Rocky Mount Museum

William Cobb moved his family from North Carolina to this hill in 1769. In October 1790 Governor William Blount arrived and made Cobb's log house the first seat of government for the Southwest Territory, the country that became Tennessee. He wrote of a room with glass windows and a fireplace, and governed from here until early 1792. Blount was also the federal Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and the Treaty of Holston, signed with the Cherokee in 1791, was part of his work in these months. The site itself says that treaty and the land dealings behind it had significant consequences for the Cherokee Nation.

The museum interprets 1791 with costumed interpreters who treat visitors as guests of the Cobb family and show the kitchen, barn, weaving cabin and gardens. A reconstructed cabin stands for the enslaved people of the farm, who the site says were a handful and does not name. The 1791 census counted 3,417 enslaved people and 361 free people of color among 35,691 residents of the whole territory.

Accounts of the house differ. The museum's own history describes the original log structure as largely intact beneath later siding, while the Tennessee Historical Commission and tree-ring dating place the standing dwelling in the late 1820s. The Rocky Mount Historical Association, founded by Pauline DeFriece to save the place, has run it since it opened to the public on April 1, 1962.