Jonesborough

Tennessee

The first newspaper in the United States dedicated to the abolition of slavery was not published in Boston or Philadelphia, but in a small town on the western slopes of the Appalachian Mountains. On April 30, 1820, Elihu Embree printed the inaugural issue of The Emancipator in Jonesborough, Tennessee, a frontier settlement that had been the capital of a short-lived, separatist state just forty years earlier.

Jonesborough occupies a series of low, rolling ridges in the valley of the Nolichucky River, a tributary of the French Broad. The town’s elevation is approximately 1,700 feet above sea level. The underlying geology is limestone and shale of the Knox Group, deposited over 400 million years ago in a shallow sea. This bedrock creates a karst landscape to the west, characterized by sinkholes and caves, but in the immediate vicinity of the town, it weathers into fertile, well-drained soil. The primary geographic logic of the settlement is not a river crossing or a mineral deposit, but a political line. Jonesborough was founded in 1779 as the county seat of Washington County, North Carolina, a jurisdiction that stretched from the crest of the Blue Ridge to the Mississippi River. It was placed here, not at a pre-existing Cherokee town or a natural ford, because it was a central point for the scattered, illegal settlements that had spilled over the mountains into Cherokee territory. The land proposed a broad, arable valley; the first European-American settlers responded by claiming it for agriculture and governance, immediately placing themselves in conflict with the people who had long used it as a hunting ground.

For centuries before European contact, the region was part of the Cherokee heartland, known as the Overhill Towns territory. The Cherokee name for the area is not recorded in primary sources specifically for the Jonesborough site, but the broader river valley was a vital corridor. The Nolichucky, whose name derives from the Cherokee Na’na-tlu gun’yi, meaning “Spruce-Tree Place,” flowed past major settlements like Tuskegee near present-day Vonore. The land here was not a permanent town site but a rich hunting ground within the Cherokee domain, part of a landscape imbued with spiritual significance. Streams, caves, and unusual rock formations were often understood as homes to the Yunwi Tsunsdi’, or “Little People,” spiritual beings who could be mischievous or helpful. The specific ridge where Jonesborough would be built was a piece of this animate world, a place defined by its relationship to the river and the mountains, not by property lines.

That changed with the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals in 1775, when the Transylvania Company, led by Richard Henderson, purchased a vast tract of land between the Kentucky and Cumberland Rivers from a faction of Cherokee leaders. The deal was illegal under British law and contested by most Cherokee, but it opened the floodgates for settlement. Pioneers like John Sevier and James Robertson established farms along the Watauga River, forming the semi-autonomous Watauga Association. In 1779, the North Carolina legislature formalized its western holdings by creating Washington County and authorizing a courthouse “at the most convenient place.” The commissioners chose a spot on a ridge above a spring, naming it for Willie Jones, a North Carolina legislator who supported western interests. The town plat was a simple grid of four streets, with the public square reserved for the log courthouse. This was a deliberate act of state-making in contested territory. The Cherokee, allied with the British during the Revolutionary War, attacked these settlements repeatedly. The war’s pivotal southern battle at Kings Mountain in 1780 was fought by Overmountain Men mustered from this frontier, including Jonesborough. Their victory secured the region for the American cause but intensified the displacement of the Cherokee.

From 1784 to 1788, Jonesborough became the de facto capital of the State of Franklin, a territory that attempted to secede from North Carolina. The movement was born from geographic isolation and a lack of protection; the mountains created a political as well as a physical barrier. John Sevier was elected governor, and the legislature met in Jonesborough’s courthouse. The “state” issued its own currency, passed laws, and conducted a doomed diplomacy seeking recognition from Congress. The experiment collapsed due to internal divisions and military pressure from North Carolina, but it demonstrated the region’s fierce independence. This political ferment existed alongside a brutal contradiction. The same frontier that championed liberty from distant government was built on land taken by force and was deeply invested in the enslavement of African people. By 1790, enslaved individuals comprised nearly 13% of Washington County’s population. Jonesborough’s early economy was agricultural, based on tobacco, corn, and wheat grown in the valley soils, and its legal archives are filled with deeds, wills, and court cases involving human property.

It was in this environment that Elihu Embree, a Quaker and a former iron manufacturer who had manumitted his own enslaved workers, chose to publish The Emancipator. The paper was a monthly, with a subscription price of one dollar per year. It reprinted abolitionist speeches, published anti-slavery poetry, and argued for gradual emancipation. Embree died of a fever in December 1820, and the paper ceased after only seven issues. Its brief existence in a slaveholding state’s oldest town highlights the complex ideological currents of the early Appalachian South. The town’s other early claim to fame was literary. In 1842, a young lawyer named Thomas A. R. Nelson, who would later become a prominent Unionist congressman, published a satirical pamphlet in Jonesborough titled “The Diary of a Public Man.” It lampooned local politicians and is considered one of the earliest examples of Appalachian humor writing.

The arrival of the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad in 1858, with a depot just east of town, shifted the region’s economic axis. The railroad followed the natural valley corridors, and towns directly on the line, like Johnson City, grew rapidly. Jonesborough, slightly off the main trunk, settled into a quieter role as a market and administrative center. Its architecture from the late 19th and early 20th centuries reflects this steady, modest prosperity: two-story brick commercial buildings with Italianate details on Main Street, and large frame houses with wraparound porches on residential streets. The land continued to dictate local enterprise. The surrounding county remained predominantly agricultural, with dairy farming becoming significant in the early 20th century. Timber from the wooded ridges provided another resource. The town itself never industrialized on a large scale; it was a hub for the goods produced by the land around it.

This trajectory preserved the town’s historic core in a way that more industrialized centers were not. By the 1960s, Jonesborough’s downtown was economically dormant, its 18th and 19th-century buildings largely intact but underused. In 1973, a high school teacher named Jimmy Neil Smith organized the first National Storytelling Festival on the town’s courthouse lawn. The event featured three storytellers and an audience of about sixty people seated on bales of hay. The festival’s success was a direct response to the place. The scale was human, the setting was authentically historic, and the Appalachian tradition of oral narrative found a physical home. The festival grew exponentially, leading to the establishment of the International Storytelling Center in a renovated 1910 schoolhouse on Main Street in 1998. This transformed the town’s economy and identity from a forgotten seat of government into a global center for an ancient art form, all while requiring minimal alteration to the historic landscape that made it possible.

Today, Jonesborough is the oldest incorporated town in Tennessee, with a population of approximately 5,800. The historic district contains over 200 structures, including the 1830 Chester Inn, the state’s oldest continuously operated hotel building, and the 1910 Jonesborough-Washington County History Museum. The town’s layout remains the original 1779 grid, with the courthouse square at its center. The surrounding county’s economy is a mix of agriculture, light manufacturing, and services, with the storytelling industry providing a distinct cultural and tourism sector. The physical constraints of the ridge-and-valley topography continue to direct growth and infrastructure along predictable lines.

The Cherokee never built a town on this particular ridge, but they had a name for the river that carved the valley below. The settlers who took the land built a courthouse and named it for a politician in a distant capital. One of those settlers’ descendants then used the town’s printing press to argue for the dismantling of the very system the courthouse often upheld. Centuries later, people return to that same square not for politics or commerce, but to listen. The land proposed a spring on a ridge, a place to stop. The response has been a continuous, contradictory, and evolving conversation about law, liberty, memory, and the power of a story told out loud.