Appalachian Community Histories – Stewart Hill, Washington County: The Campground Hidden in an 1885 Court Case
Stewart Hill is easy to pass without realizing how far its name reaches into the history of Washington County. Today it survives as an unincorporated community northwest of Jonesborough, identified by the U.S. Geographic Names Information System as a populated place on the Leesburg quadrangle at an elevation of about 1,791 feet. Fairview lies to the northwest, Leesburg to the southwest, and the old county seat of Jonesborough only a few miles away.
For a place so close to Tennessee’s oldest town, however, Stewart Hill left surprisingly little obvious narrative history behind. There is no well-known founding story, no incorporated government that generated its own minute books, and no easily located history explaining when people first began calling this part of Washington County Stewart Hill.
One document changes that picture.
Buried in the surviving Washington County Circuit Court files is an 1885 criminal case titled State v. John Hickman. The archival description contains only a few words about what happened, but those words are unusually important. Hickman was charged with “Disturbing public worship at Stewart Hill Camping ground.”
With that single court entry, Stewart Hill emerges from the nineteenth-century record not simply as a hill or geographic landmark, but as a place where people gathered for worship.
The Stewart Hill Camping Ground
The 1885 case is presently the strongest documentary evidence for Stewart Hill as a named community location during the nineteenth century. The Washington County Archives places State v. John Hickman in Box/Folder 204 among the Circuit Court cases for that year. The archivist’s description specifically identifies the location as the “Stewart Hill Camping ground.”
That wording tells us several things while also leaving much unanswered.
First, the Stewart Hill name was clearly recognizable enough by 1885 to be used in an official court record. It was not merely a modern name attached to the neighborhood generations later. Someone preparing or cataloging the case could identify the location by Stewart Hill.
More importantly, people were assembling there for religious worship. The reference to a camping ground suggests that Stewart Hill had a recognized gathering place rather than being only the name of a physical elevation. Whether the site contained a permanent meeting structure, a brush arbor, tents, cabins, or simply an open meeting ground cannot yet be established from the archival index. The denomination responsible for the gathering is also unknown.
Even the exact events involving John Hickman remain hidden until the complete court file is examined. The surviving index does not say what Hickman did, who complained against him, who was preaching, how many people were present, or whether he was ultimately convicted.
What the record does establish is important enough on its own. In 1885, people were gathering at Stewart Hill for worship, and whatever occurred there became serious enough to reach the Washington County Circuit Court.
What “Disturbing Public Worship” Meant
The wording of Hickman’s case was not simply an archivist’s way of describing bad behavior at a church meeting. “Disturbing public worship” was a recognized criminal offense under Tennessee law.
An 1867 Tennessee Supreme Court case, State v. Doty, discussed the statute then contained in Section 4853 of the Tennessee Code. The law applied when someone willfully disturbed an assembly gathered for religious worship through noise, profane speech, rude or indecent conduct, or another disruptive act. The law allowed fines and, in some circumstances, imprisonment. Later Tennessee cases continued to deal with the same statutory offense.
That legal background gives the Stewart Hill case more weight. Hickman’s appearance in the Circuit Court files was not merely the result of someone being asked to leave a gathering. The alleged disturbance entered the criminal justice system.
The complete file may therefore be one of the richest surviving sources for the community’s nineteenth-century history. Witness statements, indictments, subpoenas, bonds, or other papers could identify residents who attended the meeting. Ministers or church leaders might be named. Even a seemingly minor criminal case could provide a snapshot of a rural Washington County neighborhood that otherwise escaped detailed description.
Until those papers are examined, it would be a mistake to invent the details. Still, the archival entry allows us to picture Stewart Hill in 1885 as a place known locally enough that residents could simply refer to its camping ground and expect others to understand where they meant.
Religion and Community Life on the Hill
In rural communities across nineteenth-century Tennessee, religious gatherings served purposes that stretched beyond the sermon itself. Worship brought scattered families together and placed churches, meeting grounds, and campgrounds among the most recognizable landmarks in communities that might never develop a formal business district or municipal government.
The Stewart Hill record fits that larger pattern, although its particular denomination and organization remain uncertain. The words “Camping ground” are especially suggestive because they imply a location associated with gatherings rather than an isolated household. Yet the available evidence does not justify attaching Stewart Hill to the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Brethren, or any other denomination without additional church or court records.
That distinction matters because the surrounding country was filled with congregations. The 1935 and 1939 Leesburg topographic maps identify several churches in the broader area, including New Hope Church, Union Tabernacle, Pleasant Grove Church, Oak Hill Church, and others. New Hope Church and New Hope Cemetery remain particularly close to modern Stewart Hill, but proximity alone does not establish that New Hope was responsible for the 1885 camping ground.
Future church-minute research may eventually make that connection, or it may point somewhere else entirely. Records preserved by the Washington County Archives include church collections and manuscript holdings that could contain references to camp meetings, preaching appointments, local families, or neighboring congregations. The attachment research also identifies Buffalo Ridge Baptist Church minutes, Cherokee Baptist Church records, and Immanuel Lutheran Church records as collections worth investigating, while carefully noting that no connection between those churches and the Stewart Hill campground has yet been proven.
For now, Stewart Hill’s religious history begins with the safest statement the evidence allows: there was a recognized place for public worship there by 1885.
Stewart Hill Before 1885
Finding the history of Stewart Hill before the campground case requires looking past the place-name itself.
Washington County has an extraordinarily deep documentary record. Its first deed book contains land transactions dating from 1775 through 1782, including deeds involving the Watauga and Nolichucky settlements, later conveyances among settlers, North Carolina grants, and other early land records. The Washington County Archives describes Deed Book A as the first deed book of Tennessee’s oldest county.
Those records matter to Stewart Hill because a chain of title may eventually answer one of the largest unresolved questions surrounding the community: who, if anyone, was the Stewart for whom the place was named?
The county’s tax records offer another path. Surviving Washington County tax lists extend from 1778 into the nineteenth century, with surviving loose lists ultimately reaching 1882. Depending on the year, they can identify taxpayers, acreage, polls, livestock, and other taxable property. After 1835, Washington County was divided into numbered civil districts, making it increasingly possible to narrow families to particular sections of the county.
This matters because small Appalachian communities frequently existed socially before they became prominent cartographic names. Families might identify their neighborhood by a ridge, creek, church, mill, farm, or landowner long before a mapmaker printed that name.
The goal, then, is not simply to search eighteenth and early nineteenth-century indexes for the phrase “Stewart Hill.” It is to determine who owned the land at the modern Stewart Hill location, who lived along the roads crossing it, where they worshipped, and whether a Stewart or Stuart household appears in the chain.
An Intriguing “Stuarts Place”
The 1836 description of Washington County’s newly created civil districts provides an interesting clue, although it should be treated cautiously.
The original county map and boundary descriptions were created after Tennessee’s new constitution required counties to organize civil districts for taxation and elections. Washington County was divided into seventeen districts. The description for District No. 15, the Jonesborough District, refers at one point to the “three forks above Stuarts place.”
That phrase is intriguing because it proves that a Stuart place-name or household landmark existed in the general Jonesborough landscape by 1836.
It does not prove that this was Stewart Hill.
The spelling is different, the boundary description must be carefully reconstructed on a map, and “Stuarts place” may refer to an entirely separate person and location. Connecting the two without deeds or additional records would turn an interesting possibility into an unsupported claim.
Still, it is precisely the kind of clue worth pursuing. If deeds, tax records, census schedules, or estate papers can identify the Stuart named in the 1836 district description and place that person’s land around modern Stewart Hill, the history of the name could potentially be pushed back nearly half a century before the Hickman case. If the property lies elsewhere, the possibility can be discarded.
For local history, disproving an attractive explanation can be just as important as confirming one.
Mapping the Country Around Stewart Hill
Two early maps preserved by the Tennessee State Library and Archives provide a way to reconstruct the landscape surrounding the future community.
Eastin Morris’s 1828 map of Washington County recorded roads, residences, churches, mills, ferries, rivers, mountains, and industrial sites. Its emphasis on the county’s working landscape makes it especially valuable for locating the families and transportation routes that existed before Stewart Hill becomes clear in later documentation.
The 1836 civil district map adds another layer. It divided Washington County into its new political districts while preserving roads, waterways, ridges, and other landmarks used to establish their boundaries. Combined with the tax lists, deeds, and census schedules, the map offers a method for narrowing nineteenth-century residents to the landscape around present-day Stewart Hill.
By the end of the nineteenth century, federal mapping becomes useful as well. The U.S. Geological Survey’s Greeneville quadrangle was based on surveys conducted during the 1880s and early 1890s, almost exactly the period in which the Stewart Hill campground case occurred. The map records roads, structures, streams, relief, and other features across the region, allowing the 1885 community to be studied within its contemporary transportation network.
None of these maps alone tells the complete story. Together, however, they turn Stewart Hill from a dot on a modern map into a landscape that can be reconstructed one generation at a time.
Stewart Hill Reaches the Topographic Maps
By the twentieth century, Stewart Hill becomes much easier to follow cartographically.
The 1935 Leesburg topographic map identifies Stewart Hill among the named terrain features of the area. The same sheet records surrounding communities, churches, schools, ridges, streams, the Southern Railway, and State Highway No. 81. A 1939 Leesburg map again records Stewart Hill, this time in a landscape that also includes Fairview, Bowmantown, New Hope Church, Progressive Church, Union Tabernacle, local schools, and the Southern railroad.
That evidence demonstrates continuity. At least fifty years after the 1885 campground case, Stewart Hill remained a recognized geographic name.
Modern federal geographic data carries the name forward again. GNIS Feature ID 1314337 classifies Stewart Hill as a populated place at approximately 36°18′28″ north and 82°30′29″ west on the Leesburg quadrangle. The location sits roughly two miles northwest of Jonesborough, surrounded by other small Washington County communities that developed outside incorporated municipal boundaries.
Modern maps can therefore give researchers the anchor needed to work backward. Starting at the documented Stewart Hill coordinates and comparing successive topographic maps, property maps, tax districts, and deeds offers the best chance of identifying how the nineteenth-century campground relates to the community known by that name today.
Newspapers Waiting to Be Searched
Stewart Hill’s story may also be hiding in newspapers.
The Herald and Tribune began publication in Jonesborough in August 1869 and was therefore operating throughout the period surrounding the 1885 Hickman case. The Library of Congress has digitized nineteenth-century issues through Chronicling America. Since the newspaper was published at the Washington County seat only a short distance from Stewart Hill, it is one of the strongest possible sources for notices of camp meetings, revivals, court proceedings, neighborhood news, deaths, property sales, and road matters.
Johnson City’s Comet began publication in March 1884, almost exactly one year before the known Stewart Hill court case. Its surviving digitized run likewise provides another contemporary source for Washington County news.
The challenge is spelling. Searches should not stop with “Stewart Hill.” Nineteenth-century newspapers were inconsistent even when writers themselves were not. “Stewart’s Hill,” “Stewarts Hill,” “Stuart Hill,” “Stewart Hill Camp Ground,” “camping ground,” and references to individual families may uncover material that a single modern spelling misses.
A newspaper notice advertising a meeting at Stewart Hill could potentially identify a preacher and denomination. A court report could explain exactly what John Hickman was accused of doing. An obituary might identify someone as having lived at Stewart Hill decades before topographic maps began carrying the name.
The sources exist. The difficulty is making them speak to one another.
Who Was Stewart?
The most tempting question about the community remains the one that cannot yet be answered responsibly.
Who was Stewart?
There is currently no reliable documentary source establishing that Stewart Hill was named for a particular person or family. The early deed books contain numerous landowners, the 1836 district description includes a “Stuarts place,” and later records may reveal Stewart families in the vicinity, but none of that is sufficient by itself to identify a namesake. The source research used for this article likewise found no dependable published explanation for the origin of the name.
That uncertainty should remain part of the history rather than being filled with an attractive guess.
A convincing answer would probably require a chain of title centered on the modern Stewart Hill coordinates, followed by comparison with tax lists, probate files, census schedules, and court cases. Washington County’s Chancery Court records could be particularly useful because property disputes and estate divisions sometimes preserve plats, depositions, descriptions of neighboring landowners, and family relationships that do not survive elsewhere. The Archives maintains extensive Circuit Court, Chancery Court, County Clerk, property, probate, and trustee records that make such a reconstruction possible.
Until that work is completed, the origin of Stewart Hill’s name remains open.
Why Stewart Hill Matters
Stewart Hill is the kind of place that reveals how much Appalachian history survives outside famous battles, courthouses, mansions, and incorporated towns.
Its known nineteenth-century history currently rests on a court case that might otherwise seem insignificant. John Hickman allegedly disrupted a worship gathering in 1885. Because the case survived, so did a description of Stewart Hill as a place where people assembled for religion. Fifty years later federal mapmakers still recognized the name. More than a century after that, Stewart Hill remains on modern maps.
Between those points lies an unfinished local history.
The deeds may identify the families who first occupied the land. Tax lists may show how farms were divided. Census schedules may reconstruct neighborhoods. Church records may reveal the congregation that worshipped at the campground. Newspapers may tell us what happened there on meeting days. The complete Hickman file may even preserve voices from Stewart Hill itself.
That is why small communities deserve careful historical attention. Their stories are rarely absent because nothing happened there. More often, the story has been divided among courthouse boxes, old newspapers, maps, church minutes, tax books, and family papers.
In Stewart Hill, one line from 1885 has already opened the door.
The people who gathered at that camping ground probably never imagined that their worship service, or the disturbance that interrupted it, would become one of the clearest surviving pieces of evidence for their community nearly a century and a half later. Yet that is exactly what happened.
For now, Stewart Hill’s documented story begins there, on a Washington County hillside where people came together to worship and where one court case ensured that the name of their gathering place would survive.
Sources & Further Reading
Washington County Circuit Court. State v. John Hickman. 1885. Circuit Court Case Files, Record Group 3, Box 204, Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, Tennessee. The finding aid identifies the charge as disturbing public worship at “Stewart Hill Camping ground.” URL: Washington County Archives Circuit Court Guide, 1880–1889
Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives. “Record Groups.” Circuit Court Records, Chancery Court Case Files, County Clerk Records, Assessor of Property Records, Trustee Records, and related county collections. Accessed September 12, 2026. URL: Washington County Archives Record Groups
Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives. “Deed Book A.” Washington County, Tennessee. Deeds and land records, 1775–1782. URL: Washington County Deed Book A
Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives. “All County Tax Lists Now Available Online.” Washington County, Tennessee. Surviving loose tax lists, 1778–1882. URL: Washington County Archives Tax Lists
Morris, Eastin. Washington County, Tennessee. 1828. TSLA Map Collection, ID 42186. Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives. URL: 1828 Washington County Map
Tennessee State Library and Archives. Washington County, Tennessee, Showing Civil Districts. 1836. TSLA Map Collection, ID 44030. Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives. URL: 1836 Washington County Civil District Map
U.S. Geological Survey. Greeneville Sheet, Tennessee–North Carolina. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1896. Surveys conducted 1883–84, 1888, and 1891. URL: 1896 Greeneville Sheet PDF
U.S. Geological Survey. “topoView.” Historical Topographic Map Collection. Accessed September 12, 2026. URL: USGS topoView
Keith, Arthur. Greeneville Folio, Tennessee-North Carolina. Geologic Atlas of the United States, Folio 118. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1905. URL: USGS Greeneville Folio
Herald and Tribune. Jonesborough, Tennessee. 1869–present. Library of Congress. The newspaper began August 26, 1869, making its nineteenth-century issues particularly useful for Stewart Hill, camp meetings, court proceedings, and Washington County community news. URL: Herald and Tribune at the Library of Congress
The Comet. Johnson City, Tennessee. 1884–1916. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. URL: The Comet at the Library of Congress
FamilySearch. “Tennessee, Probate Court Books, 1795–1927.” Salt Lake City: FamilySearch. Collection of county probate books including wills, inventories, settlements, guardianships, administrations, and court minutes. URL: Tennessee Probate Court Books
FamilySearch. “Tennessee, Probate Court Files, 1795–1955.” Salt Lake City: FamilySearch. Collection of loose probate files containing wills, deeds, inventories, settlements, bonds, and other estate records. URL: Tennessee Probate Court Files
Cox, Joyce, and W. Eugene Cox, eds. History of Washington County, Tennessee. Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 2001. URL: History of Washington County, Tennessee
Watauga Association of Genealogists. History of Washington County, Tennessee, 1988. Johnson City, TN: Watauga Association of Genealogists, 1988. URL: History of Washington County, Tennessee, 1988
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Washington County Genealogical Fact Sheet.” Nashville: Tennessee Department of State. A bibliography of Washington County histories, church records, tax materials, wills, estate records, and other research collections. URL: Washington County Genealogical Fact Sheet
Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives. “Manuscript Collections.” Jonesborough, Tennessee. Includes family papers, newspapers, church material, and other locally donated collections. URL: Washington County Manuscript Collections
Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives. Mildred Spaulding Kozsuch Collection. Accession 11. Jonesborough, Tennessee. Collection of photographs of historic buildings, structures, and locations throughout Washington County. URL: Mildred Spaulding Kozsuch Collection Finding Aid
Washington County TNGenWeb. “Local Genealogy and History Books.” Accessed September 12, 2026. Bibliography of Washington County books and archival resources, including Samuel Cole Williams’s History of Johnson City and Its Environs. URL: Washington County Local History Bibliography
Author Note: Stewart Hill is a reminder that the history of a small Appalachian community can survive in a single courthouse entry when little else has been written about it. I hope this story encourages readers to look beyond published histories and into the local records where communities like this still wait to be rediscovered.