Tennessee's First Newspaper

George Roulstone, a Boston native who had worked on North Carolina newspapers, stayed in Rogersville eleven months before taking the paper to Knoxville in fall 1792. Territorial Governor William Blount encouraged it as a way to distribute news of the territory, and the patronage paid back: Roulstone became Knoxville's first postmaster, one of its first commissioners, Tennessee's first public printer and clerk of the first state Senate. After his death in 1804 his wife, Elizabeth Gilliam Roulstone, kept publishing. The Gazette ceased in 1818.

What the plaque says

Tennessee's First Newspaper At the invitation of Territorial Gov. William Blount, George Roulestone and Robert Ferguson brought a printing press over the mountains from North Carolina, and established the Knoxville Gazette in a log cabin on the Hawkins County Courthouse Square. On November 5, 1791, the first issue of Tennessee's first newspaper was printed. In October 1792, the Gazette was moved to Knoxville, Blount's newly established capital.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rogersville Historic District — steps away
  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.
• Vardy Community Museum — 15 mi
  A 1899 Presbyterian church in Hancock County, now a museum, beside the Mahala Mullins cabin and the ruins of the Vardy school that educated the Melungeon children of Newman's Ridge.
• Andrew Johnson National Historic Site — 20 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.
• Long Island of the Holston — 25 mi
  A four-mile island in the Holston at Kingsport, Cherokee council and treaty ground, the start of Boone's Wilderness Road in 1775, and in part returned to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in 1976.

More markers nearby

• Alexander Peter Stewart — steps away
• Swift Memorial College / St. Marks Presbyterian Church — 0.2 mi
• Amis House — 1.0 mi
• Thomas Gibbons — 5.3 mi