A bicentennial project, this chronicle will provide readers an overview of the long and often colorful past of Tennessee’s oldest county. In addition to numerous photographs, this comprehensive county history includes information on dozens of communities, religious denominations, clubs and organizations, museums, visitor centers and recreational sites, and more than 100 notable people.

When John F. Baker Jr. was in the seventh grade, he saw a photograph of four former slaves in his social studies textbook—two of them were his grandmother's grandparents. He began the lifelong research project that would become The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation, the fruit of more than thirty years of archival and field research and DNA testing spanning 250 years. A descendant of Wessyngton slaves, Baker has written the most accessible and exciting work of African American history since Roots. He has not only written his own family's story but included the history of hundreds of slaves and their descendants now numbering in the thousands throughout the United States. More than one hundred rare photographs and portraits of African Americans who were slaves on the plantation bring this compelling American history to life. Founded in 1796 by Joseph Washington, a distant cousin of America's first president, Wessyngton Plantation covered 15,000 acres and held 274 slaves, whose labor made it the largest tobacco plantation in America. Atypically, the Washingtons sold only two slaves, so the slave families remained intact for generations. Many of their descendants still reside in the area surrounding the plantation. The Washington family owned the plantation until 1983; their family papers, housed at the Tennessee State Library and Archives, include birth registers from 1795 to 1860, letters, diaries, and more. Baker also conducted dozens of interviews—three of his subjects were more than one hundred years old—and discovered caches of historic photographs and paintings. A groundbreaking work of history and a deeply personal journey of discovery, The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation is an uplifting story of survival and family that gives fresh insight into the institution of slavery and its ongoing legacy today.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1882.

Elihu Embree and his family were Quakers who were committed to the cause of abolishing slavery in the American South. Over a few short years, he raised the public consciousness in East Tennessee and achieved wide recognition with the publication ofThe Emancipator, the first periodical in the United States devoted solely to the abolitionist cause. The seven issues of the monthly publication are reproduced here, together with a brief history of Elihu and the Embree family’s migration from France to Washington County, Tennessee.

Covering Bristol's formative years, this is the story of people and events surrounding the rise of this city between two states—the town that Joseph R. Anderson, its founder, wanted to call "Paradise." The book reveals a cross section of Bristol's ancestry, ranging from the noble and well-known to the humble and obscure. Containing a myriad of facts that will be of wide local interest, the narrative offers insight into the human condition as it existed during the last century. Enhanced with numerous old photographs, this carefully researched volume is a definitive reference on Bristol.

Brief family histories of people who lived in Tennessee in the 18th and 19th centuries.