Lenoir Cotton Mill

The mill belonged to a family estate. Major William Ballard Lenoir arrived in 1810 to occupy his father's five-thousand-acre military grant, and by 1834 the site included a brick cotton mill built with enslaved labor, fed with raw cotton from the lower South. In June 1863 a Federal force of about 1,500 burned the Lenoir store and depot but spared the mill, supposedly because Dr. Benjamin Lenoir, a Mason, gave troops a secret Masonic sign. Later it held a hosiery mill and then a flour mill that ran until the 1950s.

What the plaque says

Lenoir Cotton Mill The Lenoir Cotton Mill, built between 1810 and 1821, was one of a series of mills in the community along Town Creek and the only one surviving. They were built by William B. Lenoir, a prosperous manufacturer, miller and merchant. It is one of Tennessee's earliest examples of industrial architecture. In 1890 there were 1000 spindles operating in the mill. Wood trusses in the building were designed intuitively since truss action was not defined scientifically until 1847.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Loudoun State Historic Park — 14 mi
  A reconstructed 1756-57 British fort on the Little Tennessee River in Overhill Cherokee country, besieged in 1760 and surrendered on August 9 of that year.
• Sequoyah Birthplace Museum — 15 mi
  The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians' museum on Tellico Lake, near the town where Sequoyah was born, telling how he built the Cherokee syllabary and what the Tellico Dam drowned.
• American Museum of Science and Energy — 15 mi
  The Oak Ridge museum that opened in 1949, when the Manhattan Project city's gates opened, in a town whose Black workers were housed in the Gamble Valley hutments.
• Fort Southwest Point State Historic Park — 16 mi
  A reconstructed 1797 federal fort on a knoll at the meeting of the Clinch and Tennessee rivers, headquarters of Cherokee agent Return J. Meigs, a state park since July 2026.

More markers nearby

• Railroad Trestle — 4.6 mi
• Longstreet's Crossing — 5.3 mi
• The Underground Railroad: Friendsville Quakers and Cudjo's Cave — 7.4 mi
• National Campground — 7.6 mi