Lewis County, Tennessee

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

County Seat: Hohenwald
Year Organized: 1843
Square Miles: 282

Court House:

Park Avenue, North
County Courthouse
Hohenwald, TN 38462

Etymology - Origin of County Name

Named in honor of Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809), appointee of President Jefferson to explore the Louisiana Purchase in 1804 who died violently on the Natchez Trace.

Demographics:

County QuickFacts: Census Bureau Quick Facts

History of Lewis County

Created 1843 from Hickman, Lawrence, Maury and Wayne counties; named in honor of Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809), appointee of President Jefferson to explore the Louisiana Purchase in 1804 who died violently on the Natchez Trace.

Lewis County was formed in 1843 from Hickman, Lawrence, Maury and Wayne counties. (Acts of Tennessee 1843, Chapter 38).

Lewis County was established in 1843 from parts of Perry, Hickman, Maury, Lawrence, and Wayne Counties and named in honor of Meriwether Lewis, the famed explorer of the Lewis and Clark expedition, who died within the county's boundaries. The first courts were held in the home of John Blackburn on Swan Creek. The first county seat was located there in 1846 and named Gordon in honor of Powhattan Gordon of nearby Columbia. Two years later the county seat moved to Newburg, a fifty-acre tract donated by Hugh B. Venable and Robert O. Smith, which stood on the dividing ridge between Big and Little Swan Creeks. Demands for a more central location for the county seat, coupled with the economic decline of Newburg, led officials to move the seat of government to Hohenwald in 1897; the town received its charter in 1923.

Located on the western Highland Rim, Lewis County's thin and flinty soil has not been conducive to agriculture. Corn, wheat, oats, grasses, and especially peanuts constituted the principal crops. The wealth of the county consisted of iron ore deposits, primarily in the southern part of the county. In 1834 Napier and Catron erected Napier Furnace, which produced approximately ten tons of pig iron per day and employed twenty-five laborers. By 1880 it had ceased operations. The Rockdale Cotton Factory opened in 1825. Producing cotton yarn and employing mostly female workers, the factory operated until late in the Civil War. Other antebellum manufacturing included sawmills, gristmills, and barrel making.

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

Geography

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 282 square miles (732 km²), of which, 282 square miles (731 km²) of it is land and 0 square miles (1 km²) of it (0.13%) is water.

Neighboring Counties:

Hickman County (north)
Maury County (east)
Lawrence County (south)
Wayne County (southwest)
Perry County (west)

Cities and Towns:

- Hohenwald (County Seat)

city

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."