Jonesborough Historic District

North Carolina chartered Jonesborough in 1779, and the town calls itself Tennessee's oldest. In 1784 it became the capital of the State of Franklin, a breakaway state that Congress never recognized, and Andrew Jackson spent several months here in 1788 practicing law. The Chester Inn was built in 1797 and still stands downtown. The historic district was listed on the National Register on December 23, 1969, the second district added after Beale Street in Memphis.

Elihu Embree, a Quaker ironmaker, held enslaved people for much of his life before he turned against slavery. In 1819 he began the weekly Manumission Intelligencer in Jonesborough, and in 1820 he renamed it The Emancipator, the first periodical in the country given wholly to ending slavery. The first issue is dated April 30, 1820. He paid for it himself, mailed copies to southern governors, who received them badly, and reached a circulation over 2,000 before he died that December. His will called for the freeing of an enslaved woman named Nancy and her five children. After the war the town's Black community built its own institutions: the Warner Institute, a school for freedmen, in 1876, College Hill Cemetery in 1896, and the Booker T. Washington School, which taught Black students from 1940 to 1965.

The National Storytelling Festival began in 1973, when the teacher Jimmy Neil Smith invited Appalachian storytellers, Ray Hicks among them, to a makeshift stage beside the courthouse. Walk the few blocks of Federal, Greek Revival and Victorian buildings, and look for the downtown museum that remembers Embree.