Kingsport Spirit

We all learned in school about “the shot heard ’round the world.” I like to examine parallel history. What was happening here at that same time? How would locals know the Revolutionary War had begun? A war so significant it wrote a new chapter in modern world history.

On the morning of April 19, 1775, British regulars and colonial militiamen faced one another on the town green at Lexington, Massachusetts. No one knows who fired first, but the shooting continued at Concord and along the British retreat to Boston. By nightfall, 49 colonists and 73 British soldiers were dead.

The American Revolution had begun.

Nearly 800 miles away, the place we now call Kingsport was quiet. There was no Kingsport, Sullivan County or Tennessee. The landscape was defined by the Holston River, Reedy Creek, scattered settlements, old trails and Long Island of the Holston—a sacred Cherokee gathering place and an important frontier crossroads.

Fort Robinson had been built near Long Island in 1761 but abandoned soon afterward. Fort Patrick Henry would not be constructed until 1776. In the spring of 1775, this was not yet a town, but it was becoming one of the principal gateways between the established colonies and the country beyond the Appalachian Mountains.

In fact, something of continental importance had happened here only five weeks before Lexington.

On March 10, Daniel Boone and approximately 30 axmen departed from Long Island to open what became the Wilderness Road. Boone’s party followed older Native American paths through Southwest Virginia, Powell Valley and Cumberland Gap toward Kentucky. Within about two weeks, they had reached the Kentucky River.

Boone’s work was connected to the Transylvania Purchase negotiated at Sycamore Shoals that March. Richard Henderson and his partners claimed to have purchased millions of acres from Cherokee leaders, although Dragging Canoe and others opposed the agreement and both Virginia and North Carolina later rejected its legality.

While shots were being fired at Lexington on April 19, Henderson was traveling along the road Boone had opened. His journal records that he traveled about 16 miles that day and camped on Otter Creek. The following day, he arrived at the settlement that became Boonesborough.

Henderson had no idea that war had begun.

That raises an interesting question: When did people living around Long Island learn what had happened?

News traveled rapidly for its time, but not instantly. Express riders carried reports from Massachusetts southward from town to town. The first account appeared in a Williamsburg newspaper on April 28—nine days after the fighting. Word reached the Moravian settlements around present-day Winston-Salem on May 17. Henderson recorded receiving a letter reporting the “battles at Boston” in Boonesborough on May 29—40 days after Lexington and Concord.

No surviving record appears to tell us the exact day the news reached Long Island. Based on those documented dates, settlers around present-day Kingsport probably heard sometime in May—perhaps three to five weeks after the first shots.

The news may have arrived with a rider from Virginia, a traveler coming through the Carolinas, or someone following Boone’s new road. It would have spread through cabins, trading places, churches, forts and gatherings rather than through television alerts or social media.

Yet local settlers were not entirely surprised by the crisis. In January 1775, three months before Lexington, leaders of sprawling Fincastle County—which included much of the Holston frontier—had declared that they would never surrender their liberties except at the cost of their lives.

The shot heard round the world was not heard in Kingsport on April 19. But its echo eventually traveled up the valleys and across the mountains.

When it arrived, the people living along the Holston discovered that the distant dispute with Britain had become a war—and that their frontier would soon become part of it.