Philadelphia, Tennessee

Philadelphia, Tennessee, is a small Loudon County community that dates to eighteen twenty-two, when settlers platted a town and reached for a grand name from scripture, following a tradition common in the early American republic of borrowing the names of cities mentioned in the Book of Revelation. The Philadelphia of ancient Asia Minor was praised in Revelation for keeping the faith, and frontier Tennesseans often named new settlements with that kind of hopeful aspiration. The town remained a modest farming community throughout the nineteenth century, growing cotton and later dairy cattle in the rolling Tennessee Valley terrain. Today Philadelphia has a population of just over six hundred and sits quietly off Interstate Seventy-Five, a blink-and-miss-it reminder that the ambitious biblical name once carried the weight of a whole community's hopes.