Evan Shelby

Shelby's business ran on the frontier trade. In the 1770s he built a fort, a store and a trading station near present-day Bristol, which included perhaps the first distillery in the region. He was born in Tregaron, Wales, and his family came to the colonies about 1734, settling in Pennsylvania and later in Maryland, where he farmed near Frederick on a place called Mountain of Wales. His son Isaac Shelby became governor of Kentucky. His first wife, Letitia Cox, died in 1777, and he later married Isabella Elliot.

What the plaque says

Evan Shelby Born in Wales, 1719, he came here about 1771. A veteran of Braddock's Campaign and Lord Dunmore's War, he commanded a successful expedition against the Chickamauga towns, 1779. Member of the North Carolina State Senate, 1781, and brigadier general of militia, 1786, he declined governorship of the State of Franklin, 1787. He died Dec.4,1794, and is buried in East Hill Cemetery.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bristol's State Street and the 1927 Sessions — steps away
  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.
• Rocky Mount Museum — 16 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 — 18 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.
• Warriors' Path State Park — 18 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.

More markers nearby

• The Bristol Municipal Stadium — 0.9 mi
• Tennessee Ernie Ford's Birthplace — 1.0 mi
• King College — 4.1 mi
• John Isaac Cox — 8.0 mi