Battle of Blountville

Union Col. John W. Foster's cavalry and artillery attacked at noon, and for four hours the fight was mostly a shelling of the county seat, followed by a flanking movement that forced James E. Carter's Confederates out. Historians count about 27 Union and 165 Confederate casualties. The Sullivan County courthouse was gutted by fire during the bombardment and rebuilt in 1866. The battle was the first step in Burnside's effort to make Maj. Gen. Sam Jones retire from East Tennessee. Maps and some old reports spell the town Blountsville, a spelling modern accounts treat as an error.

What the plaque says

Battle of Blountville Here on September 22, 1863, Confederate forces commanded by Colonel James E. Carter fought a Union brigade led by John W. Foster. After delaying the Union advance for more than four hours, Carter withdrew toward Zollicoffer, now known as Bluff City. During the battle, artillery shells set fire to the courthouse and much of the town burned. Skirmishing continued until news of the bloody battle at Chickamauga reached General Ambrose Burnside, and Union General Henry Wager Halleck ordered a retreat toward Knoxville.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rocky Mount Museum — 8.8 mi
  William Cobb's log house at Piney Flats, where Governor William Blount ran the Southwest Territory from 1790 to 1792, now a living-history museum set in 1791 with a reconstructed cabin for the enslaved.
• Warriors' Path State Park — 9.1 mi
  A state park around Fort Patrick Henry Lake on the Holston at Kingsport, named for the Great Indian Warpath, with an unfinished late-1800s railroad grade, mountain-bike trails and a marina.
• Bristol's State Street and the 1927 Sessions — 9.1 mi
  The Tennessee side of the street that is also the state line, where producer Ralph Peer recorded 76 songs in the summer of 1927, with the Birthplace of Country Music Museum a few blocks away in Virginia.
• Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park — 14 mi
  A shoal on the Watauga River where the Transylvania Company bought about 20 million acres from the Cherokee in March 1775, Dragging Canoe refused, and the Overmountain Men mustered in 1780.

More markers nearby

• John Isaac Cox — 3.6 mi
• King College — 5.8 mi
• Tennessee Ernie Ford's Birthplace — 8.3 mi
• The Bristol Municipal Stadium — 8.7 mi