Visitors Guide to Obion County, Tennessee

Obion County is situated in the rolling hills of northwest Tennessee. Obion County once bordered the Mississippi River until the creation of Lake County in 1870. Obion County still does include half of Reelfoot Lake, Tennessee’s largest natural lake. The lake harbors almost every kind of shore and wading bird including the golden and American bald eagles as well as being a prime spot for fishermen. Visitors can take advantage of this natural feature at either Reelfoot Lake State Park or Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge. The county’s name comes from the Obion River which flows through the county. The Obion has four major forks whose confluences are located in the southeast corner of the county east of the town of Obion. The origin of the name "Obion" is obscure, with some contending that it derives from a Native American word meaning "many forks and others that it represents a corruption of the name of an Irish trapper, O'Bion or, perhaps, O'Brien.

Many of the county’s European settlers were Scots-Irish moving west from the Carolinas and Virginia. The first known European settler arrived in the area in 1819 after the land was sold to the United States by the Chickasaw tribe in 1818 in a deal negotiated by future U.S. President Andrew Jackson. All of Tennessee west of the Tennessee River and the southwestern corner of Kentucky was included in this purchase. In 1820 Colonel W. M. Wilson settled three miles southwest of the future town of Troy and the organization of Obion County took place in his cabin. Obion County was founded on October 24, 1823. Davy Crockett, the famed frontiersman, was among those present on March 16, 1825, when the county seat of Troy was laid out. Crockett's association with the history of Obion County is well known having served the area in the U.S. House of Representatives and his claim of killing a record 103 bears was made in Obion County. Troy remained the county seat until 1890, when it was moved to Union City following a contentious legal dispute.

The population of Obion County increased rapidly in the years before the Civil War. In 1830 the population numbered just over 2,000 and it had increased to 12,800 by 1860. Historically Obion County has been a region of small farms; in 1860 most farms ranged in size from twenty to fifty acres with tobacco, corn, and wheat being the principal crops. The history of Union City, the present county seat, was tied to the railroads. The community was laid out in 1854 by General George Gibbs on land he received in 1829 and the town derived its name from the intersection of the Nashville and Northwestern Railroad with the Mobile and Ohio Railroad.

Obion County was the site of several events during the Civil War. In early 1861 Camp Brown, which housed up to ten thousand Confederate soldiers, was established one mile north of Union City in preparation for General Leonidas Polk's invasion of Kentucky in September 1861. In March of 1864 the last important engagement in Obion County occurred at Union City. A fort at the railroad station was occupied by 500 men of the U.S. Seventh Tennessee Cavalry under the command of Colonel Isaac Hawkins. The fort was quickly encircled by Confederate forces of Nathan Bedford Forrest's Seventh Cavalry under the command of Colonel Duckworth. Unable to take the Federal stronghold at Union City by force, the Confederates devised a "Quaker cannon" from a black painted log and wagon wheels and successfully demanded unconditional surrender in Forrest's name. There were three other small battles or skirmishes in or near Union City. The first monument ever erected in memory of unknown Confederate dead was dedicated in Union City in 1869.

By the early 1880s business and manufacturing had revived and the rail lines soon made Union City the commercial center of the region, shipping the products of the county's furniture factories and sawmills to eastern markets. Along with Union City’s success came demands to move the county seat from Troy. Following a lengthy public debate and court battle, Union City won a hotly contested referendum, and the county records were moved to the new courthouse in July 1890. As the county seat, Union City experience another period of expansion. This era is marked by several National Register properties, including the Washington-Florida Avenues historic district, the East Main Historic District, and the Mt. Zion C.M.E. Church.

In the early 1900s there was trouble over the use of Reelfoot Lake. Local fishermen and waterfowl hunters felt they had a natural right to lake’s bounty. However, the land beneath the lake's shallow waters had been claimed under the 1783 grants made prior to the earthquakes of 1811-12 that created the lake. In the 1870s John Burdick established a dock and wholesale fish business at the lake. In the 1890s James Harris of Tiptonville became interested in exploiting the timber and agricultural possibilities of the lake. After buying most of the old land grants, Harris announced in 1899 that he was going to drain the lake. This effort was opposed by Burdick and the fishermen, but the initial legal decision was that the lake was not navigable and thus subject to private ownership. In 1907 Harris joined forces with the West Tennessee Land Company, which had acquired the remaining grants.

Emotions among some lake residents shifted toward a more violent solution to the dispute as they lost faith in legal remedies. Men wearing masks and gowns and calling themselves Night Riders, made vigilante raids around the lake and terrorized those who opposed them. On the night of October 19, 1908, Robert Z. Taylor and Quentin Rankin, attorneys for the land company, were taken from Ward's Hotel at Walnut Log by the Night Riders. When they refused demands to reopen the lake to fishing, Rankin was killed, and Taylor escaped into the water of the lake, surviving to tell the story. Eight of the Night Riders were captured by the state militia and tried in Union City. Six were sentenced to hang, but the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the verdict on several technicalities. The lake was later ruled navigable and incapable of private ownership and became part of Tennessee's park system.

Obion County's rich history has been carefully preserved. The first monument ever erected in memory of unknown Confederate dead was dedicated in Union City on October 21, 1869. Nearby is the Discovery Park of America. On Highway 51 is Turner Kirkland's Dixie Gun Works, the world's largest supplier of antique guns and parts. The Obion County Courthouse, built by the Public Works Administration in 1939-40, and the Park's covered bridge near Trimble are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

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