Chester Inn

William Chester's 1797 inn stood on the Great Stage Road at 116 West Main, and one account calls it the best hotel on the Tennessee frontier. It later passed to the State of Tennessee, and the Heritage Alliance of Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia runs it under an agreement with the Tennessee Historical Commission. Visitors can see the restored upstairs, with a late nineteenth-century parlor and dining room and a former inn room, while a basement exhibit that opened in 2011 tells the town's local history. Hours vary, so check before you go.

What the plaque says

Chester Inn Built in 1797 by Dr. William P. Chester of Lancaster, Pa., it has been continuously occupied as an Inn, a hotel and an apartment house. Among the guests here have been three presidents of the United States, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson, as well as John Sevier, Governor of Franklin and first Governor of Tennessee. President Andrew Jackson held a reception for his friends on the porch of the Inn in the summer of 1832.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jonesborough Historic District — 0.3 mi
  Tennessee's oldest town, chartered in 1779, where Elihu Embree printed The Emancipator in 1820 and a hay wagon by the courthouse started the National Storytelling Festival in 1973.
• Unicoi County Heritage Museum and the Erwin Rail Yard — 10 mi
  A museum in the old fish hatchery superintendent's house in Erwin, a Clinchfield railroad town where the elephant Mary was hanged in 1916 and Black residents were driven out in 1918.
• Rocky Mount Museum — 11 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.
• Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park — 13 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

• Christopher Taylor House — steps away
• First Abolition Publications — steps away
• Alfred Martin Ray, Buffalo Soldier — steps away
• DeVault Tavern — 0.3 mi