Union City: The Name Came From the Crossroads

Union City, Tennessee got its name from a railroad intersection, and its early history is inseparable from the iron rails that crossed here.

General George Gibbs laid out the town in eighteen fifty-four on land he had received in eighteen twenty-nine. The name Union City referred to the union of two railroad lines at this point: the Nashville and Northwestern and the Mobile and Ohio. Where two major lines crossed in the antebellum South, a commercial center tended to grow, and Union City became that center for Obion County.

During the Civil War, Confederate forces established Camp Brown just north of town, housing up to ten thousand soldiers before General Polk's move into Kentucky in eighteen sixty-one. In a later engagement, Confederate cavalry under Nathan Bedford Forrest used a log painted black to simulate a cannon and bluffed the Union garrison into surrendering after its defenders had beaten back earlier attacks. After the war the rail lines made Union City a shipping hub for the region's furniture factories and sawmills, and it has served as Obion County's commercial core ever since.