East Tennessee & Western North Carolina (ET & WNC) Depot

The Tweetsie line was chartered in 1866 to reach the iron mines at Cranberry, North Carolina, and its first 14.1 miles, from Johnson City through Elizabethton to Hampton, opened on August 22, 1881. Track reached Cranberry on July 3, 1882. A flood in 1940 wrecked the extension toward Boone, which regulators let go in 1941, and the narrow gauge ended on October 16, 1950. Locomotive No. 12 survives at the Tweetsie Railroad park, and after standard-gauge trains stopped in 2003 the rails were pulled in 2012 for the Tweetsie Trail.

What the plaque says

East Tennessee & Western North Carolina (ET & WMC) Depot Constructed in 1891 as a union depot for the East Tennessee & Western North Carolina Railroad (nicknamed "Tweetsie") and the East Tennessee, Virginia & Georgia Railroad, the building served as a passenger railway terminal until 1940. From 1912 until 1930, it served ET & WNC only. The narrow gauge ET & WNC Railroad was a construction marvel along its mountainous 60-mile route between Johnson City, Tennessee and Boone, North Carolina.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park — 5.9 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.
• Rocky Mount Museum — 6.3 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.
• Jonesborough Historic District — 6.7 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 — 11 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.

More markers nearby

• Johnson City Incorporated December 1, 1869 — steps away
• State Flag — steps away
• Johnson City Sessions — 0.3 mi
• Colored Christian Church and Colored School — 0.3 mi