Grundy County, Tennessee

Grundy County History, Geography, Demographics, Cities and Towns, and Education

County Seat: Altamont
Year Organized: 1844
Square Miles: 361

Court House:

PO Box 177
County Courthouse
Altamont, TN 37301-0177

Etymology - Origin of County Name

Named in honor of Felix Grundy (1777- 1840), chief justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court, US congressman and senator from Tennessee, US attorney general under President Van Buren.

Demographics:

County QuickFacts: Census Bureau Quick Facts

History of Grundy County

Created 1844 from Coffee, Warren and Franklin counties; named in honor of Felix Grundy (1777- 1840), chief justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court, US congressman and senator from Tennessee, US attorney general under President Van Buren.

Grundy County was formed in 1844 from Franklin and Warren counties
(Acts of Tennessee 1843-44, Chapter 204).

There were fires at the Grundy County courthouse in 1853 and 1890.

The Tennessee General Assembly established Grundy County in 1844 from parts of Warren, Coffee, and later, Marion Counties. It was named in honor of Felix Grundy, a Virginian who migrated to Tennessee by way of Kentucky. Grundy served in both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate and was attorney general under President Martin Van Buren.

The first County Court was held at Beersheba Springs and then at several individual homes near the present site of Altamont, which was established as the permanent county seat in 1848. The founding of Beersheba Springs and Pelham predated the formation of Grundy County.

Long associated with the economic history of the county, coal was discovered in the area of present-day Tracy City in the 1840s while Ben Wooten's sons were digging out a groundhog from beneath a stump. In 1848 a young Irishman, Leslie Kennedy, followed the construction of the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad in search of moneymaking opportunities. While hiking through the Cumberland Plateau he became interested in coal outcroppings and returned to Nashville to seek financial backing for a coal mining venture. Nashville attorney William N. Bilbo listened to his scheme and bought the Wooten land and vast tracts belonging to the Samuel Barrell heirs, before heading to New York to find developers for the coal lands. Samuel Franklin Tracy and a group of financiers traveled to Tennessee and purchased Bilbo's holdings, which they used to form the Sewanee Mining Company with Tracy as president. When the Sewanee site proved less productive than expected, the mining company extended their tracks ten miles farther to the Wooten site, which became the town of Tracy City. The first coal was shipped from the site on November 8, 1858.

Find more from the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture: GRUNDY COUNTY

Geography

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 361 square miles (935 km²), of which, 361 square miles (934 km²) of it is land and 1 square miles (2 km²) of it (0.16%) is water

Neighboring Counties:

Warren County (north)
Sequatchie County (east)
Marion County (south)
Franklin County (southwest)
Coffee County (west)

Cities and Towns:

- Altamont (County Seat)	town	Incorporated Area
- Beersheba Springs	town	Incorporated Area
- Coalmont	city	Incorporated Area
- Gruetli-Laager	city	Incorporated Area
- Monteagle	town	Incorporated Area
- Palmer	town	Incorporated Area
- Tracy City	town	Incorporated Area

County Resources:

Enter County Resources and Information Here

County Resources

The history of our nation was a prolonged struggle to define the relative roles and powers of our governments: federal, state, and local. And the names given the counties, our most locally based jurisdictions, reflects the "characteristic features of this country!"

But age, size and colorful names of our counties isn't the only reason to explore counties' role in American history, or the history of county government itself. In fact, the story of county government reflects the larger meanings of American history.

Today's counties are the most flexible, locally responsive and creative governments in the US. They are the most diverse, varying in size, population, geography, and governmental structure. In their politics and policies, they express a 1990's political slogan "Think globally, act locally."