The Fire Of 1856

In March 1856 a fire took the Sevier County courthouse in Sevierville, the jail beside it, forty-one houses and most of the town's businesses, and with the courthouse went almost every county record written before that year. The Sevier County Archives begin in 1856 for that reason, and anyone tracing a family in the county runs into the same wall. The accounts disagree on which day it was, offering the twenty-fourth, the twenty-sixth, the twenty-seventh and the thirty-first of March, which is a small monument in itself to what the fire destroyed. The town rebuilt, then burned again in 1900, when much of the business district went a second time, which is why the storefronts standing around the courthouse today largely date from after that year rather than before it. The county had never been lucky with courthouses. The first, in 1796, was a converted stable on James McMahan's land, and local tradition holds that the lawyers, driven out by fleas, got an Irishman drunk on a bottle of whisky and had him burn it down. A frame building followed about 1820 and a brick one about 1850, and the brick one is what the fire of 1856 took. The courthouse standing today went up in the 1890s to a design by Kenneth McDonald of Louisville, built by C. W. Brown of Lenoir City: eighty-five feet by seventy, a tower a hundred and thirty feet from the ground, hand-shaped limestone below and locally made brick above, for about twenty-one thousand dollars. It was placed on the National Register on 24 March 1971.