Johnson City Incorporated December 1, 1869

Henry Johnson built a store, depot and post office here in 1854, ahead of the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad. Locomotives stopped to take on water, so the village was first Johnson's Tank, then Johnson's Depot once passengers and freight moved. In the Civil War it was renamed Haynesville for Confederate senator Landon Carter Haynes, though most East Tennesseans backed the Union, and the old name returned after the war. The 1869 charter made it Johnson City with Henry Johnson as first mayor, and a boom followed until the Panic of 1893.

What the plaque says

Johnson City Incorporated December 1, 1869 The town was formerly known as Green Meadows, Blue Plum, Johnson's Depot, Haynesville, then Johnson City. It is situated on land grants of 1782 to Robert and Joseph Young and in 1792 to Joseph Tipton. The town charter was repealed in 1879, but incorporated in 1885. The name honors Henry Johnson, prominent merchant and postmaster. As industrial and educational center, it is the home of Milligan College, East Tennessee State University, and Steed College.

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 — 6.2 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

• East Tennessee & Western North Carolina (ET & WNC) Depot — steps away
• State Flag — 0.2 mi
• Johnson City Sessions — 0.2 mi
• Colored Christian Church and Colored School — 0.3 mi