Pickett County, Tennessee

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

County Seat: Byrdstown
Year Organized: 1879
Square Miles: 163

Court House:

P.O. Box 280
County Courthouse
Byrdstown, TN 38549-0280

Etymology - Origin of County Name

Named in honor of Howell L. Pickett (1847-after 1909), attorney and member of Tennessee state house from Wilson County who moved to Arizona and continued his career in law and politics.

Demographics:

County QuickFacts: Census Bureau Quick Facts

History of Pickett County

Created 1879 from Fentress and Overton counties; named in honor of Howell L. Pickett (1847-after 1909), attorney and member of Tennessee state house from Wilson County who moved to Arizona and continued his career in law and politics.

Pickett County was formed in 1879 from Fentress and Overton counties (Acts of Tennessee 1879, Chapter 34).

There was a fire at the Pickett County courthouse in 1934.

Located along Tennessee's northern border with Kentucky, Pickett County lies in the picturesque Cumberland Plateau region of upper Middle Tennessee. In 1878 Lem Wright and Howell L. Pickett, legislators from Wilson County, led the move to organize Pickett County. The county was established in 1879 from sections of Overton and Fentress Counties.

The county seat is Byrdstown, where the Pickett County Courthouse, designed in Crab Orchard stone by the Nashville firm of Marr and Holman, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Originally the county seat was to be named Wrightsville after Lem Wright, but at the last minute support went to Colonel Richard Byrd of Kingston, and the county seat was named Byrdstown. During the Civil War, Byrd had struggled to keep Tennessee in the Union and when Tennessee seceded, he joined the Union army. Byrdstown was incorporated in 1917.

The county encompasses 240 square miles with the Obey and Wolf Rivers flowing through the western half of the county. Though hilly, the landscape has supported farming with corn, wheat, oats, grass, and livestock as the primary products. In 1943 Pickett County lost most of its best farmland, as well as a fourth of its population, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Obey River, creating the Dale Hollow Reservoir. The county continues to be rather sparsely populated, its 2000 population numbering 4,945 residents.

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

Geography

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 175 square miles (452 km²), of which, 163 square miles (422 km²) of it is land and 12 square miles (30 km²) of it (6.68%) is water.

Neighboring Counties:

Wayne County, Kentucky (northeast)
Scott County (east)
Fentress County (southeast)
Overton County (southwest)
Clay County (west)
Clinton County, Kentucky (northeast)

Cities and Towns:

- Byrdstown (County Seat)

town

Incorporated Area

County Resources:

Enter County Resources and Information Here

County Resource Guide

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."

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