When Tennessee voted on separation on 8 June 1861, Sevier County went against it by 1,528 votes to 60, better than ninety-six percent, while the state as a whole voted to leave by more than two to one. East Tennessee was full of counties like it, and Sevier County's loyalists organised a Home Guard that August. It drilled openly at first. Once Confederate troops occupied the county the same men went underground and worked as couriers, guides and gatherers of intelligence, which was far more dangerous than drilling had been. Some thirty-one thousand Tennesseans joined the Federal army, more than all the other Confederate states put together, and men who wanted to enlist often rode north into Kentucky to enlist. The most tangible thing they did survives as a working grist mill at Pigeon Forge, built in 1830 by Isaac Love, whose iron forge on the same water gave the town the second half of its name. In 1861 a secret garment factory was set up on the mill's second floor to make cloth for Union uniforms, and shoes were made from leather out of Newton Trotter's tannery nearby. The mill owner John Trotter's son, Captain William Trotter, commanded Company H of the 9th Tennessee Cavalry, a Union regiment. On the night of 8 November 1861 East Tennessee Unionists attacked nine railroad bridges and destroyed five. About sixteen Sevier County men rode to Strawberry Plains, on the Holston, and theirs was one of the four attempts that failed. A watchman named James Keelan shot William Pickens, a former Sevier County sheriff, as he tried to set the bridge alight, and was badly wounded himself. Pickens was carried back into Sevier County and was reported to have died of his wounds.
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35.7883, -83.5542
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