Historical Marker
National Soldiers' Home
Johnson City, Washington County · Tennessee
Erected 2007
New York architect J. H. Freedlander designed the home as a campus of 36 French Renaissance-style buildings, and it was the ninth and last branch Congress funded for Union veterans of the Civil War. Brownlow himself was buried here by special dispensation: he and his wife hold the only graves inside Monument Circle in the home's cemetery, which became a national cemetery in 1973. The grounds were named a National Historic Landmark district in 2011, and in 2025 the cemetery received sixteen unknown First Tennessee Infantry soldiers killed at Monterrey in 1846.
What the plaque says
National Soldiers' Home Approved by an Act of Congress on Jan. 28, 1901, the Mountain Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers was created through the work of Tennessee Congressman Walter P. Brownlow (1851–1910). Known locally as Mountain Home, the original site comprised 447 acres and opened in October 1903. Peak enrollment reached over 2,500 Civil War and Spanish-American War veterans. In 1930, the National Soldiers' Home system became part of the Veterans Administration. (2007)
Where it stands
36.30812, -82.37458 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Jonesborough Historic District — 5.4 miTennessee'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.
- Rocky Mount Museum — 7.1 miWilliam 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 — 7.2 miA 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.
- Unicoi County Heritage Museum and the Erwin Rail Yard — 9.9 miA 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.