Appalachian Community Histories – Piney Flats, Sullivan County: Shell’s Crossing, Rocky Mount, and Wolfe Brothers
Piney Flats can be easy to pass through without realizing how much Tennessee history is gathered around it. The community lies among the roads, farms, and rolling country between Johnson City, Bristol, and Kingsport, but its story reaches back long before those cities assumed their modern forms. Here, between the Holston and Watauga waters, early settlers established farms and churches, the first government of the Southwest Territory operated from a frontier home, a railroad transformed a rural crossroads, and a family furniture company eventually provided Piney Flats with employment, electricity, and telephone service.
Unlike many unincorporated Appalachian communities whose early history survives mostly through family stories, Piney Flats left a substantial documentary trail. Eighteenth-century land records identify its early families. Federal census takers called the surrounding 9th Civil District Piney Flats. Government maps trace the community before and after the creation of Boone Reservoir. State preservation records document the houses, stores, churches, school buildings, and industrial structures that grew around the railroad. Even the community’s older names, including Shell’s Crossing, Shell’s Crossroads, and Shell’s Station, survive in the National Register record.
Taken together, those records reveal a place that developed in several distinct stages, first as an eighteenth-century settlement in the Forks, then as a crossroads and territorial center, later as a railroad village, and finally as one of the small industrial communities that helped shape twentieth-century Upper East Tennessee.
In the Forks of the Holston and Watauga
Before Piney Flats acquired its present name, the surrounding country was commonly described as “The Forks,” referring to the area between the Holston and Watauga waters. Farms and scattered households appeared here during the first generation of permanent Euro-American settlement in what became northeastern Tennessee.
One of the strongest surviving records from this period comes from North Carolina’s land-grant system. Tennessee did not yet exist as a state, and North Carolina exercised jurisdiction over the region. A surviving list of North Carolina grants for Sullivan County in 1782 records Arnold Shell twice, under grant numbers 1034 and 1088. Sullivan County’s later preservation study directly connects Shell’s land to the property upon which Piney Flats developed.
The Shells were only one part of a much broader settlement pattern. Massengills, Cobbs, Kings, Rheas, Alisons, DeVaults, and other families became associated with the countryside around Piney Flats. The DeVault-Massengill property still preserves this layered settlement history. The National Register nomination describes a substantial Greek Revival residence built about 1842 beside an older log building dating from the eighteenth century. The property stands across the highway from Rocky Mount, placing two of the community’s most important surviving early sites within sight of one another.
Religious life developed almost as quickly as the farms. New Bethel Presbyterian Church traces its beginnings to settlers who gathered for worship in the Forks during the 1770s. The congregation itself records that its beginnings came under the influence of Reverend Joseph Rhea in 1777 and that it was formally organized under Reverend Samuel Doak in 1782. Tennessee State Library and Archives holdings include New Bethel church minutes and church records, providing an unusually rich institutional record for an eighteenth-century rural congregation.
This meant that before there was a railroad depot, furniture factory, or formally named village, the Piney Flats countryside already possessed the foundations of a community. Land ownership, family connections, worship, agriculture, and roads had begun tying scattered farms together.
Rocky Mount and the Government Before Tennessee
The history of Piney Flats became part of a much larger American story in 1790.
That year, the federal government organized the Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio, commonly called the Southwest Territory. President George Washington appointed William Blount as governor, and Blount traveled into the territory to organize its government.
His first seat of government was not Nashville or Knoxville. It was William Cobb’s property at Rocky Mount, near present-day Piney Flats.
Blount reached Rocky Mount in October 1790 and began conducting territorial business there. In a letter dated October 20, he reported that he was “very well accommodated with a room with glass windows, fireplace” at Cobb’s home. The surviving Blount papers and journal contain entries from Rocky Mount and document the formation of the territorial government from the site.
For roughly the next year and a half, Rocky Mount served as the headquarters from which Blount administered a territory stretching far beyond modern Sullivan County. Appointments were issued, correspondence traveled between the frontier and the federal government, militia organization was addressed, and territorial administration began taking shape. Blount remained there until the seat of government shifted to Knoxville in 1792. Tennessee entered the Union four years later, in 1796.
The importance of Rocky Mount gives Piney Flats an unusual place in Tennessee history. The community that later grew around the railroad did not exist in recognizable form in 1790, yet the countryside surrounding it had already hosted the first headquarters of the government that preceded Tennessee statehood.
Rocky Mount also reminds us that this was not an empty frontier. The expansion of the new territorial government occurred amid continuing conflict over Native land and an economic system in which slavery was firmly established. Rocky Mount’s modern interpretation includes the enslaved people who lived and labored on the property, while the 1791 territorial census counted thousands of enslaved people and hundreds of free people of color throughout the Southwest Territory.
From Shell’s Crossing to Piney Flats
For much of the first half of the nineteenth century, settlement around the future village remained largely agricultural. The community center was associated closely enough with the Shell family that Shell’s Crossing, Shell’s Crossroads, and later Shell’s Station all became names for the place. Those names remain recognized as alternate historic names in the National Register record.
The change that pushed Piney Flats toward becoming a defined village came from the railroad.
According to the Tennessee Historical Commission, construction of the railroad began in the Piney Flats area in the 1850s, and the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad was completed through the community in 1858. Reverend Andrew Shell, who owned substantial property around the developing center, applied for a post office to accommodate the growing population and railroad activity. The post office was approved, Shell became the first postmaster, and Piney Flats emerged as the official community name.
Local preservation tradition associates the name with the landscape itself. Sullivan County’s historic-district guidelines describe a flat, pine-covered area near the later Wolfe Brothers factory where settlers reportedly gathered for organized wolf hunts to protect livestock. The phrase “pine flats” eventually outlived the hunts and became attached to the community. It is a piece of local tradition rather than something that can be demonstrated as neatly as a land grant or census entry, but it has been preserved in the county’s official interpretation of the village.
The railroad did more than provide a name. It connected Piney Flats directly to the commercial world developing across East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. Farmers could reach broader markets, merchants could receive goods more efficiently, and industries that would have been difficult to sustain along wagon roads suddenly had access to rail transportation.
By 1860, Piney Flats was established strongly enough that the federal census identified Sullivan County’s 9th Civil District by name as Piney Flats. Enumerator L. G. Dryden began recording the district on July 23, 1860, filling approximately twenty census pages with the households that made up the surrounding community.
The schedules show the texture of rural life better than almost any later community history can. Farmers lived beside day laborers, craftspeople, children, widows, and extended families. Property values varied widely. Familiar surnames appeared repeatedly as kinship networks spread across adjoining farms. The census turns Piney Flats from a point on a map into a neighborhood of actual households.
The Railroad Village Takes Shape
Rail service continued to matter long after the first tracks arrived. In October 1889 the Johnson City Comet reported that railroad construction materials associated with the Charleston, Cincinnati and Chicago Railroad, popularly known as the Three C’s, were being moved throughout the region. Several carloads of carts and materials passed through Johnson City and were unloaded at Piney Flats and Bristol before being sent onward to construction crews.
That small newspaper notice captures Piney Flats’s new position. The community was no longer simply a farming district through which a railroad happened to run. Its station and transportation connections had made it a useful transfer point in the rapidly expanding railroad economy of northeastern Tennessee.
Stores appeared near the village center. A canning factory operated for a time, and several general stores served people who no longer had to travel to larger towns for every purchase. The Tennessee Historical Commission identifies the surviving Mitchell Carr General Store, built in 1939, as an example of the modest commercial buildings that characterized Piney Flats.
Country stores also served purposes beyond commerce. A 1978 Sullivan County News history based on interviews with local residents remembered John Gross’s store near Piney Flats as a postal station and gathering place. Supplies were hauled from the Piney Flats railroad depot or from Bristol, illustrating how the railroad connected even outlying stores and farms to the village center. Local tradition also remembered the property as a Civil War mustering site, although that particular claim rests on later community recollection rather than a wartime document.
Wolfe Brothers and the Industrial Heart of Piney Flats
No business shaped historic Piney Flats more deeply than Wolfe Brothers & Company.
John Bunyan Wolfe, a grandson of Reverend Andrew Shell, was a furniture maker who recognized the advantage of locating beside the railroad. The Tennessee Historical Commission records that Wolfe acquired railroad-adjacent property in 1886. By 1888 a large two-story manufacturing building stood there, and the company became the largest private employer in Piney Flats.
The effect extended far beyond the factory payroll.
Wolfe Brothers produced household furnishings and developed a particularly strong trade in church furniture. Pews, pulpits, chancel furniture, and related products carried the name Piney Flats far beyond Sullivan County. A 1959 advertisement in the Western Recorder offered solid oak Wolfe Brothers church pews directly from the Piney Flats factory, physical evidence of the national religious market the company served decades after its founding.
The factory also helped pull the community into the technological changes of the new century. John Bunyan Wolfe established a local telephone system around 1900. Its original switchboard operated from the Wolfe home, where his wife Lenora served as operator. Wolfe also established a power system that furnished electricity locally before large regional systems made such service commonplace in rural communities.
In this respect Piney Flats followed a pattern found in a number of Appalachian industrial communities, although on a much smaller scale than a coal company town. A major employer did more than manufacture a product. It became part of the community’s infrastructure.
The physical village grew around this new economic center. Houses for families connected to the factory appeared along the surrounding streets. Commercial businesses followed. Architectural styles that were becoming fashionable throughout the country reached Piney Flats, including Queen Anne houses with elaborate wood details and, later, Craftsman and bungalow designs. Sullivan County’s preservation study still identifies Wolfe, Hughes, Shell, Massengill, and other houses as examples of the architecture created during this period of growth.
Wolfe Brothers remained in operation for 112 years, finally closing in 2000. By then the company had outlasted many of the small manufacturing concerns that once lined railroad communities throughout Appalachia.
Churches, Schools, and Community Life
Industrial growth did not replace the older institutions of Piney Flats. Churches and schools remained central to community life.
The Piney Flats Union Church reflected the practical cooperation often required in small rural communities. Although organized earlier, the surviving red brick church building was completed in 1914. Rather than each denomination immediately maintaining a separate large building, the Union Church served several groups over its history. Its interior also demonstrated the close relationship between Piney Flats industry and religion. Wolfe Brothers manufactured the curved solid oak pews that remain inside the church. The historic building is now associated with Piney Flats United Methodist Church.
Education developed along a similar path. Mary Hughes School was completed in 1897 and became one of the community’s most enduring institutions. Four additional classrooms and an auditorium were added in 1924, along with what the Tennessee Historical Commission describes as one of the early gymnasiums constructed for a rural East Tennessee school.
The school eventually changed as Sullivan County consolidated and reorganized its educational system, but the Mary Hughes name survived. A public Mary Hughes School continues operating in Piney Flats today, linking a modern elementary school with an educational institution whose roots extend into the nineteenth century.
New Bethel Presbyterian Church provides an even longer line of continuity. Its eighteenth-century origins predate the village itself, and its surviving church records document generations of marriages, baptisms, church discipline, worship, and family relationships in the Piney Flats countryside. In a community where no single municipal government ever created a formal town archive, churches such as New Bethel effectively became repositories of local memory.
Boone Dam Changes the Landscape
The next great physical transformation came not from the railroad but from the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Congress authorized Boone Dam in 1950 as TVA responded to the postwar demand for electricity and the continuing need for flood control in the upper Tennessee Valley. Construction began that year. The dam was completed in 1952, and its gates closed in December, creating Boone Reservoir near the confluence of the Watauga River and the South Fork Holston.
Piney Flats’s historic village was not submerged, but the wider landscape surrounding the community changed profoundly. River bottoms became shoreline. Transportation patterns shifted. Property that had once been understood primarily in relation to farms, roads, ferries, and river crossings was increasingly understood in relation to a reservoir.
TVA’s own 1959 Boone Reservoir property maps preserve that transition in remarkable detail. The maps identify individual landowners while distinguishing property TVA intended to retain, declare surplus, or transfer. For local historians and descendants of Piney Flats families, they provide a snapshot of landholding patterns only a few years after the reservoir altered the countryside.
Boone Lake also changed the economy and identity of the surrounding area. Recreation, fishing, boating, waterfront development, and new residential growth became increasingly important. The creation of the reservoir therefore represents another stage in the history of Piney Flats, just as significant to the twentieth-century landscape as the railroad had been to the nineteenth.
Preserving the Old Village
By the late twentieth century, Piney Flats was increasingly surrounded by the expanding Tri-Cities region. New roads, subdivisions, businesses, and modern buildings placed pressure on an old village whose historic importance was easy to overlook precisely because Piney Flats had never become an incorporated town.
Preservation efforts eventually focused attention on what remained.
Rocky Mount had already been listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970. The nearby DeVault-Massengill House followed in 1985. These properties preserved the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century story of the Piney Flats countryside, but the later railroad village required recognition of its own.
That recognition came with the Piney Flats Historic District. The National Park Service listed the district on November 15, 2011. Its boundaries include Main, McKamey, and Methodist Church streets and portions of Tank Hill, Piney Flats, Austin Springs, and Mountain View roads. The Tennessee Historical Commission described thirty-six principal properties representing the village’s development from the late nineteenth century into the middle of the twentieth.
The district contains more than grand houses. Its importance comes from the combination of ordinary structures that made the community function. There are residences, the Wolfe Brothers factory and machine shop, a general store, church buildings, and other resources associated with the generations who turned a rural railroad stop into a recognizable village.
The houses themselves tell part of that story. Queen Anne details appear on residences built during the prosperous years around the turn of the twentieth century. Bungalows followed during the 1920s and 1930s. Colonial Revival, Dutch Colonial Revival, English Cottage Revival, and later Ranch influences show that Piney Flats continued evolving instead of freezing at one particular moment in time.
Preservation in Piney Flats is therefore not about recreating an imagined pioneer village. The surviving community reflects nearly two centuries of change, and each period left another layer.
Why Piney Flats Matters
The story of Piney Flats is larger than the story of a small unincorporated community in Sullivan County.
Its eighteenth-century land records preserve the names of families who settled along the Holston and Watauga before Tennessee became a state. Rocky Mount connects the area directly to William Blount, George Washington’s territorial government, and the political creation of Tennessee. New Bethel preserves the religious life of some of the region’s earliest permanent settlers. The railroad explains how Shell’s Crossing became Piney Flats, while the federal census shows the families who actually lived there once the village had acquired its name.
Then came Wolfe Brothers, turning the railroad settlement into an industrial village capable of manufacturing furniture for distant customers while providing its own telephone and electrical systems. Churches and Mary Hughes School anchored community life. TVA changed the surrounding water and land after World War II. Finally, preservationists recognized that the old factory, houses, churches, roads, and stores were not isolated relics but parts of one continuous historic landscape.
Piney Flats never required a courthouse square, city charter, or great downtown to become historically important. Its history accumulated differently, in farm deeds and church minutes, beside railroad tracks, around a furniture factory, inside schoolrooms, and along roads leading toward the Watauga and Holston.
That may be what makes the community especially representative of Appalachia. Much of the region’s history happened outside incorporated places. It happened in crossroads communities where families stayed for generations and where a railroad station, church, store, school, factory, and cemetery could collectively define a place just as clearly as city limits.
Piney Flats is one of those places, but few have preserved so many layers of the story. From the Forks of the eighteenth century to the railroad village of the nineteenth, from the Wolfe Brothers factory to the shores created by TVA, its landscape still carries the evidence of how northeastern Tennessee moved from frontier settlement to the modern Appalachian South.
Sources & Further Reading
Bergeron, Paul H. “Southwest Territory.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/southwest-territory/.
Carden, Kara. “Rocky Mount.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/rocky-mount/.
Grissino-Mayer, Henri D., Lisa LaForest, and Saskia L. van de Gevel. “Construction History of the Rocky Mount Historic Site (40SL386), Piney Flats, Tennessee, from Tree-Ring and Documentary Evidence.” Southeastern Archaeology 28, no. 1 (2009). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266351688_Construction_history_of_the_Rocky_Mount_Historic_Site_40SL386_Piney_Flats_Tennessee_from_tree-ring_and_documentary_evidence.
Johnson City Comet. “Railroad Construction Materials at Piney Flats and Bristol.” October 24, 1889. Transcription reproduced by the East Tennessee & Western North Carolina Railroad Historical Society. https://etwncrrhs.org/art/historiesart/JohnsonCityBusinessesAlongET%26WNCandClinchfieldPart6.pdf.
National Archives and Records Administration. “1860 Census Records.” Eighth Census of the United States, 1860. Microfilm Publication M653, Record Group 29. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/online-resources.
New Bethel Presbyterian Church. “About Us.” Piney Flats, TN. https://newbethelpres.org/About-Us.
North Carolina, Secretary of State. “North Carolina Land Grants in Sullivan County, 1778–1791.” Transcribed by the Tennessee Genealogy Web Project. https://www.tngenweb.org/records/sullivan/land/nc_grants_sullivan.html.
Rocky Mount Historical Association. “Tennessee’s First Capital: Rocky Mount.” Rocky Mount State Historic Site. https://www.rockymountmuseum.com/tennessee-first-capital-rocky-mount.
Rocky Mount Historical Association. “Our History.” Rocky Mount State Historic Site. https://www.rockymountmuseum.com/our-history.
Rocky Mount Historical Association. “Wolfe Brothers Furniture Historical Sale.” Rocky Mount State Historic Site, 2022. https://www.rockymountmuseum.com/events/wolfe-brothers-furniture-factory-sale.
Sullivan County, Tennessee. A Parcel of Piney Flats: Piney Flats Village Historic District Design Guidelines. Sullivan County Historic Zoning Commission, 2014. https://sullivancountytn.gov/wp-content/uploads/Piney-Flats-Village-Historic-District-Design-Guidelines-2014.pdf.
Taylor, Oliver. Historic Sullivan: A History of Sullivan County, Tennessee, with Brief Biographies of the Makers of History. Bristol, TN: King Printing Company, 1909. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/09025291/.
Tennessee Historical Commission. “National Register of Historic Places.” Tennessee Historical Commission. https://comptroller.extglb.tn.gov/historicalcommission/federal-programs/national-register.html.
Tennessee Historical Commission. “Piney Flats Historic District.” The Courier, February 2012. https://comptroller.aem.tn.extglb.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/historicalcommission/archive/courier/back-issues/thc_courier_feb12.pdf.
Tennessee Historical Commission. “Rocky Mount State Historic Site.” Tennessee State Historic Sites. https://www.tn.gov/historicalcommission/state-programs/state-historic-sites/rocky-mount.html.
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Sullivan County Genealogical Fact Sheet.” Tennessee Secretary of State. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm.
Tennessee Valley Authority. “Boone.” TVA Hydroelectric System. https://www.tva.com/Energy/Our-Power-System/Hydroelectric/Boone.
Tennessee Valley Authority. “Boone Reservoir Land Management Plan.” https://www.tva.com/environment/environmental-stewardship/land-management/reservoir-land-management-plans/boone-reservoir-land-management-plan.
Tennessee Valley Authority, Division of Reservoir Properties. Boone Reservoir Properties, Sheet 2. October 1959. Rare Maps Digital Collection, Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University, Sherrod Library. https://dc.etsu.edu/rare-maps/20/.
Tennessee Valley Authority, Division of Reservoir Properties. Boone Reservoir Properties, Sheet 3. October 1959. Rare Maps Digital Collection, Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University, Sherrod Library. https://dc.etsu.edu/rare-maps/21/.
“Tennessee: Sullivan County.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/sullivan-county/.
United States Bureau of the Census. Eighth Census of the United States, 1860: Sullivan County, Tennessee, Civil District No. 9, Piney Flats. Washington, DC, 1860. Transcription and finding aid, Tennessee Genealogy Web Project. https://tngenweb.org/sullivantn/census/09/.
United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service. “DeVault-Masengill House.” National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination Form. Sullivan County, Tennessee. National Register No. 85000669. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/85000669_text.
United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service. “Piney Flats Historic District.” National Register of Historic Places. Sullivan County, Tennessee. National Register No. 11000808. Listed November 15, 2011. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2011-10-26/pdf/2011-27401.pdf.
United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service. “Rocky Mount.” National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination Form. Sullivan County, Tennessee. National Register No. 70000617. 1970. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/ca284081-1574-496b-ae65-532c12b9d29a.
United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service. “National Register of Historic Places; Notification of Pending Nominations and Related Actions.” Federal Register 76, no. 207 (October 26, 2011). https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2011-10-26/pdf/2011-27401.pdf.
United States Geological Survey. Bluff City, Tennessee. Historical Topographic Map, 1940. USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection. https://store.usgs.gov/.
United States Geological Survey. Boone Dam, Tennessee. 7.5-Minute Topographic Quadrangle, 1959. USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past.
United States Geological Survey. Roan Mountain, Tennessee–North Carolina. Historical Topographic Map, 1891. USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past.
United States Geological Survey. Roan Mountain, Tennessee–North Carolina. Historical Topographic Map, 1904. USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past.
“Wolfe Brothers & Co., Piney Flats, Tenn.” Advertisement. Western Recorder, March 26, 1959. https://media2.sbhla.org.s3.amazonaws.com/periodicals/western_recorder/1959/WR_1959_03_26.pdf.
Sorrell, Robert. The Story of Becoming Piney Flats. Elizabethton, TN: Laurel Fork Publishing, 2022. https://search.worldcat.org/.
Scenes from the Bluffs: A Bicentennial Picture History of Bluff City and Piney Flats, Tennessee. Bluff City, TN: Bluff City United Methodist Church, 1976.
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Holston Territory Genealogical Society. Families and History of Sullivan County, Tennessee. Vols. 1–2. Johnson City, TN: Holston Territory Genealogical Society.
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Tennis, Joe. Sullivan County. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008.
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Sorrell, Robert. Historic Homes of Northeast Tennessee. Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press.
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Tennessee State Library and Archives. Sullivan County Wills, 1838–1915. Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla.
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Tennessee State Library and Archives. Sullivan County Circuit Court Minutes, 1879–. Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla.
Tennessee State Library and Archives. Sullivan County Tax Books, 1877–. Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla.
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Tennessee Confederate Pension Applications: Sullivan County.” Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla.
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Tennessee World War I Veterans Records.” Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla.
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Tennessee Death Records, 1908–1912 and 1914–1933.” Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla.
Author Note: Piney Flats is one of those Appalachian communities whose story survives unusually well through land records, census schedules, maps, historic buildings, and government documents. I have tried to bring those records together here while keeping documented history distinct from the local traditions that generations of Piney Flats residents preserved.