Gordonsville: John Gordon's Town on the Cumberland Plateau

John Gordon arrived on the Cumberland Plateau in eighteen oh one and set up as a merchant in what was then the edge of American settlement. The town that grew around his store took his name, and by the early eighteen hundreds Gordonsville was the largest town south of the Cumberland River in this part of Tennessee.

Smith County itself had only been carved from Sumner County two years earlier, in seventeen ninety-nine, and named for Revolutionary War General Daniel Smith. Gordonsville served as an early commercial hub for the surrounding farm communities, sitting along routes that connected Nashville to the eastern hill country.

The town incorporated officially in nineteen oh nine. Today Gordonsville remains a small community of about thirteen hundred residents in Smith County, holding onto the name of the merchant who staked a claim here when Tennessee's interior was still frontier.