Montgomery County, Tennessee

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

County Seat: Clarksville
Year Organized: 1796
Square Miles: 539

Court House:

P.O. Box 368
County Courthouse
Clarksville, TN 37041-0368

Etymology - Origin of County Name

Named in honor of John Montgomery (?-1794), explorer, Revolutionary War officer, signer of the Cumberland Compact, founder of Clarksville, Nickajack Expedition commander who was killed by Indians in Kentucky.

Demographics:

County QuickFacts: Census Bureau Quick Facts

History of Montgomery County

Created 1796 from Tennessee County; named in honor of John Montgomery (?-1794), explorer, Revolutionary War officer, signer of the Cumberland Compact, founder of Clarksville, Nickajack Expedition commander who was killed by Indians in Kentucky.

Montgomery County was formed in 1796 from Tennessee County
(Acts of Tennessee 1796 [1st Session], Chapter 30).

There were fires at the Montgomery County courthouse in 1878 & 1900, and a tornado in 1999.

Long before the dawn of written history, humans inhabited the lands along the Cumberland and Red Rivers. In successive order Paleoindian, Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian Indians left evidence of their occupancy in this area. In the eighteenth century John Donelson led a flotilla of flatboats on a historic journey on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers through the area. An excerpt from Donelson's journal notes that on April 12, 1780, Moses Renfroe and company took leave of the main party, ascended the Red River and made a short-lived settlement upstream.

By the early 1780s three principal stations had been erected in the Cumberland-Red River area: Prince's Station, established in 1782, near Sulphur Fork and Red River; Neville's Station founded ca. 1784 between Prince's Station and Clarksville; and Clarksville, the only station to become a city, established near the confluence of the Cumberland and Red Rivers. In January 1784 John Montgomery and Martin Armstrong surveyed the present site of Clarksville and proceeded to sell lots. The town, established by North Carolina in 1785, was named for General George Rogers Clark, Indian fighter and Revolutionary War leader.

In 1796 when Tennessee became the sixteenth state, Tennessee County, of which Clarksville was a part, was divided into Montgomery and Robertson Counties, with Clarksville the county seat of Montgomery County. The name Montgomery honored John Montgomery, who was a founder of Clarksville as well as a Revolutionary War leader. By 1797 Clarksville contained thirty houses, a courthouse, and a jail. Cultivation of tobacco in Montgomery County antedates the county's name. Three years after its establishment, Clarksville was declared a tobacco inspection site

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

Geography

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 544 square miles (1,409 km²), of which, 539 square miles (1,397 km²) of it is land and 5 square miles (12 km²) of it (0.84%) is water.

Montgomery County lies in a region of heavy karst topography and has a cave system named Dunbar Cave.

Neighboring Counties:

Christian County, Kentucky (north)
Todd County, Kentucky (northeast)
Robertson County (east)
Cheatham County (southeast)
Dickson County (south)
Houston County (southwest)
Stewart County (west)

Cities and Towns:

- Clarksville (County Seat)

city

Incorporated Area

County Resources:

Enter County Resources and Information Here

County Resource Guide

Counties: US Map

The history of our nation can be seen as a prolonged struggle to define the relative roles and powers of our governments: federal, state, and local. And the names we've given our counties, our most locally based jurisdictions, reflects the "characteristic features of our 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."

Penn Foster High School

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