Knoxville, Tennessee: Named for Washington's Secretary of War

Tennessee’s first newspaper was called The Knoxville Gazette, but its first issues came off a press in Rogersville, before Knoxville was laid out. The town it was waiting for got its name from Maj. Gen. Henry Knox, President Washington’s secretary of war.

A newspaper ahead of its town

J. G. M. Ramsey, who wrote the big 1853 history of early Tennessee, marks November 5, 1791, as the day the first newspaper appeared inside the future state’s borders. The printer was George Roulstone, and he set up in Rogersville, in Hawkins County. “Though at first published at Rogersville,” Ramsey writes, the paper “was called ‘The Knoxville Gazette,’ as it was intended to be issued at Knoxville, where Governor Blount had determined to fix the seat of his government.” In February of the next year, he says, Knoxville was laid off, and the Gazette moved there soon after. John Haywood’s 1823 history says the same thing more bluntly: the first number of the Knoxville Gazette came out at Rogersville on November 5, 1791, “though Knoxville was not laid off till February, 1792.”

So for a few months, you could read a Knoxville paper that wasn’t printed in Knoxville. The name was settled before the town was.

James White’s fort

The ground had a different name before that. Ramsey says James White and his old comrade James Conner “were the first to disturb the virgin soil, on which the future Knoxville was to be built.” White’s cabin became one corner of a stockade called White’s Fort, and the fort became a gathering point for settlers, rangers and scouts. Goodspeed’s 1887 county history tells it the same way: White and Conner made the first settlement on the site, and “White’s Fort was soon formed here.”

Then William Blount, governor of the territory, picked the spot for his capital. In Ramsey’s account, White, as owner of the land, “laid off a town, consisting of the necessary streets and sixty-four lots. In honour of Major-General Henry Knox, the then Secretary of War, under President Washington, the new town was called Knoxville.” Some lots sold in 1791, he says, but real building didn’t start until February 1792. Goodspeed’s version adds that the Treaty of Holston was held there in 1791, when “there were no houses at this time but shanties.” Haywood puts the treaty with the Cherokees on July 2, 1791, on the same ground where the town was laid off.

A name that traveled

The county around the city carries Knox’s name too: Ramsey says Blount set up Knox County by ordinance in June 1792. Henry Gannett’s 1905 list of place names counts Knoxvilles in Georgia, New York and Tennessee named for General Knox. He adds one more that you might not expect. Knoxville, Mississippi, he says, was “named by the first settlers from the city in Tennessee,” which makes it a namesake of a namesake.

The little capital kept its job for a while. The federal place-names record says Knoxville was the state capital from 1796 to 1812 and again from 1817 to 1818, and Haywood says the convention that formed “a free and independent State, by the name of the State of Tennessee” met there from January 11, 1796. That story is in how Tennessee got its name.

Sources & further reading

• J. G. M. Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century (1853). James White and James Conner on the site of “the future Knoxville” and White’s Fort (p. 374); the first newspaper, November 5, 1791, printed at Rogersville as “The Knoxville Gazette”; Knoxville laid off in February of the next year; the 64 lots named “in honour of Major-General Henry Knox”; lots sold in 1791 and building from February 1792; Knox County set up in June (pp. 557–558).
• Goodspeed Publishing Co., History of Tennessee, East Tennessee edition (1887), Knox County sketch. White and Conner, White’s Fort, Knoxville as seat of the territorial government in 1791, the Treaty of Holston “here” among “shanties,” the town laid off in 1792 and named “in honor of Gen. Henry Knox, Secretary of War.”
• John Haywood, The Civil and Political History of the State of Tennessee (1823; 1891 reprint). The first number of the Knoxville Gazette at Rogersville on November 5, 1791, “though Knoxville was not laid off till February, 1792,” on the ground of the Cherokee treaty of July 2, 1791 (p. 272); the convention at Knoxville from January 11, 1796, and the State “by the name of the State of Tennessee” (pp. 484–485).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States, 2nd ed. (U.S. Geological Survey, 1905), p. 177. Knoxvilles in Georgia, New York and Tennessee named for Gen. Henry Knox, and Knoxville, Mississippi, named by settlers from the Tennessee city.
• GNIS feature 1648562 (U.S. Geological Survey). Knoxville as state capital from 1796 to 1812 and 1817 to 1818.