Morris Cemetery

Gideon, Daniel and Absalom Morris took land grants within what is now Morristown in the 1780s, and their name became the town's. Gideon's deed gave the town its ground. Morristown was incorporated in 1855 and named seat when Hamblen County was formed in 1870, though it was four years before a courthouse was built; the later courthouse, designed by A. C. Bruce, is on the National Register. Before the Morrises, Robert McFarland and Alexander Outlaw had already claimed grants on the Bend of Chucky in 1783.

What the plaque says

Morris Cemetery A few yards east is the family graveyard of the founders of Morristown. In 1787, Gideon, Daniel and Absalom Morris, formerly of the Watauga Settlement, received grants in this area, from which Gideon deeded the land on which the town was built.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rogersville Historic District — 21 mi
  Tennessee's first newspaper was printed in this Hawkins County seat in 1791, and Swift Memorial College, founded in 1883, educated Black students after the state's 1901 law forced Maryville College to expel them.
• Andrew Johnson National Historic Site — 26 mi
  The tailor shop, homestead and grave of the seventeenth president in Greeneville, where the people he enslaved are named and where the Eighth of August emancipation celebration took root.

More markers nearby

• Morristown College — 1.0 mi
• Panther Springs — 5.0 mi
• Hayslope — 6.0 mi
• Longstreet's Billet — 6.2 mi