Jonesborough: Tennessee's Oldest Town

Jonesborough was founded in seventeen seventy-nine by the North Carolina General Assembly, making it the oldest town in Tennessee, seventeen years older than the state itself. It was named for Willie Jones, a North Carolina legislator who supported westward expansion over the Appalachians.

The town played an outsized role in early American history. It briefly served as the capital of the short-lived State of Franklin, a breakaway republic organized by settlers after North Carolina ceded its western lands to the federal government in the seventeen eighties. John Sevier was Franklin's only governor. In eighteen twenty, Jonesborough became home to one of the first abolitionist newspapers in the United States, the Emancipator, published by Elihu Embree. The town's oldest surviving building, the Chester Inn from seventeen ninety-seven, still stands on Main Street.