Roane County Courthouse: A Union County in a Confederate State

The Old Roane County Courthouse in Kingston is one of six antebellum courthouses still standing in Tennessee, a brick building constructed in the mid eighteen fifties by architect Augustus Fisher, using bricks made on site by enslaved workers. During the Civil War, the courthouse was alternately occupied by Confederate and Union forces, both of whom used it as a hospital and an observation post. Graffiti scratched into its interior walls by Civil War soldiers is still visible today.

Roane County itself was one of East Tennessee's strongly pro-Union counties: when Tennessee voted on secession in June eighteen sixty-one, Roane County voted fifteen hundred sixty-eight to four hundred fifty-four to remain in the Union. The building served as the active courthouse until nineteen seventy-four and is now the Roane County Museum of History.