Carter County: Blue Ridge Headwaters Country
Near Banner Elk, Tennessee
Carter County was established in seventeen ninety-six, the same year Tennessee became a state. It was carved from the eastern end of Washington County and named for Landon Carter, one of the founding members of the Watauga Association, the improvised self-government that frontier settlers created here in seventeen seventy-two.
The county contains some of the most dramatic topography in Tennessee. Roan Mountain, on the Carter County border with North Carolina, reaches six thousand two hundred eighty-five feet and is famous for its Catawba rhododendron balds, which bloom brilliantly in June. Elizabethton is the county seat, sitting at the confluence of the Watauga and Doe rivers at about fifteen hundred feet. The Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park, which marks the September seventeen eighty muster point of the Overmountain Men, is within the county limits.
