Amis House

Amis was elected Hawkins County's first state senator in North Carolina's legislature, and in 1789 he presented the petition that created Rogersville; the General Assembly approved it on November 7. Commissioners laid the town out in half-acre lots with streets and ground reserved for public buildings. Main Street followed the Great Wilderness Road, which carried settlers toward Bean Station, the Cumberland Gap and Kentucky, so travelers passed through the new town on their way west.

What the plaque says

Amis House About 1 1/2 miles south is the stone house build by Thomas Amis between 1781 and 1783. He was Captain and Commissary of North Carolina troops in the Revolution; and original member of the Society of the Cincinnati, and legislator. He established here a distillery, forge, store and tavern, at which many notables stopped.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rogersville Historic District — 1.1 mi
  Tennessee's first newspaper was printed in this Hawkins County seat in 1791, and Swift Memorial College, founded in 1883, educated Black students after the state's 1901 law forced Maryville College to expel them.
• Vardy Community Museum — 16 mi
  A 1899 Presbyterian church in Hancock County, now a museum, beside the Mahala Mullins cabin and the ruins of the Vardy school that educated the Melungeon children of Newman's Ridge.
• Andrew Johnson National Historic Site — 20 mi
  The tailor shop, homestead and grave of the seventeenth president in Greeneville, where the people he enslaved are named and where the Eighth of August emancipation celebration took root.
• Long Island of the Holston — 24 mi
  A four-mile island in the Holston at Kingsport, Cherokee council and treaty ground, the start of Boone's Wilderness Road in 1775, and in part returned to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in 1976.

More markers nearby

• Tennessee's First Newspaper — 1.0 mi
• Alexander Peter Stewart — 1.0 mi
• Swift Memorial College / St. Marks Presbyterian Church — 1.2 mi
• Thomas Gibbons — 4.4 mi