Appalachian Community Histories – Walnut Hill, Sullivan County: From the Stagecoach Settlement of Stop to a Bristol-Area Community
Walnut Hill sits in Sullivan County between Bristol and Blountville, along a stretch of East Tennessee where modern highways, residential neighborhoods, old farms, springs, and forgotten pieces of road overlap. It is easy to look at Walnut Hill today and see a suburban community on the edge of Bristol, but some of the oldest surviving history in this part of Sullivan County reaches back to the years before Tennessee existed as a state.
The difficulty is that much of that history was not originally recorded under the name Walnut Hill. To understand the community, a researcher has to look for the Steel and Steele families, the Senekers, Back Creek, the old Bristol and Blountville road, the Great Stage Road, the little settlement once called Stop, and eventually Walnut Hill Presbyterian Church. The National Register nomination for the Steel-Seneker Houses brings many of those pieces together in one small valley along what is now the Highway 126 and Old Stagecoach Road corridor.
Walnut Hill is therefore not simply a twentieth-century residential place that happened to develop outside Bristol. Beneath the modern community is an older landscape of frontier land grants, farms, mills, muddy road crossings, stage traffic, Civil War occupation, family cemeteries, churches, and generations of people who continued living on the same ground while the transportation routes around them changed.
Before Walnut Hill Had the Name
The documented history of the Walnut Hill area begins before Sullivan County itself was organized. Sullivan County was established in 1779 while this part of the Appalachian backcountry still belonged politically to North Carolina, and the upper Holston country was already being divided into farms, roads, settlements, and competing land claims. The surviving Steel-Seneker records place members of the Steel family in the country west of present Bristol during those early settlement years.
This was not an empty landscape waiting for settlement. The broader upper Holston country was Indigenous homeland long before permanent European American settlement expanded through northeastern Tennessee, and the frontier communities that developed here were part of a larger process of colonization and dispossession. The political boundaries themselves were uncertain. The National Register research for the Steel-Seneker property notes that portions of what became northern Sullivan County were at one time claimed by Washington County, Virginia, and that some early land and road records were complicated further by the later State of Franklin controversy.
That unsettled borderland helps explain why the history of Walnut Hill does not begin with a neat town plat or incorporation document. It begins instead with people establishing farms beside water, obtaining grants, surveying roads, and creating routes between scattered settlements.
The Steel Family and the Early Settlement
The Steel-Seneker National Register nomination identifies David, James, Robert, and John Steel among the earliest settlers in this immediate part of Sullivan County. The family name was generally spelled Steel during the earlier period, with some descendants adding the final “e” and using Steele during the late nineteenth century. Members of the family accumulated substantial landholdings, and the nomination estimated that at one point the Steels controlled approximately 2,000 acres in Sullivan County.
John Steel obtained a 600-acre grant along the north fork of Back Creek, adjoining land associated with Robert Steel. In 1787 he sold 243 acres to James Steel Sr., who was already living on the property. A two-story log house associated with that tract was believed by the investigators who prepared the National Register nomination to date to about 1777. That structure became the core of what was later known as the Steel House.
The importance of the property goes beyond the age of one house. The Steel settlement stood near an unusually large concentration of springs. Water determined where people could comfortably live, where livestock could be kept, where travelers could stop, and eventually where machinery could be powered. According to the National Register investigation, the springs became one of the defining physical features of the settlement and helped determine the route of the road through the valley.
In Walnut Hill, water helped create both a farm community and a transportation corridor.
The Road Through the Springs
Road history is central to the story of Walnut Hill.
David Steel appears in early records as more than a landowner. In 1777 he was commissioned by the Washington County, Virginia, court to survey a main road between Steel’s Creek and the Taylor Meeting House, an early landmark west of Blountville. In 1795 Sullivan County selected him as one of twenty-six citizens assigned to examine the road running from the courthouse toward the Virginia line. That route became part of the larger road system remembered as the Great Stage Road.
The road passed directly through the Steel settlement. The National Register nomination places the old route between the Steel House and the Steel-Barker-Seneker House before reaching the Back Creek crossing. Travelers used the corridor between Bristol and Blountville, and it became part of a larger highway and mail route through northeastern Tennessee. The nomination records that the stage route over Back Creek remained in use from before 1790 into the 1920s.
The broader Highway 126 corridor preserves pieces of this much older road world. Tennessee transportation studies have traced portions of the regional route system to eighteenth-century roads that connected the upper Holston settlements and eventually formed parts of the Great Stage Road. Long before automobiles moved between Bristol and Blountville, the same general corridor carried riders, wagons, mail, livestock, and stage traffic through Sullivan County.
For the families living there, however, having an important road beside the farm brought a problem.
Why the Settlement Became Known as Stop
The old name “Stop” may be the most unusual part of Walnut Hill’s documented history.
At the Back Creek crossing, a spring branch followed the road before joining the larger creek. Unlike a normal creek carrying enough stone and sediment to create a firmer bed, the spring kept the ground soft. Heavy wagons and stagecoaches could sink deeply into the mud, particularly when loaded. The National Register investigation recorded repeated attempts to raise the roadbed with material, but the improvements did not always solve the problem.
Travelers sometimes became stuck badly enough that they had little choice but to stop.
That inconvenience apparently became the identity of the settlement. The National Register nomination states that the community became known as “Stop” because vehicles were repeatedly mired at the crossing. It is one of those Appalachian place names born not from a grand founder or political event, but from something ordinary that happened often enough to become part of local speech.
The Steel family adapted to the traffic. Their property contained additional houses that could shelter stranded travelers, along with a large stable where extra horses were available. Travelers also stayed in barns or camped near the springs. The family did not operate a formal inn, according to the nomination, but their property effectively became a place where people could recover from the difficult crossing before continuing toward Bristol, Blountville, Knoxville, or points beyond.
Eventually John Elias Lafayette Seneker and William James Steel rerouted portions of the spring branches so that water crossed the road more directly. Rock and gravel could then be used to raise the roadbed above flood level, improving a crossing that had frustrated travelers for generations.
The old problem had helped give Stop its name, but engineering gradually removed the reason for it.
The Houses That Preserved the Settlement
Three surviving houses became the most important architectural record of this older community.
The Steel House contained the early log structure associated with the 1770s, although generations of additions and remodeling gradually changed its outward appearance. When the property was documented for the National Register during the 1970s, the original log construction survived beneath later materials. The site was also associated with the family’s milling operations and other agricultural buildings.
Across the old road stood the Steel-Barker-Seneker House. It was constructed sometime after the Steel settlement began and before Joel N. Barker acquired the property in 1853. The nomination described its early brick section as one of the oldest surviving brick houses in Sullivan County and recorded that bricks were manufactured on the property. When Barker purchased approximately 140 acres and the house from the Steel estate, the deed described the property as including its improvements and a large stable.
The third major building was the James King Seneker House, a large brick residence built after the Civil War on land that had previously belonged to the Steels and Barker. Together, the three houses showed how construction in the same small valley developed from frontier log architecture through early brick building and into the substantial rural houses of the postwar nineteenth century. That progression was one of the reasons the complex was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.
The federal listing placed the Steel-Seneker Houses about four miles west of Bristol on Tennessee 126.
For Walnut Hill, that designation preserved more than three old homes. It preserved the physical center of an earlier community whose history might otherwise have disappeared beneath road widening, new houses, and the outward growth of Bristol.
The Seneker Family Comes to Sullivan County
The Seneker family added another major layer to the community.
The National Register research traces the family in Sullivan County to Elias Gottlieb Schoeneker, whose surname later became Seneker. He was born in Germany in 1761, came to America during the eighteenth century, spent time in Rockbridge County, Virginia, and moved to Sullivan County in 1792. He married Catherine Susong, whose father Andrew Susong had served in the Revolutionary War, and established a farm west of Bristol along the old Blountville road.
His son James King Seneker eventually acquired former Steel and Barker land in the Stop community. He first lived in a log dwelling near the spring while the large brick house associated with his name was constructed.
The Senekers were therefore not replacing the earlier community as much as joining its history. Their property, marriages, and later descendants became intertwined with the Steels and other families living along the road. J.E.L. Seneker later purchased the Barker property and lived in the older Steel-Barker-Seneker House with his wife, Margaret Dulaney Seneker. The National Register nomination described him as a teacher, a man who spoke several languages, and at one time superintendent of the county schools.
By the late nineteenth century, the landscape around Stop was no longer simply the land of one pioneering family. It had become a network of related farms, houses, businesses, and marriages that connected several generations of Sullivan County residents.
The Civil War at the Springs
The Civil War brought soldiers directly into this rural landscape.
The Steel-Seneker National Register nomination records that Federal troops camped near the springs while operating in the area. The Barker family was living in the older brick house during the war, while James King Seneker’s farm was also reportedly used by Union soldiers.
The account associated with the Seneker House is especially interesting. The nomination states that the large brick residence was constructed after the war using money received as compensation for wartime damage. It reportedly took about three years to build, with bricks made at the site.
The nomination also preserved an important but frustratingly incomplete piece of the building’s history. It states that a Black craftsman constructed the Seneker House and two similar houses in the region, but the document does not identify him by name. That absence is itself revealing. Skilled African American labor is present in the architectural record, even where the individual craftsman’s name was not preserved in the written history used by later researchers.
The house that resulted from that work still connected the postwar landscape to the older stage road, spring, and farms below it.
Farms, Mills, Sawmills, and Blacksmith Work
Walnut Hill’s early history was largely agricultural, but these farms supported far more activity than crops and livestock alone.
The Steel family harnessed the spring water to operate a mill, and by around 1900 the property had developed into a larger milling complex. William James Steel combined farming with several skilled trades. The National Register research describes him operating a steam sawmill and blacksmith shop while also working as a cabinetmaker and boilermaker. He additionally held an interest in a water-powered flour mill on adjoining property.
Older descriptions of the Steel property include barns, a corn crib, shop buildings, sheds, chicken houses, horse stables, and a sawmill near Back Creek. This was the sort of mixed rural economy once common throughout Sullivan County, where a farm could also function as a workshop, milling site, transportation stop, and small industrial operation.
The road made that economy possible. A blacksmith located beside an important route had travelers and local farmers who needed horses shod, tools repaired, and metalwork completed. A mill beside reliable water could serve surrounding farms. A sawmill could turn nearby timber into construction material. The same geography that caused stagecoaches to become stuck in the mud also gave the settlement the water and traffic needed for work.
Walnut Hill grew from this relationship between land and movement.
A Harder Part of the Frontier Story
The Steel family history also intersects with the forced removal of the Cherokee.
The National Register nomination states that David Steel and his cousin John Steel served with the 2nd Regiment, 2nd Brigade of Mounted Volunteer Militia from 1836 to 1838 under Major John R. Dulaney, and identifies the unit’s service with the campaign to remove Cherokee people from their homelands in Tennessee and North Carolina.
That detail belongs in the community’s history because it places the families of Walnut Hill inside one of the defining events of nineteenth-century southern Appalachia. The same frontier settlement process that created farms, roads, mills, and communities for white settlers occurred alongside the loss of Indigenous lands and ultimately the forced removal remembered as the Trail of Tears.
Local history becomes more useful when these connections are kept visible. The Steel family can be remembered as early settlers, road builders, farmers, millers, craftsmen, and soldiers while their participation in Cherokee removal is also preserved as part of the record.
Walnut Hill’s history, like the history of Appalachia itself, is more complicated than a single pioneer story.
The Stop Post Office
As the settlement developed, Stop became more than an informal nickname.
J.E.L. Seneker served as the local postmaster, and a small one-room post office stood beside the road near the Steel-Barker-Seneker House. When the National Register survey was completed in the 1970s, the old Stop post office building still survived, although it had been moved across the road onto Steele property.
The existence of that post office matters because postal identity often gave small rural Appalachian communities a stronger sense of place. A post office did not require a courthouse, incorporated government, or large business district. It required a recognizable community and a place where mail could be distributed.
Stop belonged to that older rural system.
Eventually the Great Stage Road lost its dominance. Highway 11W replaced the route as the principal highway, and the old Back Creek crossing was closed during the 1920s. Automobiles and improved highways reshaped travel across Sullivan County just as stagecoaches and mail routes had done more than a century earlier.
The old settlement name gradually became less important, but the community did not disappear.
It acquired another identity.
From Stop to Walnut Hill
The surviving records do not justify a simple statement that Stop was formally renamed Walnut Hill on a particular date. The safer way to understand the transition is that the historic Stop settlement occupied part of the same landscape that later became associated with Walnut Hill, while the Walnut Hill name emerged more clearly in twentieth-century records.
That distinction matters. Appalachian community names rarely changed as neatly as municipal names. People could use an old postal name, a church name, a road name, a family name, and a newer community name at the same time. The boundaries might be understood locally without ever being drawn on an official map.
By the early twentieth century, however, Walnut Hill had become an established community name between Bristol and Blountville.
One of the strongest pieces of evidence comes from Walnut Hill Presbyterian Church.
Walnut Hill Presbyterian Church and the Community Name
Walnut Hill Presbyterian Church was organized in 1932. Presbyterian historical records list Dan Hamilton Graham as its first pastor, serving from 1932 to 1942 and returning after a short interval to serve again from 1944 to 1958. Later pastors included C. R. Bixler, Kyle Edward Barr, and John A. Myers IV.
The church’s importance goes beyond religious history because it provides documentary evidence for the name Walnut Hill itself.
In 2007, Representative David Davis of Tennessee entered remarks in the Congressional Record recognizing the church’s seventy-fifth anniversary. He described the congregation as beginning in 1932 in the area between Blountville and Bristol and specifically referred to the surrounding place as the Walnut Hill community.
That makes the church one of the clearest anchors for Walnut Hill’s twentieth-century identity.
The Bristol Public Library’s local history collections also preserve a dedicated Walnut Hill Presbyterian Church file among its church histories, celebrations, and news materials. That collection sits alongside city directories, cemetery files, business records, historic building material, and other sources capable of reconstructing the everyday life of the Bristol and Sullivan County area.
As the old Stop post office and stage route passed from daily use, the church helped preserve a different community name.
The Stone Farm and Walnut Hill’s Agricultural Landscape
Agriculture remained visible around Walnut Hill well into the twentieth century.
The University of Tennessee’s history of the Stone family property near Interstate 81 traces the farm back to land once associated with the Seneker family. A. D. Stone inherited a portion of the farm off Walnut Hill Road in 1927. The Stone family raised wheat, oats, corn, and tobacco while keeping hogs, cattle, and chickens. The property also supported a family grocery.
That account helps bridge the gap between the nineteenth-century Steel and Seneker landscape and the Walnut Hill remembered by later residents.
The crops had changed little from the mixed farming practiced elsewhere in Sullivan County. Families still relied on livestock, fields, barns, gardens, and small businesses while Bristol expanded nearby. Walnut Hill remained close enough to the city to participate in its economy without immediately becoming part of its urban landscape.
That rural character survived long enough to leave barns and family land visible beside the interstate age.
The Seneker-Steele Cemetery
Another part of the older community survives in the Seneker-Steele Cemetery on Walnut Hill Road.
A Northeast Tennessee cemetery survey conducted in 2003 documented approximately sixty fieldstones, additional unmarked graves, and identified burials connected with families including Steele, Dishner, Leonard, Nelson, King, and others. Some recorded deaths reached back into the nineteenth century.
Small cemeteries like this are some of the most important documents in Appalachian community history. They show relationships that roads and buildings sometimes hide. A modern subdivision may erase the appearance of an old farm, but a cemetery can preserve the surnames of the people who lived there long after fence lines disappear.
The Seneker-Steele Cemetery also reinforces how deeply the old family landscape extends into modern Walnut Hill. Steel, Steele, Seneker, Dishner, and related names are not simply names appearing in an old historical nomination. Their dead remain buried in the community.
Highway 126 and a Changing Walnut Hill
By the time the Steel-Seneker property was surveyed during the 1970s, change was already visible.
The National Register nomination described the surroundings as still primarily rural but noted that modern houses and stores were beginning to encroach along Highway 126. That sentence captured Walnut Hill at an important transition. The historic valley had survived two centuries of change, but suburban development was moving outward from Bristol and along the transportation routes that had always defined the area.
The irony is that transportation once again transformed the community.
The Great Stage Road had helped create Stop. Later highways diminished the importance of the stage route. Interstate 81 and modern road development made the land between Bristol and Blountville increasingly accessible for commuters, businesses, and residential development.
Walnut Hill did not become a conventional town with a courthouse square or Main Street. It became something common in modern Appalachia, an old rural community increasingly incorporated into the suburban landscape of a nearby city while still keeping its own name.
The old farms were divided. New houses appeared. Traffic followed paved highways instead of muddy stage roads.
Yet portions of the earlier landscape remained.
Walnut Hill as a Modern Community
Today Walnut Hill is officially recognized by the United States Census Bureau as a census-designated place in Sullivan County.
The 2020 Census recorded 2,331 residents and 1,083 housing units within the Walnut Hill CDP. The Census Bureau places the community over roughly 4.1 square miles, giving a statistical boundary to a name that had existed locally long before federal census geography formally defined it.
That modern boundary should not be mistaken for the exact boundary of historic Walnut Hill. Rural communities rarely worked that way. The older landscape spilled outward through farms, roads, cemeteries, churches, and family properties without the sharp lines used by modern census maps.
Still, federal recognition gives Walnut Hill something Stop never possessed in quite the same way: an officially mapped modern identity.
Reading Walnut Hill Through the Landscape
What makes Walnut Hill particularly valuable for Sullivan County history is the amount of the older landscape that can still be reconstructed.
The Steel-Seneker Houses preserve the architecture of several generations. Old Stagecoach Road preserves the memory of an early transportation corridor. Back Creek and the springs explain why settlement began where it did. The Seneker-Steele Cemetery preserves families who lived along Walnut Hill Road. Walnut Hill Presbyterian Church documents the community identity that had emerged by the twentieth century. The Stone farm history shows the persistence of agriculture into the automobile age.
Historic maps, deeds, census schedules, wills, tax records, newspapers, church files, and county court records can fill in the spaces between those landmarks. The Bristol Public Library’s digital archive alone contains an extensive run of city directories beginning in the nineteenth century along with church, cemetery, business, family, and historic building collections.
The Steel-Seneker National Register nomination is particularly important because its investigators were able to record details that might now be considerably harder to recover. In the 1970s they still found traces of the old stage route beyond the paved road, including wheel ruts worn into the landscape near the spring branch and Back Creek crossing.
Those ruts were a physical record of movement.
They marked the place where travelers once struggled through mud, where families helped strangers continue their journeys, and where a settlement acquired the remarkably practical name Stop.
Why Walnut Hill Matters
Walnut Hill matters because it demonstrates how much history can survive beneath an ordinary modern community.
There was no single moment when Walnut Hill was founded. Its history accumulated gradually. Early settlers established farms beside the springs. The Steel family helped survey roads through the upper Holston country. Travelers followed the route between Bristol and Blountville. Mud at Back Creek helped create the settlement called Stop. Mills and blacksmith shops grew beside the farms. The Senekers joined the landscape and built substantial houses. Soldiers occupied the area during the Civil War. A post office served the rural community. Churches and family farms carried local identity into the twentieth century. Highways and residential development then transformed the countryside again.
What appears today as a census-designated community of a few thousand people is therefore the latest layer of a much older place.
The Steel House, Seneker properties, cemetery, springs, church records, and old road show that Walnut Hill belongs to the earliest history of Sullivan County as well as its modern story. The community connects the North Carolina frontier period to Tennessee statehood, the stagecoach era to the automobile, the Civil War to twentieth-century farming, and the old postal settlement of Stop to the Walnut Hill name that survives today.
That is what makes places like Walnut Hill important to Appalachian history. Their past is rarely concentrated in one famous building or one dramatic event. It survives in roads that changed names, houses altered by generations, cemeteries tucked beside newer development, family land divided into smaller parcels, and documentary records filed under names that modern residents may no longer recognize.
In Walnut Hill, the modern road still passes through a landscape shaped by the people who traveled there more than two centuries ago. The stagecoaches are gone, and travelers no longer sink to their axles at Back Creek, but the old community has not entirely disappeared.
It is still there, beneath Walnut Hill.
Sources & Further Reading
Tennessee Historical Commission. “Steel-Seneker Houses.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Sullivan County, Tennessee, 1977. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/67aca41c-d6fa-4721-90d8-4e82edd814b7
National Park Service. “Steel-Seneker Houses, Bristol, Tennessee.” National Register of Historic Places. Listed August 22, 1977. https://www.nps.gov/state/tn/list.htm?program=all
United States Department of the Interior. “National Register of Historic Places: Steel-Seneker Houses, Sullivan County, Tennessee.” Federal Register 42, no. 45. March 8, 1977. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1977-03-08/pdf/FR-1977-03-08.pdf
Tennessee Historical Commission. Tennessee National Register Inventory. Nashville: Tennessee Historical Commission. https://comptroller.aem.tn.extglb.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/historicalcommission/nr/thc_nr-inventory.pdf
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Map of Sullivan County, Tennessee, Showing Civil Districts.” 1836. TSLA Map Collection, Map 1229. https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15138coll23/id/9821/
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Sullivan County.” Genealogical Fact Sheets About Tennessee Counties. Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Sullivan County, Tennessee. Deed Indexes, 1781–1930. Sullivan County Register of Deeds. Microfilmed by Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Sullivan County, Tennessee. Deed Books, 1775–1815 and 1834–1838. Sullivan County Register of Deeds. Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Sullivan County, Tennessee. Wills, 1838–1915. Sullivan County records. Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Sullivan County, Tennessee. Tax Books, 1877–1895. Sullivan County Trustee. Microfilmed by Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/204243
Tennessee Chancery Court, Sullivan County. Enrolling Books and Minutes, 1852–1894. Microfilmed by Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/195886
Tennessee State Library and Archives. Sullivan County, Tennessee, Tombstone Records. Works Progress Administration, 1936. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Tennessee State Library and Archives. Sullivan County, Tennessee, Will Book No. 1, 1830–1870. Works Progress Administration, 1938. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Tennessee State Library and Archives. Sullivan County, Tennessee, Marriage Records, 1863–1893. Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Tennessee State Library and Archives. Sullivan County, Tennessee, Death Records, 1908–1925. Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
National Archives and Records Administration. “Census Records.” Washington, D.C.: National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/census
National Archives and Records Administration. “1950 Census Records.” Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1950
U.S. Geological Survey. Campbell, Marius R. Bristol Folio, Virginia-Tennessee. Geologic Atlas of the United States, Folio 59. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Geological Survey, 1899. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gf59
U.S. Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Maps: Preserving the Past.” Historical Topographic Map Collection. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past
Bristol Public Library. “Digital Archives.” Bristol, Virginia. https://bristol-library.org/digital-archives/
Bristol Public Library. “City Directories.” Bristol, Virginia. https://bristol-library.org/city-directories/
Bristol Public Library. “Genealogy and Local History.” Bristol, Virginia. https://bristol-library.org/reference/genealogylocal-history/
Presbyterian Church in America Historical Center. “PCA Congregations in Tennessee.” St. Louis, Missouri. https://www.pcahistory.org/churches/tennessee.html
Presbyterian Church in America Historical Center. Succession of Pastors by Churches: Tennessee. https://www.pcahistory.org/pca/succession/Tennessee.pdf
Presbyterian Church in America Historical Center. “Paul Rowland Gilchrist Manuscript Collection.” Box 195.3, file 51, “Walnut Hill Presbyterian Church, Bristol, TN, 1980, Correspondence, Bulletins, Notes.” https://www.pcahistory.org/mo/gilchristPR/195.3%20Paul%20Rowland%20Gilchrist%20Manuscript%20Collection.pdf
United States Congress. “Walnut Hill, TN: Walnut Hill Presbyterian Church Anniversary.” Congressional Record. 110th Cong., 1st sess., July 30, 2007, E1651. https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/congressional-record-index/110th-congress/1st-session/walnut-hill-tn/124087
Briggs, Donna, and Bob Shell. “Seneker-Steele Cemetery.” Cemetery Survey Team of Northeast Tennessee. April 25, 2003. Sullivan County TN Genealogy. https://tngenweb.org/sullivan/seneker-steele-cemetery/
University of Tennessee. “Bristol: Interstate 81 Barn.” Everywhere You Look, UT. Knoxville: University of Tennessee. https://everywhere.tennessee.edu/murals/bristol/
Taylor, Oliver. Historic Sullivan: A History of Sullivan County, Tennessee, with Brief Biographies of the Makers of History. Bristol, TN: King Printing Company, 1909. https://www.loc.gov/item/09025291/
Sullivan County Historical Commission and Associates. Historic Sites of Sullivan County. Kingsport, TN: Sullivan County Historical Commission and Associates, 1977. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Sullivan County Historical Society. Foundations of Faith in Sullivan, 1777–1935. Sullivan County, TN: Sullivan County Historical Society, 1986. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Groseclose, C. R., and Martha C. Marshall, eds. Entering a New Century: Sullivan County, Tennessee, 1895–1905. 1986. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Holston Territory Genealogical Society. Families and History of Sullivan County, Tennessee. Vol. 1, 1779–1992. Holston Territory Genealogical Society, 1992. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Holston Territory Genealogical Society. Families and History of Sullivan County, Tennessee. Vol. 2, 1779–2006. Holston Territory Genealogical Society. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Sullivan County Genealogical Society. Sullivan County, Tennessee: Pictorial History. Sullivan County Genealogical Society, 1998. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Phillips, V. N. Between the States: Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia During the Civil War. 1997. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Phillips, V. N. Hidden History of Bristol. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2010. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Spoden, Muriel C. Kingsport Heritage: The Early Years, 1700–1900. 1991. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Porter, Margaret R. Sullivan County, Tennessee. 2003. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Tennis, Dawn. Sullivan County. 2008. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/county/factsullivan.htm
Author Note: Walnut Hill is one of those Appalachian communities whose history survives under several older names, family properties, roads, churches, and cemeteries rather than in one town record. I hope this article helps preserve the connections between modern Walnut Hill, the old settlement of Stop, and the families who lived along this Sullivan County road for generations.