Sullivan County: The Overmountain Men and the Twin Cities

Sullivan County, Tennessee, was established in seventeen seventy-nine, carved out of territory that was then still North Carolina, Tennessee would not become a state until seventeen ninety-six. It is the second oldest county in Tennessee and takes its name from John Sullivan, a general in the Continental Army.

In seventeen eighty, it was from this corner of the Appalachians that the Overmountain Men assembled. These frontier militia fighters from settlements west of the Blue Ridge gathered at Sycamore Shoals in present-day Elizabethton and marched east to confront British Major Patrick Ferguson, who had threatened to lay waste to their communities if they did not submit. On October seventh, seventeen eighty, they defeated and killed Ferguson at the Battle of Kings Mountain in South Carolina, a turning point in the Southern campaign of the Revolution that forced Cornwallis to alter his strategy.

Today the county anchors the twin cities of Bristol, Tennessee and Bristol, Virginia, divided by State Street, where the state line runs down the middle of the road.