A Brief History of Knoxville, TN

The only native people that lived permanently around what is now known as Knoxville were the Cherokee, and called the area Shacomage, "Place of Blue Smoke".Early contacts between the European settlers and the Cherokee were fairly cordial, which encouraged colonial expansion into the land west of the Great Smoky Mountains. James White settled White's Fort in 1786, a militia officer during the American Revolutionary War. When William Blount, the territorial governor of the Southwest Territory, moved the territorial capital to White's Fort in 1791, he renamed it Knoxville in honor of Henry Knox, the American Revolutionary War general and Washington's secretary of War.