Four years ago, I wrote a long story about “underwater ghost towns of Tennessee,” focusing on places permanently flooded by the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Army Corps of Engineers. That 2021 article might have led to the impression that manmade dams are responsible for most of the ghost towns in Tennessee history — which is not true.
In fact, this article is about 19 ghost towns in Tennessee that are not underwater.
All the communities cited in this article once had residents, businesses, churches and schools. In many cases, something important happened in the towns on this list. But these communities don’t exist today, to the best of my knowledge.
I should also point out that this is not a complete list. My guess is that Tennessee has more than a hundred ghost towns.
Here are 19 Tennessee “ghost towns” that I know about, organized by category.
‘Flatboat/steamboat’ ghost towns (4)
A lot of towns faded in the late 1800s when the railroad replaced the flatboat and steamboat as the dominant method of commercial transportation. Around 1930, when ferries were replaced by bridges, many of these river towns completely vanished from the map.
At one time, the Tipton County community of Randolph had residents, churches, hotels, a steamboat landing and a weekly newspaper called the Randolph Recorder (which you can read at the Tennessee State Library and Archives). In the early 1830s, Randolph rivaled Memphis to be the largest Tennessee town on the Mississippi River. But the last time I was in Randolph, I saw only one house there.
What happened? The first thing that went wrong was when the mail route went to Memphis rather than Randolph (passengers traveled with the mail, so getting the mail route was a big deal). Cholera hit the town hard in 1834; according to newspaper accounts, about 40 of Randolph’s 350 residents died from it in only a few days.
In 1861, someone got the bright idea of building a Confederate fortress in Randolph. During the Civil War, the Union Army destroyed that fortress and much of the town along with it. The town managed to rebuild, but in 1886, fire destroyed much of the town again.
Today, Randolph is a lovely vantage point from where to see the Mississippi River. But pack a lunch, and make sure you have enough gas to get there and back, because there aren’t many businesses in that part of Tipton County.
A few months ago, I wrote about Gold Dust, a place on the Mississippi River in Lauderdale County. I have found articles that mention Gold Dust as early as 1920. The main thing I know about Gold Dust is that some members of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians were talked into moving there around 1952. Their descendants make up most of West Tennessee’s Choctaw community, which is why there is a small Choctaw reservation in Henning.
Ashport was a few miles upstream from Gold Dust. Like Randolph, Ashport was an active steamboat stop in the 1800s. Like Randolph, part of its original location eventually slipped into the Mississippi River. Like Randolph, it doesn’t even merit a spot on the official Tennessee map anymore.
However, unlike Randolph, Ashport remained an active community well into the 20th century. As late as the 1930s, the Commercial Appeal contained stories about riverboats stopping in Ashport as they traveled up and down the Mississippi. And as late as 1949, Ashport still had a hotel.
From about 1950 onward, however, the news from Ashport generally involved prison escapees and floods. In 1975 and again in 1979, Ashport residents were cut off from the outside world for weeks because of flooding. Finally, in 2011, a flood washed away almost every building left in Ashport.
However, here’s the thing about backwater flooding and the Mississippi River: It’s good for the soil. So even though the town of Ashport is no more, there are fertile cotton and soybean farms in this corner of Tennessee. Many of these farming families attend the Ashport Baptist Church, one of the only institutions that keeps alive the town name.
At the other end of the state, Rhea County contains a reminder that not every abandoned river town is on the Mississippi. The town of Washington was organized in 1812 — six years after the Cherokee conceded the land in the 1806 Treaty of Washington (thus the name of the town). Washington remained the seat of Rhea County and most prominent flatboat stop on the Tennessee River between Knoxville and Chattanooga until the Cincinnati Southern Railway missed the town in 1880.
No one alive today remembers what the town of Washington was like before it declined. But longtime residents of Rhea County recall the Washington Ferry, which operated until 1996.
‘No longer on the route’ ghost towns (3)
Many sources will tell you that the first road across the Cumberland Plateau started at Fort Southwest Point (in Roane County) and ended at Fort Blount (in Jackson County). The town around Fort Southwest Point is still there and is called Kingston. The town around Fort Blount was called Williamsburg, and it’s long gone.
If Williamsburg still existed, it could make this claim: Among the people who spent the night there in the 1790s were Andrew Jackson, John Sevier, and Louis Philippe — King of France from 1830 until 1848.
Williamsburg wasn’t a place of note for long. The town declined because someone else came up with a better route across the Cumberland Plateau. That someone was William Walton, and the community he started at the western end of his road is called Carthage.
Four years ago, in my story about underwater ghost towns, I mentioned the Rutherford County community of Jefferson. Jefferson was originally created because it was the best place for stagecoaches to cross Stones River, since the river forks there. If you look at early maps of Tennessee, stagecoaches went from Lebanon to Nashville via Jefferson (hardly a direct route!). Jefferson declined after a ferry was opened on Stones River, due east of Nashville. The Rutherford County seat was moved from Jefferson to Murfreesboro in 1814.
Jefferson remained a small but notable community for nearly a century and a half. But in the 1940s, all that remained of Jefferson was bought and torn down by the Army Corps of Engineers when Stones River was dammed and Percy Priest Lake was created. However, as it turns out, the engineers were wrong in their calculations about how much land would be flooded. So the former site of the Jefferson community is still above water.
A few weeks ago, a Rutherford County teacher named Forrest Smith led me to the former site of Jefferson. We found stone walls, roadbeds, abandoned home foundations, a set of stairs descending into a cellar that is now caved in and a lot of trash (some of it old).
Finally, there used to be a place called Port Royal along the Red River, near the border of Montgomery and Robertson counties. Halfway between Springfield and Clarksville, without a railroad connection, Port Royal declined.
There are two reasons I’ve put Port Royal on this list. One is because four of the delegates who attended Tennessee’s first Constitutional Convention in 1796 were from there. The other is because Port Royal is now a state historic park.
‘Company town’ ghost towns (6)
The most important company town in Tennessee history was the Fentress County community of Wilder — once owned by the Fentress Coal and Coke Company. In July 1932, workers in Wilder went on strike to protest low pay and unsafe working conditions. Fentress Coal hired replacement workers. During the next few months, several of the bridges used to haul coal from the mines were damaged or destroyed, and there were many violent incidents against both strikers and replacement workers.
In April 1933, company guards shot and killed union leader Barney Graham in the streets of Wilder. A couple of weeks later, replacement worker B.J. Brewer was ambushed. No one was ever convicted of either murder.
Newspapers all over the country carried news about the Wilder strike and the violence that took place because of it. The strike inspired Myles Horton to start Grundy County’s Highlander Folk School — a training ground for the Civil Rights Movement.
Today there is almost nothing left of Wilder, other than a cemetery.
We remember Wilder because of people who died there. Two counties to the southwest, we remember the abandoned coal mining town of Ravenscroft because of someone who was born there. Carl Rowan, a member of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration and one of the first African-American syndicated columnists in American history, was born in Ravenscroft. Thanks to the Bon Air Mountain Historical Society, there are historical markers in Ravenscroft and near his birthplace.
Wilder and Ravenscroft were pretty rough communities — as was Sucktown. Sucktown (quit snickering) was the name of the town in Marion County where construction workers were housed by the companies that built Hales Bar Dam between 1905 and 1913. It got its name from the series of navigational barriers along the Tennessee River in that area called The Suck. Judging from newspaper clippings, Sucktown was a rough place, where locals clashed with immigrants brought in to work on the dam. Sucktown was on the north side of what remains of the dam, and I don’t think there’s anything left of it.
Just upstream from Sucktown is a ghost town called Shakerag. With its stone foundations, the abandoned site of Shakerag (now part of the Prentice Cooper State Forest) is a great place to take photos. However, I haven’t been able to learn much about Shakerag, in part because almost every state appears to have a ghost town by the same name.
Sucktown and Shakerag were on the “big” Tennessee River. Far upstream, on the Little Tennessee River, there used to be a town called Calderwood. Built around 1912 by the Aluminum Company of America (later Alcoa), Calderwood housed hydroelectric dam workers and their families. According to various articles about the place, as many as 2,000 people lived in Calderwood at one time. That number dropped to about 200 by 1940 and a handful by 1960. Today, the only structure left of Calderwood is a small Methodist church.
Finally, if you google the words “Tennessee ghost town,” you will find photos that were taken in the former Blount County community of Elkmont. As you can read in many books and websites, Elkmont was a lumber town and later a resort town that was eventually abandoned because the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was created in and around it.
Only a handful of structures remain in Elkmont today. What’s ironic about Elkmont is that the reason it’s abandoned is also the reason it’s so famous: If it weren’t for the national park, no one outside of Blount County would know where Elkmont was — anymore than the average Tennessean knows where Wilder, Randolph, Washington or Sucktown were. For many years, the park preserved the structures in Elkmont, creating a haven for amateur photographers. Eventually, it allowed nature to reclaim the area.
‘The courthouse moved’ ghost towns (6)
I’ve already mentioned three ghost towns that were once county seats. But in the cases of Jefferson, Washington and Williamsburg, I don’t think the loss of the courthouse was the reason for the town’s decline. Each town faded first for other reasons, and the courthouse was moved after the town declined.
If there is a fourth category of ghost towns, that category would be “towns that were abandoned because they ceased to be the county seat.”
Vernon was the county seat of Hickman County. After the borders of Hickman County were changed, Centerville became the county seat in 1823.
Montgomery was the original county seat of Morgan County. By 1870, with the creation of Scott and Campbell counties, Montgomery was no longer even in Morgan County but in Scott County. Therefore, the Morgan County Courthouse was moved to Wartburg.
Monroe was the original county seat of Overton County, but in 1833 the citizens of the county voted to move the courthouse to Livingston.
When McNairy County was formed, Purdy was its county seat. Mainly because of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, the county seat was moved to Selmer in 1891.
Finally, Lewis County wasn’t formed until 1843 but had three different county seats in the first half-century of its existence. Originally the Lewis County Courthouse was at Gordon and later at Newburg. In 1897, the courthouse was moved to a Swiss colony called Hohenwald, where it remains today.
To the best of my knowledge, there are no communities at Vernon, Montgomery, Monroe, Purdy, Gordon or Newburg. There are a couple of historical markers and the ghosts of county mayors, county officials, etc. But that’s it.
