Lewis County was made in 1843 out of fractions of Maury, Lawrence, Wayne and Hickman, and named for Meriwether Lewis on the stated ground that his remains lay buried and neglected within its limits. It then spent half a century deciding where to put the courthouse. The first courts sat, as the act provided, at John Blackburn's house on Swan Creek, and in 1846 the seat was formally placed there and named Gordon. In 1848 it moved to a fifty-acre tract called Newburg, given by Hugh Venable and Robert Smith. In 1897 it moved a last time to Hohenwald. The legislature had meanwhile abolished the county outright in 1869 and restored it at the same session. Fifty-four years is a long argument about a courthouse.
Nothing is left of Gordon. Newburg survives as the name of a ridge and a road. Hohenwald began as a crossroads store kept by Warren and Augusta Smith, and it was Augusta, a German immigrant, who gave it a German name meaning high forest. Swiss settlers laid out a separate town called New Switzerland immediately beside it, arriving by train in November 1895 to a boxcar depot; some of them, having bought land off newspaper advertisements, looked at what they had bought and stayed on the train. A New York firm opened a lace factory in Hohenwald in 1903, worked by Swiss labour, which turned to embroidering military emblems during the First World War and closed soon after it.
Getting there
35.4149, -87.5145
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Hear it from the road
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