Monroe County, Tennessee

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

County Seat: Madisonville
Year Organized: 1819
Square Miles: 635

Court House:

105 College Street
County Courthouse
Madisonville, TN 37354-2400

Etymology - Origin of County Name

Named in honor of James Monroe (1758-1831), American Revolutionary War soldier, member of the Continental Congress and the US Senate, governor of Virginia, US secretary of state and of war, fifth US president.

Demographics:

County QuickFacts: Census Bureau Quick Facts

History of Monroe County

Created 1819 from Indian lands; named in honor of James Monroe (1758-1831), American Revolutionary War soldier, member of the Continental Congress and the US Senate, governor of Virginia, US secretary of state and of war, fifth US president.

Monroe County was formed in 1819 from Indian lands (Public Acts of Tennessee 1819, Chapter 7).

There were fires at the Monroe County courthouse in the 1820s and 1960.

Named in honor of President James Monroe, Monroe County is located along the North Carolina border in the southeastern corner of Tennessee. Its beautiful landscape includes the Appalachian Mountains, approximately 145,380 acres of Cherokee National Forest, the Bald River Falls on the Tellico River, and the Little Tennessee River. The modern Cherohala Skyway, a scenic byway, connects Tellico Plains to Robbinsville, North Carolina.

In 1819 the Tennessee General Assembly established the county from lands formerly belonging to the Overhill Cherokees. Despite the destruction of several Cherokee village sites by Tellico Lake in the late 1970s, Monroe County still possesses extremely significant historical sites associated with the Cherokees and the Native American heritage of Tennessee. Toqua was a large Mississippian village along the Little Tennessee River. Great Talequah was a principal Overhill Cherokee town initially visited by South Carolina fur traders in the late seventeenth century. Tanasi was the principal Cherokee political center of the early eighteenth century, while by the mid-1750s Chota emerged as the principal town, remaining so until the treaty era began in the late eighteenth century. Fort Loudoun, the first permanent English settlement in present-day Tennessee, was established along the Little Tennessee River in 1756-57. In 1760 Sequoyah, the originator of the Cherokee syllabary, was born at the nearby village of Tuskegee. Today, the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum documents his contributions to Cherokee culture and history as well as the Cherokee legacy in Tennessee. Another important site concerning early relations with the United States and the Cherokees is Tellico Blockhouse, a former federal agency established in 1794 near the site of Fort Loudoun. The first major gold mining sites in the state also are in Monroe County, where placer mining took place along Coker Creek from 1831 to 1834.

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

Geography

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 653 square miles (1,690 km²), of which, 635 square miles (1,644 km²) of it is land and 18 square miles (46 km²) of it (2.71%) is water.

Neighboring Counties:

Loudon County (north)
Blount County (northeast)
Graham County, North Carolina (east)
Cherokee County, North Carolina (southeast)
Polk County (southwest)
McMinn County (west)

Cities and Towns:

- Madisonville (County Seat)	city	Incorporated Area
- Sweetwater	city	Incorporated Area
- Tellico Plains	town	Incorporated Area
- Vonore	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."