Maryville: Named for a Governor's Wife
Near Knoxville, Tennessee
Maryville is the county seat of Blount County, Tennessee, and like many towns in this part of the state it was named not for a landmark but for a person, specifically, Mary Grainger Blount, wife of Territorial Governor William Blount, when the county was laid out in seventeen ninety-five.
The town is best known today as the home of Maryville College, founded in eighteen nineteen by Presbyterian minister Isaac Anderson to train frontier clergy. The college distinguished itself early by admitting African American students and women at a time when most Southern institutions refused both, and it was integrated well before most Southern schools. Sitting at the foot of the Smokies, Maryville today is a gateway community to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and its historic downtown retains much of the character of its nineteenth-century origins.
