Carter County

In the 1760s, the first Europeans crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains from North Carolina and down the Valley of Virginia into the area that today comprises Carter County, Tennessee. They illegally settled the fertile bottomlands, already cleared by Native Americans, along the banks of Watauga River where Elizabethton is now situated. This was in direct defiance of British law forbidding settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains. The settlers became known as the Overmountain Men. In 1775, ...