Marion County, Tennessee

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

County Seat: Jasper
Year Organized: 1817
Square Miles: 500

Court House:

P.O. Box 789
County Courthouse
Jasper, TN 37347-0789

Etymology - Origin of County Name

Named in honor of Francis Marion (1732-1795), continental and Revolutionary War officer whose guerilla tactics in the Revolutionary War won him the title "Swamp Fox."

Demographics:

County QuickFacts: Census Bureau Quick Facts

History of Marion County

Created 1817 from Indian lands; named in honor of Francis Marion (1732-1795), continental and Revolutionary War officer whose guerilla tactics in the Revolutionary War won him the title "Swamp Fox."

Marion County was formed in 1817 from Indian lands
(Acts of Tennessee 1817, Chapter 109).

There was a fire at the Marion County courthouse in 1922.

Marion County, located in the southern part of the Cumberland Plateau and the Sequatchie Valley, encompasses five hundred square miles. Established in 1817 out of Cherokee lands, the county was named for General Francis Marion, a Revolutionary War leader in South Carolina. When Tennessee became a state, the Sequatchie Valley was a part of Roane County. The upper end of the valley was established as Bledsoe County in 1807. This county included all of the valley, but treaties with the Cherokees kept white settlers out of the lower end. The first white settlers are thought to have been Amos Griffith and William and James Standifer in 1805, while the area was still part of Roane County.

Native Americans have played an important part in the history of present-day Marion County. They built their towns on the rivers and were living here when the white men came. These newcomers kept the Indian names Tennessee and Sequatchie for this area. Recent research indicates that in 1560 Spanish soldiers from Tristan de Luna's expedition entered the Tennessee River valley in the vicinity of Marion County, visiting the main town of the chiefdom of Napochies. More than a century later, the next Europeans to make contact with the Native Americans found a number of tribes in what later became Tennessee. The Cherokee dominated this area later in the 1700s and early 1800s.

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

Geography

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 512 square miles (1,327 km²), of which, 498 square miles (1,291 km²) of it is land and 14 square miles (36 km²) of it (2.72%) is water.

Neighboring Counties:

Grundy County (north)
Sequatchie County (northeast)
Hamilton County (east)
Dade County, Georgia (southeast)
Jackson County, Alabama (southwest)
Franklin County (west)

Cities and Towns:

- Jasper (County Seat)	town	Incorporated Area
- Kimball	town	Incorporated Area
- New Hope	city	Incorporated Area
- Orme	town	Incorporated Area
- Powells Crossroads	town	Incorporated Area
- South Pittsburg	city	Incorporated Area
- Whitwell	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."