Blount Mansion

In the early 1790s, Knoxville was a new town at the edge of a territory that had not yet become Tennessee. William Blount, appointed governor of the Southwest Territory by President George Washington, chose the settlement as its capital. Around 1792, he began building a home there. The modest frame house that survives is often called the birthplace of Tennessee because state-making business took place within its rooms.

That political story is only one part of the house’s record. Blount and his family were among the most powerful people in the territory, and their domestic life depended on enslaved labor. A deed from 1797 lists twenty-six people enslaved to Blount and his family. Their names and individual histories are fragmentary, but the record makes clear that this was not simply a governor’s residence. Enslaved people maintained the household and worked in the family’s business enterprises, even as the new government debated the territory’s future.