Burnside: Where Burnside Began His Tennessee Push

The town now called Burnside had a quieter beginning, first settled around eighteen hundred by pioneers coming down from the Carolinas and Virginia, and originally known as Point Isabel. The Civil War changed everything. In eighteen sixty-three the Union army chose this spot on the Cumberland River as a troop rendezvous and supply base for General Ambrose E.

Burnside's drive into East Tennessee. The camp left such a mark that the town was renamed Burnside in eighteen ninety in his honor. Today Burnside sits at the edge of Lake Cumberland, the massive reservoir that flooded this stretch of the Cumberland River in the early nineteen fifties, giving the old Civil War staging ground a very different waterfront.