Appalachian Community Histories – Rogersville, Hawkins County: The Courthouse Town Where Tennessee Printing Began
Rogersville is one of those Appalachian towns where the oldest stories are not hidden in one place. They sit in courthouse books, National Register files, old maps, graveyards, church records, school memories, newspaper pages, and the brick face of Main Street itself. To understand Rogersville, Hawkins County, Tennessee, a researcher has to follow the road, the courthouse, and the press.
The town began as a courthouse settlement in the North Carolina backcountry before Tennessee was a state. It grew beside routes that carried settlers toward Bean Station, Cumberland Gap, Kentucky, and the Cumberland settlements. It became a county seat, a printing town, a stage stop, a Civil War crossroads, and later an important place in the history of African American education in East Tennessee.
Rogersville’s story is not only the story of one town. It is the story of how law, travel, trade, education, and memory shaped the upper Holston country.
Hawkins Court House Before Rogersville
Before Rogersville became Rogersville, the settlement was known as Hawkins Court House. Hawkins County itself was created while the region was still under North Carolina authority. The county was carved from Sullivan County in the late 1780s, and early commissioners chose land associated with Joseph Rogers near Crockett Creek as the place for the county seat.
The first need was practical. A county had to have a courthouse, a jail, and public offices. The early county seat was not simply a town in the modern sense. It was the place where deeds were proved, marriages were recorded, wills were filed, taxes were assessed, disputes were heard, and public authority took visible form.
That is why Rogersville’s history is so deeply tied to records. The town’s beginning is written into court and land systems as much as into local tradition. County archives, register books, and early acts of government are not just supporting evidence for Rogersville. They are part of the town’s foundation.
The 1789 Act and the Naming of Rogersville
In 1789, residents petitioned the North Carolina General Assembly to establish a town at Hawkins Court House and name it Rogersville. The act appointed commissioners and trustees to lay out land into lots, streets, alleys, and public building lots. The town was to take shape on paper first, then in fences, taverns, stores, houses, and courthouse business.
There is a small date issue researchers should watch closely. Some summaries give November 7, 1789, as the approval date connected with the petition, while Goodspeed’s nineteenth century history gives December 22, 1789, for the enacted language. The disagreement is not unusual in early state and county history, where petitions, passage, enrollment, and later printed compilations can create different dates in later references. The important point is that Rogersville was formally established in 1789 by North Carolina authority, before Tennessee entered the Union.
The name honored Joseph Rogers, the Irish born settler whose connection to the land and to the Amis family placed him at the center of the new county seat. Rogers had married Mary Amis, daughter of Thomas Amis, one of the most important early landholders and businessmen in the area. Through that marriage and through Rogers’s own activity as an innkeeper and local promoter, the family became closely tied to the birth of the town.
Joseph Rogers, Mary Amis, and the Amis Country
The Rogersville Historic District nomination identifies Joseph Rogers as the town’s namesake and places him in the area in the early 1780s. In 1786, Rogers married Mary Amis. Her father, Thomas Amis, was a major early figure in Hawkins County, and his house east of Rogersville stands as one of the strongest surviving links to the pre town landscape.
The Amis House is important because it reminds us that Rogersville did not emerge in an empty country. The upper Holston and Crockett Creek area had already become a world of forts, stations, farms, roads, trade, and contested settlement. Thomas Amis built a fortified stone house and operated businesses that served travelers and local residents. The Amis family, the Rogers family, and other early settlers worked in a borderland where politics, land claims, Indigenous dispossession, family alliance, and commerce overlapped.
Rogersville was the county seat, but it was also part of a wider settlement pattern that included Carter’s Valley, Stony Point, New Providence, the Amis property, and the roads that tied these places together. The courthouse square became the center, but the roots ran outward.
Main Street and the Great Road Through Town
Rogersville prospered because it sat where people had to pass. Main Street followed an important road corridor through East Tennessee. Travelers moved along routes that connected the upper Holston country to Bean Station, Cumberland Gap, Kentucky, Knoxville, and the Cumberland settlements.
The National Register nomination for the Rogersville Historic District makes this point clearly. Rogersville grew because it was on a major stage route. That road brought strangers, letters, horses, wagons, goods, lawsuits, news, and ambition into town. It made taverns valuable. It made blacksmiths necessary. It made the courthouse accessible. It also helped explain why a newspaper could begin in Rogersville before Knoxville became the permanent home of the territorial press.
Road towns often became memory towns. People remembered where they stopped, where they heard news, where they stood in court, where they stayed overnight, and where they saw public events unfold. Rogersville’s Main Street still carries that older function. It is not simply a street of buildings. It is the physical trace of travel, law, and trade moving through the mountains.
The First Newspaper Printed in Tennessee
One of Rogersville’s strongest claims to Tennessee history is its connection to the Knoxville Gazette. On November 5, 1791, George Roulstone printed the Knoxville Gazette at Rogersville. It was the first newspaper printed in what would become Tennessee.
The name can confuse modern readers. The paper was called the Knoxville Gazette, but its first issues were printed in Rogersville because Knoxville was not yet ready to receive the territorial government and its printer. Roulstone stayed in Rogersville for about eleven months before moving the press to Knoxville in 1792.
This event made Rogersville one of the cradles of Tennessee journalism. The first newspaper carried territorial news, government notices, advertisements, political information, and the early public language of a region moving toward statehood. In a frontier courthouse town, printing gave public life a new form. Laws, sales, runaway notices, land matters, and political announcements could travel farther and last longer than spoken news.
Rogersville’s Tennessee Newspaper and Printing Museum keeps this memory alive. The museum’s work matters because the printing history of Rogersville is not a side story. It is one of the ways East Tennessee entered the documentary world.
The Courthouse Square and the Architecture of a County Seat
Rogersville’s historic core is best understood through its square. The National Register nomination describes a tree lined Main Street with early and late nineteenth century dwellings, commercial buildings, public buildings, and a courthouse landscape that preserved much of the town’s older character.
The Hawkins County Courthouse, built in the late 1830s, became the architectural and civic anchor of the square. The nomination notes its classical style and its importance among the public buildings of the district. Local and state sources often emphasize the courthouse as one of Tennessee’s oldest courthouses still in use.
Around the courthouse stood the businesses and homes that made Rogersville more than a government seat. The Rogers Tavern buildings, the old graveyard, the McKinney property, law offices, stores, and later commercial blocks all formed part of the town’s identity.
The Rogers Graveyard, located behind buildings associated with the old Rogers property, is especially important. It ties the town’s public history back to family memory and burial ground. In Rogersville, the courthouse, tavern, graveyard, and Main Street are close enough that a visitor can understand how early settlement, county government, and local memory grew together.
Hale Springs Inn and the Stagecoach World
Among the best known Rogersville landmarks is Hale Springs Inn. Built in 1824 and 1825 by John A. McKinney, the inn stood along the busy stage route through town. It was first known as McKinney Tavern before later becoming associated with the Hale Springs name.
The inn belonged to a world of public travel. Guests needed food, beds, stables, information, and company. Lawyers, judges, merchants, politicians, and families moving west or south passed through such places. The inn’s location near the courthouse and Main Street made it part of Rogersville’s civic theater.
The building also carries presidential and Civil War associations. Tradition and architectural histories connect Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson with the inn. During the Civil War, the building was used in connection with military occupation, with Union forces using it as headquarters at one point while Confederate headquarters stood across the street at the Kyle House.
Its survival gives Rogersville a rare piece of the stagecoach era. It is one thing to read that travelers passed through a town. It is another to stand before a building that received them.
A Working Town in the Early Nineteenth Century
Eastin Morris’s 1834 Tennessee Gazetteer gives a valuable early snapshot of Rogersville. The Rogersville Historic District nomination cites Morris’s description of the town in 1833 as having about 300 inhabitants. The town included lawyers, doctors, ministers, an academy, stores, taverns, blacksmiths, bricklayers, carpenters, cabinetmakers, painters, hatters, tailors, shoemakers, saddlers, a silversmith, tanners, a tinner, and wagonmakers.
That list is important because it shows Rogersville as a working county seat rather than a sleepy mountain village. The courthouse created legal business. The road created travel business. Farms and nearby settlements created demand for tradesmen. Schools and churches created civic life. Stores and taverns turned passing traffic into local economy.
By the 1830s, Rogersville was already a town of skilled hands. Brick, wood, iron, leather, cloth, paper, and law all had a place there. The architecture that survives on Main Street came out of this world of labor and commerce.
Civil War at Rogersville
The Civil War brought Rogersville into the military struggle for East Tennessee. The town sat in a region where Unionist and Confederate loyalties divided families, churches, and neighborhoods. Its road connections and position in Hawkins County made it valuable to armies operating between Virginia, Knoxville, Cumberland Gap, and the Holston Valley.
On November 6, 1863, Confederate cavalry under Brigadier General William E. Jones struck Union forces near Rogersville in an action often remembered as the Battle of Rogersville or the Battle of Big Creek. Reports in the Official Records and the Tennessee State Library and Archives Civil War Sourcebook preserve the military language of that day. Jones reported from near Carter’s Station several days later, describing the operation and its results.
The action was a Confederate success. Union troops were surprised, prisoners were captured, and supplies, wagons, horses, and military stores fell into Confederate hands. For the broader campaign, Rogersville mattered because it affected the military screen in upper East Tennessee during the Knoxville operations.
For the people of Rogersville, the war meant more than troop movements. It meant occupation, uncertainty, confiscation, fear, and the presence of soldiers in familiar buildings. The courthouse square, hotels, roads, and nearby farms became part of the machinery of war.
Swift Memorial College and Black Education in Rogersville
Rogersville’s history did not end with courthouse politics and Civil War memory. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it became home to one of East Tennessee’s important historically Black educational institutions.
Swift Memorial College began in Rogersville in 1883 through the work of Reverend William H. Franklin, a Maryville College graduate and African American Presbyterian minister. The school began as Swift Memorial Institute and grew into Swift Memorial College. Like many Black institutions founded in the post Reconstruction South, it served both high school and teacher education needs.
The history of Swift is inseparable from the racial politics of Tennessee education. In 1901, a Tennessee Jim Crow law forced Maryville College to stop admitting African American students. Maryville trustees then transferred funds to Swift Memorial College to continue supporting Black education. Swift developed dormitories, expanded its curriculum, and served students from Tennessee and other southern states.
The school later became Swift Memorial Junior College and continued until Presbyterian support ended in the early 1950s. Local effort kept the school going for a short time afterward, but it eventually closed in the mid 1950s.
Today, the Swift story is preserved through Tennessee State University materials, the Tennessee Encyclopedia, the Black in Appalachia digital archive, alumni interviews, catalogues, and the Swift Museum in Rogersville. It is one of the most important chapters in Rogersville history because it places the town within the larger Appalachian story of Black education, church leadership, segregation, and community memory.
Maps, Archives, and the Paper Trail
Rogersville is especially rich for researchers because so many kinds of records survive or are identified in archival guides.
The Hawkins County Archives in Rogersville is the first stop for anyone doing serious work on the town. Its holdings include circuit court records, criminal records, chancery court materials, county court records, marriages, road orders, tax assessments, oaths and bonds, wills, school records, and Civil War related claims. These records can reconstruct families, neighborhoods, lawsuits, roads, estates, schools, and public obligations across generations.
The Hawkins County Register’s Office is essential for tracing town lots, public buildings, taverns, commercial properties, churches, and family land. Deed books can connect names in local tradition to actual property lines.
Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps at the Library of Congress are another powerful source. Rogersville maps from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can show building footprints, materials, street names, businesses, hotels, churches, and changes along Main Street. For a town where architecture matters, Sanborn maps help connect buildings to use.
The National Register files for the Rogersville Historic District, Amis House, St. Marks Presbyterian Church, Price Public Elementary School, and other Hawkins County properties give architectural descriptions, historical narratives, maps, and bibliographies. They should be read carefully, not as the final word, but as strong guides into the records.
University of Tennessee Special Collections, the Tennessee State Library and Archives, the Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State University, H. B. Stamps Memorial Library, the Hawkins County Genealogical and Historical Society, and the Rogersville Heritage Association all add additional layers to the story.
Why Rogersville Matters
Rogersville matters because it gathers several major Appalachian themes in one town. It was a courthouse town created under North Carolina authority before Tennessee statehood. It sat on a major road through the mountains. It became the first printing place of a Tennessee newspaper. It preserved a courthouse square and Main Street that still show the shape of nineteenth century public life. It witnessed the Civil War in upper East Tennessee. It became home to Swift Memorial College, a significant institution in the history of African American education.
The town also matters because its history is unusually researchable. There are laws, deeds, court cases, wills, road orders, tax lists, maps, newspapers, historic district nominations, college catalogues, photographs, oral histories, and local repositories. Rogersville is not a place where the past survives only as legend. It survives in paper, brick, stone, and memory.
A traveler can walk Main Street and see the courthouse, the inn, old commercial blocks, and the lines of the historic district. A researcher can move from those buildings into archives and find the names of the people who bought lots, kept taverns, built roads, taught students, fought lawsuits, printed newspapers, operated schools, and endured war.
That is the deeper value of Rogersville. It is not simply one of Tennessee’s oldest towns. It is one of the places where the documentary history of Appalachian Tennessee began taking shape.
Sources & Further Reading
North Carolina General Assembly. “An Act for Erecting and Establishing a Town at Hawkins Court-House.” In Acts of the North Carolina General Assembly, 1789. Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina. https://docsouth.unc.edu/csr/index.php/page/p25-3
National Park Service. National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form: Rogersville Historic District, Hawkins County, Tennessee. 1973. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/f17524bd-b15d-4207-975e-4d9099815073
Hawkins County Archives. “Hawkins County Archives.” Hawkins County, Tennessee. https://hawkinscountytn.gov/archives.html
Hawkins County, Tennessee. “Our History.” Hawkins County, Tennessee. https://www.hawkinscountytn.gov/history.html
West, Carroll Van. “Hawkins County.” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. March 1, 2018. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/hawkins-county/
West, Carroll Van. “Knoxville Gazette.” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. March 1, 2018. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/knoxville-gazette/
Lovett, Bobby L. “Swift Memorial College.” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. March 1, 2018. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/swift-memorial-college/
National Park Service. National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form: St. Marks Presbyterian Church, Rogersville, Hawkins County, Tennessee. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/03a2ef6a-74ec-4860-87a9-f4f82a036af8
National Park Service. National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form: New Providence Presbyterian Church, Academy, and Cemetery, Hawkins County, Tennessee. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/5fec3ed2-e889-491e-a14b-c8b41fbf3314
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Rogersville, Hawkins County, Tennessee. Library of Congress, 1888, 1892, 1897, 1903, 1908, and 1913. https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn08369_006/
Library of Congress. “Tennessee: U.S. Newspaper Collections at the Library of Congress.” https://guides.loc.gov/united-states-newspapers/18th-century-tennessee
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “November 6, 1863: Action near Rogersville.” Civil War Sourcebook. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/cwsb/1863-11-Article-57-Page76.pdf
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_War_of_the_Rebellion.html?id=A75ZAAAAYAAJ
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Genealogical ‘Fact Sheets’ About Hawkins County.” Tennessee Secretary of State. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla/pages/genealogical-fact-sheets-about-hawkins-county
Tennessee Virtual Archive. “Early U.S. Claim for Damages by Confederate Forces.” Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15138coll6/id/10211/
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives. “Hawkins County, Tennessee History Collections.” https://scout.lib.utk.edu/subjects/430
East Tennessee State University. “Historical Map of Hawkins County Tennessee, 1771 to 1971, by Louis T. Ketron.” Archives of Appalachia and Special Collections. https://dc.etsu.edu/rare-maps/172/
East Tennessee State University. “Archives of Appalachia.” https://www.etsu.edu/cas/cass/archives/
H. B. Stamps Memorial Library. “Genealogy Room.” Hawkins County Library System. https://www.hawkinslibraries.org/genealogy-room.html
Hawkins County Library System. “History.” https://www.hawkinslibraries.org/history.html
Hawkins County Genealogical and Historical Society. “Hawkins County, Tennessee Genealogy and History.” TNGenWeb. https://tngenweb.org/hawkins/
FamilySearch. “Hawkins County, Tennessee Genealogy.” FamilySearch Research Wiki. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Hawkins_County%2C_Tennessee_Genealogy
Rogersville Heritage Association. “Historic Rogersville, Tennessee.” https://www.rogersvilleheritage.org/historic-rogersville
Rogersville Heritage Association. “Tennessee Newspaper and Printing Museum.” https://www.rogersvilleheritage.org/tn-newspaper-and-printing
Rogersville Heritage Association. “Swift Museum.” https://www.rogersvilleheritage.org/swift-museum
Black in Appalachia. “Swift Memorial Institute.” https://blackinappalachia.omeka.net/collections/show/49
Black in Appalachia. “Rogersville.” https://www.blackinappalachia.org/rogersville
Black in Appalachia. “Hawkins County, Tennessee People of Color, 1860 and 1870.” https://blackinappalachia.omeka.net/collections/show/27
Black in Appalachia. “Rogersville Review Colored News Collection.” https://blackinappalachia.omeka.net/collections/show/26
Tennessee State University Library. “Swift Memorial College.” https://ww2.tnstate.edu/library/digital/swift.htm
SAH Archipedia. “Hale Springs Inn.” Society of Architectural Historians. https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/TN-01-073-0037
Morris, Eastin. Tennessee Gazetteer. Nashville, 1834. https://archive.org/
Goodspeed Publishing Company. “History of Hawkins County.” In History of Tennessee from the Earliest Time to the Present. Nashville: Goodspeed Publishing Company, 1887. https://tngenweb.org/hawkins/history-of-hawkins-county-from-goodspeed-published-1887/
TNGenWeb. “A Brief Overview of Hawkins County’s Early History.” https://tngenweb.org/hawkins/a-brief-overview-of-hawkins-countys-early-history/
TNGenWeb. “Microfilm Available at Rogersville Library’s Genealogy Room.” https://tngenweb.org/hawkins/microfilm-available-at-rogersville-librarys-genealogy-room/
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Newspapers on Microfilm at TSLA: R.” https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/history/newspapers/paper-r.htm
Author Note: Rogersville’s story is built from courthouse records, old roads, surviving buildings, newspapers, and local memory. I wrote this piece to show how one Hawkins County town helped shape Tennessee’s public life before and after statehood.