Soldiers that had served the new United States during the American Revolution were rewarded with large land grants on the frontier. While evidence gives earlier dates for settlement around the Barton, Panther, and Three Springs areas, as well as the Bend of the Chucky, it is known that by 1782 Hamblen County had its first settlers. By 1785, the population was adequate to form Bent Creek Church. In 1782, Charles McClung had surveyed a road from White's Fort (Knoxville) eastward, mostly over the old Indian trail, to Sinking Creek near Fort Watauga. In time, this became a rough wagon road, and much later, the basic path of Highway II-E. With the formation of Jefferson County in 1792, and Grainger County in 1796, the "Big Road" served as the dividing line between the two counties. This road allowed for rapid development, especially in the Panther Springs and Russellville areas. These two communities would soon be challenged by a third, Morristown.

The arrival, in 1856, of the East Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia Railroad firmly established the area as a population and economic unit. The area's growth and development abruptly stopped with the Civil War's four years of devastation, but restoration was rapid. By the late 1860s, people of the area were focusing their attention on the creation of a new county. Legend gives that Colonels I. P. Haun and Mark M. Murrell, with an unknown third gentle­man, were sitting under a tree across from today's First Baptist Church discussing the problems that they and others were having in transportation, government, and communication, with the county seats being so far distant. Local citizens faced hardship in that the Stagecoach Road, which had earlier been called the Big Road, divided them into either Jefferson or Grainger County. Citizens living south of the road traveled many miles over poor roads to conduct courthouse business in Dandridge. Likewise, those citizens living north of the road faced fording or ferrying across the Holston River to do business in Rutledge, the county seat of Grainger County. The discussion between the three men about these problems led to ideas that became the nucleus for the creation of a new county.

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Information taken from:
Hamblen County, Tennessee: A pictorial History
by Jim Claiborn and Bill Henderson
Copyright 1995