Thomas Gibbons

Hawkins County's seat was settled in Gibbons's house. The commissioners named by the North Carolina legislature met there on June 4, 1787, and chose Joseph Rogers's land on Crockett's Creek for the courthouse. That summer a courthouse, jail and stocks went up, and the place took the name Hawkins Court House. Its first elected officers were John Hunt as sheriff, William Marshall as register and Thomas Hutchins as clerk. Two years later the town was given the name Rogersville and laid out in half-acre lots.

What the plaque says

Thomas Gibbons Born in Surry (now Sussex) County, Virginia, in 1734, he settled here in 1778, having been forcibly ejected from a homestead about 12 miles east by one Robert Young. The courts of Spencer County, State of Franklin, met in his house 1785-87. On June 4, 1787, the first county court of Hawkins County, North Carolina, met here. Gibbons died in 1811.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rogersville Historic District — 5.5 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.
• Vardy Community Museum — 16 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.
• Long Island of the Holston — 20 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.
• Andrew Johnson National Historic Site — 22 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

• Amis House — 4.4 mi
• Tennessee's First Newspaper — 5.3 mi
• Alexander Peter Stewart — 5.4 mi
• Swift Memorial College / St. Marks Presbyterian Church — 5.5 mi