Kingston: Capital for a Day, and the Disaster That Followed

Kingston, Tennessee holds one of the stranger distinctions in American political history: it was the state capital for a single day.

The story begins with a land deal. In the Tellico Treaty of eighteen oh five, Cherokee leaders ceded millions of acres of territory in exchange for several provisions, one of which specified that the Tennessee capital would be moved from Knoxville to Kingston. The legislature dutifully complied. On September twenty-first, eighteen oh seven, the General Assembly convened in Kingston. The terms of the treaty were technically fulfilled. The very same day, the legislators voted to move the capital back to Knoxville. Kingston's moment of glory lasted a few hours.

The town survived that indignity and became the seat of Roane County, a quiet river community at the confluence of the Tennessee and Clinch Rivers. It remained quiet until the morning of December twenty-second, two thousand eight.

At approximately one in the morning, a retaining dike at the nearby Tennessee Valley Authority Kingston Fossil Plant gave way. A billion gallons of coal ash slurry, the toxic residue of decades of coal combustion, surged across three hundred acres of land and into the Emory River. It was the largest industrial spill in American history.

The cleanup took six years, cost one point one billion dollars, and required six point seven million hours of labor. The long-term toll on the cleanup workers themselves became another tragedy: dozens of the men who handled that toxic ash developed cancer and other illnesses in the years that followed, and more than thirty had died within a decade of the spill.

Kingston spent a day as Tennessee's capital and two hundred years as a footnote. Then, in two thousand eight, the rest of the country finally learned where it was.