Loudon, Tennessee

Loudon sits at a historic crossing of the Tennessee River, where the East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad built a bridge, finished in eighteen fifty-five, to link Knoxville with Chattanooga. The town grew up around that bridge and took its name from Fort Loudoun, the British fortification built upstream in seventeen fifty-six during the French and Indian War. During the Civil War the river crossing here was fiercely contested, and Confederates burned the rail bridge in eighteen sixty-three as Union forces advanced, and the Union rebuilt it the next year.

Today Loudon County has transformed into a popular retirement destination, anchored by the Tellico Village planned community on the shores of Tellico Lake, created when the Tennessee Valley Authority dammed the Little Tennessee River in nineteen seventy-nine. The county seat itself remains a modest river town of about six thousand.