Kentucky-TN, Campbell

Jellico grew up on the line itself. Founded in 1885 on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, it is cut off from the rest of Campbell County by the Cumberland Mountains; the General Assembly had made the county from parts of Anderson and Claiborne on September 11, 1806. Railroads turned the county from subsistence farming to coal mining and lumber, and coal ruled its economy for about three-quarters of a century, until a final decline in the early 1980s. Interstate 75 later brought tourists to the mountains and to Norris Lake's 750 miles of shoreline.

What the plaque says

Kentucky-TN, Campbell Campbell County: Established 1806: reportedly named in honor of Col. Arthur Campbell. Member of the Virginia House of Burgesses; Commanded 70th Regiment Virginia Militia, in the Revolution; Commissioner for negotiation of Indian Treaties in 1781. Kentucky: An Iroquois word meaning Meadow Land. It was visited by Indian tribes from as far west as the Rocky Mountains before 1750. The first white settlement was at Harrodsburg in 1744. Kentucky was the second district west of the Alleghenies to be settled and the first (1792) to become a state.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, and the Wilderness Road — 25 mi
  The Claiborne County town below the notch in Cumberland Mountain where Daniel Boone's axmen widened the Warriors' Path into the Wilderness Road in 1775, now bypassed by a tunnel.

More markers nearby

• Big Creek Gap — 14 mi
• Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong — 15 mi
• Divided Loyalties: Scott County in the Civil War — 26 mi
• Walker's Ford — 29 mi