Not very many people pass through Jackson County anymore. However, there was once a time when you HAD to pass through Jackson County to get from one part of Tennessee to another.

 

The first direct road from East to Middle Tennessee crossed the Cumberland River at a small fort called Fort Blount, located in present-day Jackson County. Travelers who came through Fort Blount stayed at an inn run by a man named Sampson Williams. For a few years, Williams' inn was the only place in which a traveller could spend the night indoors between Fort Southwest Point (Kingston) and Bledsoe's Fort (near Gallatin) The community around Williams' inn was called Williamsburg.

 

Among the people who travelled through Fort Blount and who stayed at Williams' inn were Andrew Jackson (on his move to Nashville in 1788) and Louis-Phillipe, the future king of France.

 

So what became of Fort Blount, Williamsburg and the inn?

 

By the late 1790s, there was no longer need for a fort to protect travellers from Native American attacks. Fort Blount was abandoned. Travelers started using a different route to go west that went through Carthage.

 

The Williamsburg community became the county seat when Jackson County was formed in 1805. But a few years later the county seat was moved to a more central location in the county, that became Gainesboro.

 

Today there is nothing left of Fort Blount or Williamsburg, other than a few tombstones and a rural road called "Fort Blount Ferry Road."

 

Here is another story about Jackson County:

 

Back in the 1920s, Polly Williams was the owner of the only hotel in Gainesboro. If you wanted to eat and you did not want to cook for yourself, you had to go to her hotel. At the time, Cordell Hull, who later became the Secretary of State under Franklin Roosevelt, held court in Gainesboro from time to time. The judge would stay at Aunt Polly's hotel whenever he was there. It was also his favorite place to eat.

 

Here is what happened one day, from the book "Steamboating on the Cumberland" by Byrd Douglas:

 

Exasperated with Judge Hull because he did not adjourn court immediately when she rang the dinner bell, (Aunt Polly) came out on the (town) square, rang the bell incessantly and shouted, "Court or no Court, Cordell Hull or no Cordell Hull, you better git over here in a hurry and eat my food while it's hot or you won't eat it at all."

 

Thereafter at the first tap of the bell all court proceedings stopped and court recessed quickly. The judge for once had met his match.

 

Jackson County is also the site of the Flynn's Creek Meteor Crater -- a two-mile wide depression in the ground that scientists believe was caused by a meteor that struck the earth.