Early Years

Mountain City has always been a place of art, commerce, and crossroads. Long before there were cars to drive over mountains, and explosives to blast through them, roads were shaped by geography. Mountain City is stationed in a gap that was central to area travel, by the time the first white settlers arrived the indigenous populations of the region had already long sense established trails throughout the area (Sakowski, 2007). One of the major native routes was the Old Cherokee Path that travels through most of Johnson County and straight through the Mountain City gap before it connects to the Great Valley Road. (see Trails Map) It was likely along those vary trails that the Cherokee first came into contact with Europeans in the form of Hernando de Soto, a Spanish conquistador who was an early explorer of much of the land that would become the southeastern US.

In the 1670s James Needham and Gabriel Arthur would again made use of Cherokee guides who would have taken them trough the gap on the way to establish a trading post at the other end of the valley. That trading post would later become the “The Trade Gap” settlement, and finally the community of Trade, Tn. Which has the distinction of being not only the oldest unincorporated community in Tennessee, but also the one at the highest elevation.

In 1749 Peter Jefferson, whose son Thomas would later become president of the United States, was paid by the English crown to explore the area that would become Johnson county.

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