This park commemorates the oldest home in Knoxville TN.
For those who don't know, I live in a converted campervan and travel around the country, posting photo diaries of places that I visit. I am currently in Tennessee.
In 1783, at the end of the Revolutionary War, Captain James White of the North Carolina militia was, like most of George Washington’s other officers, rewarded by Congress with a land grant of 1000 acres. White took his land in a remote site in Tennessee at the forks of the French Broad and Holston Rivers, and in 1786 he built himself a two-story log cabin there.
White maintained good relations with the Cherokee Nation which lived in the area. He enclosed his ranch with a wooden fence and allowed neighboring Natives to pasture their livestock there, and traded corn and other food which he grew on his farm. Eventually other settlers joined him, with White selling them parcels of his land for farmsteads, and by 1791 there were around a hundred Tennesseans living peacefully with the Cherokee. The village became known as White’s Fort.
That same year, William Blount, the Governor of the Southwest Territory, which included modern-day East Tennessee, moved the territorial capitol to White’s Fort, and the little town was renamed Knoxville, after President Washington’s Secretary of War.
Two years later, White moved to another ranch a few miles further up the river. When the War of 1812 broke out, he rejoined the militia and was eventually promoted to General. Returning to Knoxville after the War, he donated land for Blount College, the University of Tennessee, and the First Presbyterian Church, where he was buried after his death in 1823.
White’s Fort was eventually bought by the Kennedy family, who expanded it in the 1830s and used the original cabin as the kitchen. In 1906, the Kennedy house was demolished for a new building, but a resident named Isaiah Ford bought the dismantled lumber and used it for his own house in South Knoxville.
When the City Association of Women’s Clubs discovered the existence of the old cabin timbers in the 1950s, they launched a fundraising effort to purchase the still-standing Ford house and use the lumber to rebuild the James White Fort on a parcel of land close to its original location. White’s Fort Park opened in 1970. It features the original cabin plus a number of other buildings inside the fence, authentic period artifacts on display, as well as occasional re-enactors and living-history exhibits.
Some photos from a visit.