Sevierville History

The river bottoms where Sevierville sits were home to native people long before the Cherokee. The McMahan Indian Mound, just above the meeting of the West Fork and the Little Pigeon, dates back as early as about 200 A.D. It was first excavated in 1881, and its artifacts were sent to the Smithsonian. When Spanish explorers came through in the 1500s, the area belonged to a chiefdom called Chiaha.

By the late 1600s the Cherokee, who called themselves the Principal People, were the leading nation of the region. They used the Sevier County area mostly as hunting ground. Two branches of the Great Indian Warpath crossed the county. Traders from Virginia followed these paths into the Cherokee towns, and in the 1780s settlers used the same routes to move into valleys like the forks. Sevierville’s first courthouse, fort and tavern was the home of Isaac Thomas, an Indian trader.

By 1850 Sevierville had a brick courthouse. In March 1856 a fire swept the town square, destroying the courthouse, almost all of the county’s court records, and much of the square around it. The town rebuilt. The courthouse standing today is the county’s fifth.

In 1895 the county chose a site one block south of the old square for a new courthouse and awarded the building contract that July. The building was finished on November 10, 1896, the same year Tennessee turned 100. Designed by the McDonald brothers, it was built with bricks made by Isaac Dockery, a Black brickmason from Sevierville. Some bricks still carry his ID mark. The tower rises about 130 feet and holds a four-sided Seth Thomas clock.

New Salem Baptist Church was built in 1886 as a Union Church by and for Black congregations, with brickwork by Isaac Dockery. Visit Sevierville calls it the oldest surviving building in Sevierville and the only surviving historic African American church in the county. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

When the new courthouse went up one block south of the old square, businesses followed it. Most of the 24 buildings in today’s Sevierville Commercial Historic District, along Bruce Street, Court Avenue and Commerce Street, were built between 1900 and 1936. Floods on the Little Pigeon helped decide where people could build. The district joined the National Register on October 23, 1986.

East of town, the Harrisburg Covered Bridge has crossed the Little Pigeon River since 1875, when it replaced a bridge lost to a flood that year. It was rebuilt by the Early brothers, is 83 feet long, and is one of only four historic covered bridges left in Tennessee. In 1942 TVA built Douglas Dam on the French Broad, relocating 525 families.