Specialized

Culture, History, Historic House, Historical Society, Military, Natural History, Park, Specialized

TVRM’s passenger trains run on the historic route which includes Missionary Ridge Tunnel, completed in 1858 and on the National Register of Historic Places. The tunnel is the primary reason TVRM runs on the three-mile section of the former Southern Railway. As railroad equipment grew too large to pass through and the single-track tunnel became a traffic jam for an other wise double-track railroad, Southern Railway abandoned the three mile portion of the line and built a new section around the end of Missionary Ridge, avoiding the tunnel altogether.

History, Specialized

In the year 1791, George Roulston, the first printer to enter the State of Tennessee, took his press apart in Fayetteville, North Carolina, packed it on horses’ backs or in wagons and trekked over the trails of the Blue Ridge Mountains into the Holston Valley where Kingsport now stands. There, on the banks of the Holston River at James King’s Boat Yard, he loaded it on a flatboat and floated it down to Rogersville where he set it up and started printing the Knoxville Gazette, the first piece of printing ever attempted in Tennessee