No other town has as rich a history as Elizabethton. It was here along the banks of the Watauga River that Tennessee began. There are all kinds of footprints to indicate that.
Visit our oldest cemeteries — Green Hill, Highland, the Taylor graveyards, to name a few — and you will find gravestones of the town’s earliest settlers and leaders. Many are simply stone markers with names etched by hand into the stone.
They are the gravestones of the men and women who cleared the land, built homes and a town. They were the leaders of our first government. They are men and women with the names of Carter, Tipton, Taylor, Hyder, Jobe, Hunter, Alexander, Fitzsimmon, Folsom, and the list goes on and on.
This weekend, the community is celebrating the official opening of Sabine Hill, the home of Gen. Nathaniel Taylor, Carter County’s first sheriff, a former Tennessee legislator, and a fighter in the War of 1812, serving under Gen. Andrew Jackson.
At one time, the General’s plantation stretched from Elizabethton to Jonesborough.
The Taylor lineage includes three governors — Tennessee Governors Alf and Bob Taylor and Georgia Governor Nathaniel Harris.
Like the Carter Mansion, Sabine Hill has its place in history. The names Taylor and Carter are so entwined in not only the history of Elizabethton, but in each other. Landon Carter, for whom the Carter Mansion is named, was an American Revolutionary War veteran, whose daughter, Mary, married James Patton Taylor, a son of General Taylor.
Both, the Carter Mansion and Sabine Hill, fall under the care of Sycamore Shoals State Historic Area, another local landmark which is sacred ground in our local history.
We are blessed to have such a rich heritage and to have it preserved by the state for future generations. Elizabethton retains several important reminders of the past, and both the Carter Mansion and Sabine Hill are structures worthy of preservation, so that future generations will be better able to understand Elizabethton’s colorful past.
Too many of the structures that graced our downtown already have fallen. The list of losses include the Lynnwood Hotel and some of the city’s first movie theaters.
Nevertheless, Elizabethton has a strong sense of its past and thus of place.
Theodore Roosevelt once sagely observed that “the more you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future.”
But our past is in constant danger of disappearing. Crucial documents can be lost or dissolve. Photographs, films and recordings can disintegrate. Structures can crumble due to disrepair or be bulldozed into dust to make way for parking lots or office towers.
We are just thankful that some important pieces of our local history have been preserved, and that the dollars and cents have been provided by the State of Tennessee to do it. After all, it’s an important piece of Tennessee history, too.
History is more than a record of what has been. It provides context for the present and illuminates the future.
Thoughts — indeed, deep convictions — of liberty did not ring from Philadelphia alone. When the first free and independent government west of the Alleghenies was established right here along the banks of the Watauga, men who lived in what would become Carter County and Elizabethton made clear their commitment to live free from English King George’s rule.
Historic sites such as the Carter Mansion and Sabine Hill provide lessons about the past. To visit these houses, built more than 200 years ago, is not only to see their unique construction, but also to learn about life for early residents of our community, for the foundation they built and the contributions they made that helped create the Elizabethton of today.