Capitol for a Day

The legislature's single day in Kingston was the price of Cherokee land. Under the 1805 Tellico treaty the Cherokee ceded the Southwest Point site and thousands of acres on the promise that Kingston would become the state capital, and the 1807 meeting was a technical way of keeping that pledge. The county's own history calls the monument in the center of town a reminder of an infamous event. Kingston is counted as one of Tennessee's four official capitals, alongside Knoxville, Murfreesboro and Nashville.

What the plaque says

Capitol for a Day On Sept. 21, 1807, the State Legislature met on this site, and immediately resolved to "adjourn forthwith from Kingston," to meet in Knoxville on the 23rd. This brief meeting was in technical fulfillment of terms in a treaty with the Cherokees by which the Indians relinquished the site of Southwest Point, ostensibly for locating the capitol at Kingston.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Southwest Point State Historic Park — 1.1 mi
  A reconstructed 1797 federal fort on a knoll at the meeting of the Clinch and Tennessee rivers, headquarters of Cherokee agent Return J. Meigs, a state park since July 2026.
• Historic Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary — 17 mi
  The coal-mining prison opened in 1896 after the Coal Creek War ended convict leasing, where James Earl Ray escaped in 1977, now a tourist site and distillery.
• American Museum of Science and Energy — 18 mi
  The Oak Ridge museum that opened in 1949, when the Manhattan Project city's gates opened, in a town whose Black workers were housed in the Gamble Valley hutments.
• Frozen Head State Park — 18 mi
  A 24,000-acre Cumberland Mountains park around a 3,324-foot peak, made from Brushy Mountain prison lands and the CCC, and home to the Barkley Marathons.

More markers nearby

• For the Union — steps away
• Southwest Point — 0.4 mi
• Honoring the Kingston Coal Ash Cleanup Workers — 3.1 mi
• Harriman: Utopia of Temperance — 4.7 mi