Chilhowie: Valley of Many Deer

The name Chilhowie comes from a Cherokee phrase meaning Valley of Many Deer, and Indigenous people used it for this stretch of the Middle Fork of the Holston River long before any Europeans arrived.

In seventeen forty-eight Colonel James Patton led the first English surveying expedition into the territory. He and Doctor Thomas Walker built a small fort there, which settler Samuel Stalnaker later turned into a tavern called the Town House. Historians note it as the first English-built structure draining to the Mississippi watershed. An invisible continental divide runs just east of here.

The modern town grew around a railroad switching point called Greever's Switch. In the late eighteen fifties, a local resort owner named George Palmer suggested reviving the old Cherokee name for the village, and it stuck. Chilhowie was incorporated by the Smyth County Court in nineteen thirteen with a population of five hundred seventy.