.
Midway School and the Center of Community Life
For many small Appalachian communities, the local school served a purpose far greater than education alone. Schools were gathering places, landmarks, voting references, centers of neighborhood identity, and institutions that helped scattered farm families think of themselves as members of the same community.
Midway appears to have followed that pattern.
The Washington County Archives’ county records include a file identified as “Midway School” from 1944. The record is preserved among county property materials, making it an important starting point for reconstructing the school’s land, buildings, and relationship with county government. Even without treating the catalog entry as evidence for details contained inside the still-unexamined file, its existence proves that Midway School was established firmly enough in Washington County’s public records to be identified by name.
An even more revealing entry appeared only a few years later. In 1951, Washington County received a petition to move a voting district. The archival finding aid annotates the record as concerning the “Midway school area.”
That short description says a great deal. Midway School had apparently become more than simply a building where children attended classes. The school was recognizable enough that a portion of the county could be described politically and geographically in relation to it. In a community without incorporated boundaries, places such as schools often supplied the boundaries that government maps did not.
Washington County’s surviving Board of Education records make the school an especially promising subject for further study. The archival collection extends from 1871 through 1980, with substantial twentieth-century material covering the years in which Midway School was active. Earlier county education records also preserve school censuses, reports from superintendents, teacher records, scholastic population reports, transportation materials, and school district records.
Those records may eventually make it possible to reconstruct generations of Midway students and teachers in much greater detail. Even before that work is completed, however, the surviving references demonstrate the central role the school played in defining the community.
Growing Up in Midway
The institutional records become more personal when they are combined with the stories of people who lived there.
Robert Eugene Adams was born in 1929 and grew up in the Midway community. A biography preserved by the East Tennessee Veterans Memorial Association records that Adams attended Midway School, giving a direct connection between a known resident and the institution that helped define the neighborhood. The same biographical material describes Midway in relation to both Johnson City and Jonesborough, reinforcing the idea that residents understood it as a distinct community despite its location between larger places. The Midway source research identifies Adams’s biography as one of the strongest surviving examples of this local identity.
Adams’s experience represents something familiar across rural and semi-rural Appalachia during the early twentieth century. A person’s home might officially have been addressed through a nearby town, while the community name used by neighbors was something smaller and more intimate. Schools, churches, stores, roads, and family farms established the boundaries that mattered in daily life.
Midway therefore existed not because a legislature incorporated it, but because generations of residents recognized it.
A Baptist Mission in a Community Store
If Midway School helped establish the community geographically, Midway Baptist Church became another of its lasting institutions.
According to the church’s own historical account, the congregation began in 1941 as a mission of Central Baptist Church in Johnson City. Before a dedicated church building existed, members gathered in what had formerly been a community general store. Midway Baptist became an independent congregation in August 1947, and its original church building was erected the following year.
The detail about the general store is particularly important for understanding Midway’s history. Small stores throughout Appalachia were often much more than businesses. They were places where neighbors exchanged news, collected necessities, encountered travelers, discussed local events, and maintained the face-to-face relationships that held small communities together. In Midway, one such building also became a temporary place of worship.
The transformation from store to mission, and then from mission to permanent church, mirrors the maturation of the community itself. By the 1940s, Midway possessed a school important enough to appear in county property records and a Baptist mission large enough to become an independent congregation.
The church remained rooted on West Walnut Street. Its present address, 3414 West Walnut Street, places it within the same corridor repeatedly identified with historic Midway.
Midway in the Middle of a Changing Washington County
The decades following World War II transformed Washington County. Johnson City expanded, automobile travel increased, former agricultural land gave way to residential and commercial development, and the physical separation between older communities became increasingly difficult to see.
Midway nevertheless continued to possess an identity recognized beyond local conversation.
The clearest federal evidence came with the census. In 2000, the United States Census Bureau counted Midway as a census-designated place in Washington County and recorded a population of 2,491.
That figure shows how much Midway had changed from the scattered community represented in earlier school, church, and family records. What had once been organized around farms, a school, a store, and other neighborhood institutions had become part of an increasingly populated corridor between Johnson City and Jonesborough.
The census designation also formalized, at least temporarily, a place that residents had recognized long before federal statisticians drew boundaries around it. Midway had existed socially before it existed as a census geography.
The Midway Name Endures
Even as development has continued, the Midway name has remained attached to West Walnut Street.
Washington County Schools today operates its Teacher Center at the Midway Resource Center, located at 3519 West Walnut Street. The continued use of the Midway name by the county school system is particularly fitting given the role that Midway School once played in defining the community.
Across the street and nearby, the Midway Baptist congregation continues another institutional tradition that reaches back to 1941. Between the surviving church name, the resource center, historic records, and memories of families who grew up there, Midway remains visible even as the physical landscape around Johnson City has changed considerably.
This continuity is important because communities such as Midway are especially vulnerable to disappearing from historical memory. A town with a courthouse leaves government records. A company town leaves corporate records. A railroad town may survive on timetables and maps. Communities built mostly around roads, schools, stores, farms, and churches can be much harder to reconstruct once those landmarks change.
Midway has been fortunate. Enough documentation survives to demonstrate that it was not simply an informal label attached to an indistinct stretch of Washington County.
The Records Still Waiting to Tell Midway’s Story
Much of Midway’s history remains buried in records that deserve closer examination.
Washington County’s school census reports, scholastic population records, teacher contracts, superintendent reports, transportation files, deeds, tax records, wills, probate documents, and historical newspapers could help identify the families who lived in Midway before the community was routinely named in twentieth-century records. The county archives also holds photograph and newspaper collections that may preserve images of Midway School, residents, businesses, church gatherings, and properties along West Walnut Street.
Historic federal maps provide another route into the story. The United States Geological Survey produced Jonesborough quadrangle maps in 1939 and 1959, offering snapshots from immediately before and during the period when surviving records begin referring repeatedly to Midway institutions. Comparing those maps with deeds, school property records, and later census boundaries could help reconstruct how the community developed as Johnson City expanded westward.
Church records may be equally valuable. Midway Baptist’s published history establishes a firm chronology beginning with the 1941 mission, but surviving minutes, membership registers, photographs, building records, and anniversary histories could reveal the names of the people responsible for creating and sustaining the congregation.
The history of Midway is therefore not a closed story. It is a community history still capable of being reconstructed family by family and property by property.
Why Midway’s History Matters
There are hundreds of communities throughout Appalachia that developed without incorporated governments or famous industries. Their histories are often difficult to tell because they existed primarily through relationships between people and institutions rather than formal political boundaries.
Midway offers a particularly good example of how those communities can still be recovered.
A historian’s family home on West Walnut Street was identified as being in Midway. A county property file carried the name Midway School. A voting petition referred to the Midway school area. A young resident remembered through a veterans organization attended the community school. Baptists organized a mission in a former general store before constructing a church of their own. Decades later, the Census Bureau counted 2,491 people within a place officially called Midway.
Taken separately, these might appear to be small pieces of local history. Together, they reveal a community.
Midway grew in the space between Johnson City and Jonesborough, but being between two larger places did not make it historically insignificant. For the people who lived there, went to school there, worshiped there, visited the store, traveled West Walnut Street, and simply told others that they were from Midway, the community was a place of its own.
That may be the most important lesson preserved in its records. Appalachian history is not found only in county seats, major coal camps, battlefield sites, and incorporated towns. Sometimes it survives in the name of an old school, in the memory of a country store, in a church congregation, or in an archival description that quietly records where a family once called home.
Sources & Further Reading
Washington County, Tennessee. Department of Records Management and Archives. Martha C. Marshall Collection, Accession 19. Jonesborough, TN. The collection includes Marshall family papers and writings documenting her West Walnut Street homeplace in the Midway community. Washington County Archives, Manuscript Collections
Washington County, Tennessee. County Clerk Records. “Midway School.” 1944. Box/Folder 21:21. Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, TN. Washington County Archives, County Clerk Records Guide
Washington County, Tennessee. “Petition to Move Voting District.” 1951. Box/Folder 62:49. Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, TN. Archival annotation identifies the record with the “Midway school area.” Washington County Archives
Washington County, Tennessee. Board of Education Records, 1871–1980. Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, TN. Particularly useful are the twentieth-century records covering the years in which Midway School operated. Washington County Archives, Record Groups
Washington County, Tennessee. County Court Education Files, 1798–1936. County Clerk Records, RG 5, Series D. Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, TN. Washington County Archives, County Clerk Records Guide
Washington County, Tennessee. “School Census Reports, 1899–1917.” County Court Education Files, Box/Folder 10:25. Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, TN. Washington County Archives, County Clerk Records Guide
Washington County, Tennessee. “School Directors’ Annual Reports to County Superintendent, 1892–1907.” County Court Education Files. Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, TN. Washington County Archives, County Clerk Records Guide
Washington County, Tennessee. “Superintendent’s Annual Reports, 1906–1959.” County Court Education Files. Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, TN. The reports include dedicated files for the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, making them especially useful for Midway School. Washington County Archives, County Clerk Records Guide
Washington County, Tennessee. “Superintendent’s Quarterly Reports, 1908–1969.” County Court Education Files. Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, TN. Washington County Archives, County Clerk Records Guide
Washington County, Tennessee. Historic Newspaper Collection, Accession 14, 1901–1976. Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, TN. The collection includes newspapers published in Johnson City, Jonesborough, Knoxville, and elsewhere in East Tennessee. Washington County Archives, Historic Newspaper Collection
Washington County, Tennessee. Miscellaneous Photograph Collection, Accession 13. Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, TN. Photographs are primarily twentieth-century images of Washington County people, places, and subjects. Washington County Archives, Manuscript Collection Guide
Herald and Tribune. Jonesborough, TN, 1869–present. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. The newspaper is one of the strongest contemporary sources for Washington County and Jonesborough-area community history. Library of Congress, Herald and Tribune
The Comet. Johnson City, TN, 1884–1916. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Library of Congress, The Comet
United States Census Bureau. Tennessee: 2000. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 2002. Midway CDP, Washington County, had 2,491 residents in the 2000 census. U.S. Census Bureau, Tennessee 2000
United States Census Bureau. Population and Housing Unit Counts: Tennessee, 2000. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 2003. The report records Midway as a Washington County census-designated place and documents boundary changes. U.S. Census Bureau, Population and Housing Unit Counts
United States Geological Survey. Jonesborough, Tennessee. 7.5-Minute Quadrangle. 1:24,000. 1939. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. USGS, Jonesborough 1939 Historical Map
Midway Baptist Church. “Our Story.” Johnson City, TN. The church records its beginning as a Central Baptist Church mission in 1941, its independence in 1947, and construction of its first church building in 1948 after worshiping in a former community general store. Midway Baptist Church, Our Story
East Tennessee Veterans Memorial Association. “Adams, Robert E.” East Tennessee Veterans Memorial Association. The biography identifies Adams as a resident of the Midway community between Johnson City and Jonesborough and states that he attended Midway School. Robert E. Adams Biography
Cox, Joyce, and W. Eugene Cox, eds. History of Washington County, Tennessee. Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 2001. The 1,290-page county history includes communities, churches, organizations, notable residents, and broader Washington County history. Google Books Record
Watauga Association of Genealogists, Upper East Tennessee. History of Washington County, Tennessee, 1988. Marceline, MO: Walsworth Publishing Company, 1988. FamilySearch Catalog Record
Williams, Samuel Cole. History of Johnson City and Its Environs. Johnson City, TN: Watauga Press, 1940. This work is particularly useful for understanding the Johnson City side of the landscape in which Midway developed. University of Pennsylvania Online Books Page
Archer, Cordelia P. History of the Schools of Johnson City, Tennessee, 1868–1950. Master’s thesis, East Tennessee State College, 1953. Tennessee State Library and Archives, Washington County Bibliography
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Washington County.” Tennessee County Records and Published Histories. Nashville: Tennessee Department of State. The guide identifies county histories and archival materials useful for Washington County research. TSLA Washington County Guide
Author Note: Midway caught my attention because its history survives not through one famous event, but through a school, church, store, families, and records scattered across Washington County. Communities like this remind us that much of Appalachian history was built in places that never needed incorporated boundaries to have an identity of their own.