A Brief History of Knoxville, Tennessee

The first humans to live in what is now Knoxville were of the Woodland tribe, but by the 18th century, the only native peoples living permanently around what would later be Knoxville were the Cherokee. The Cherokee people called this area Shacomage, or "Place of Blue Smoke.". White's Fort was settled in 1786 by James White, a militia officer during the American Revolutionary War. When William Blount, the territorial governor of the Southwest Territory, moved the territorial capital to White's Fort in 1791, he renamed it Knoxville in honor of Henry Knox, the American Revolutionary War general and Washington's Secretary of War. When Tennessee entered the United States in 1796, Knoxville was the first capital of the state until 1815, when the capital was moved to Murfreesboro.