Cleveland, Tennessee

Cleveland, Tennessee was established in eighteen thirty-five, named for Colonel Benjamin Cleveland, a Revolutionary War officer from North Carolina who never actually set foot here. The town sits at the foot of the Blue Ridge in Bradley County, about thirty miles northeast of Chattanooga. In the early twentieth century it became the headquarters of the Church of God, a Pentecostal denomination that now claims millions of members worldwide and still operates its international offices here.

Cleveland found another identity in the twentieth century through furniture and textile manufacturing, and later added chemical companies along the Hiwassee River corridor. Today roughly forty-eight thousand people call it home, and the city markets itself as a gateway between Chattanooga and the Great Smoky Mountains.