A Short History of Dickson County

County seat: Charlotte · Largest city: Dickson · Founded: 1803

Dickson County sits in Middle Tennessee, about an hour west of Nashville, on the western edge of the Tennessee Central Basin where the rolling hills begin to climb toward the Highland Rim. It is a county whose story is shaped by three forces — iron, railroads, and the stubborn independence of the people who settled its creek bottoms and ridge tops. Long before it had a name on a map, this was hunting ground for Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Shawnee peoples, and the traces they cut along the creeks became the first roads European settlers followed into the region.

Creation and a borrowed name

The Tennessee General Assembly created Dickson County on October 25, 1803, carved from Montgomery and Robertson counties. The new county was named for Dr. William Dickson, a North Carolina congressman and planter who never actually lived in the area that would bear his name. The naming was a favor from his friend Montgomery Bell — the industrialist who would shape the county's first great era. The new county's first seat was established at Charlotte, which remains one of the oldest county seats in Middle Tennessee and still serves as the center of county government today.

The iron era

What put Dickson County on the map was iron. The region's hills held rich seams of brown hematite ore, and its forests provided the charcoal the furnaces needed. The story properly begins at Fort White Bluffs, the early iron forge settlement established around 1806 on the site of what is now the town of White Bluff — the forge's chimney is among the oldest industrial landmarks in Middle Tennessee. From that seed grew a cluster of charcoal iron furnaces that, for much of the nineteenth century, made this corner of Tennessee one of the iron-producing centers of the young United States.

Montgomery Bell is the towering figure of this era. Bell bought the Cumberland Iron Works in 1817 and built it into a substantial operation, and his name lives on today in Montgomery Bell State Park, which preserves the furnace site and the landscape that produced the ore. The park also shelters the reconstructed Cumberland Presbyterian birthplace — the denomination was founded in 1810 in a log cabin on the Dickson County side of the Harpeth valley, a fact that still draws visitors to the park. Other furnaces dotted the county — Valley Forge, and others along Jones and Turnbull creeks — and together they shipped iron pig and hollow-ware down the Harpeth and on to Nashville and beyond. The iron economy demanded labor, charcoal burners, teamsters, and furnace tenders, and the little communities that grew up around each works gave the county much of its early shape.

The charcoal-iron era could not last. As railroads reached deeper into the country and as anthracite and later coke-fueled iron from elsewhere undercut the cost of charcoal smelting, Dickson County's furnaces went cold. The last of them closed before the turn of the twentieth century, and the county's economy tilted toward farming, timber, and the new opportunity the railroads themselves would bring.

The railroad and the rise of Dickson

The iron works had depended on crude roads and the river; the railroad would redraw the map. When the Nashville & Northwestern (later part of the Louisville & Nashville system) pushed its line through the county during the Civil War era — completed to the Tennessee River in the mid-1860s — it created a new axis of settlement. The little village of Dickson grew up along the rail line, and as the furnace towns faded, Dickson rose. The county's growth steadily shifted east toward the tracks, and by the early twentieth century Dickson had overtaken Charlotte as the county's commercial center, though Charlotte kept the courthouse.

The railroad made Dickson a shipping point for timber and farm goods and brought manufacturing. For most of the twentieth century the town's identity was bound up with the Dickson County clay and brick industry — the Shofner and other brickyards took advantage of the county's fine clay deposits, and for a time Dickson brick went into buildings across the region. The city also became known for its hospital and, later, as a regional retail and medical hub serving the western rim counties.

Communities great and small

Beyond Dickson and Charlotte, the county is stitched together from smaller communities, each with its own character. White Bluff, the old Fort White Bluffs, keeps its iron-forge origins in its very name. Burns, on the county's eastern edge, grew where the railroad met the road to Nashville and today leans toward its larger neighbor. Vanleer, up the old furnace road in the western hills, began as a company town around a furnace and survives as a quiet ridge community — one of the smallest incorporated towns in the county. Slayden, smaller still, is a tiny dot on the map that has stubbornly persisted for more than a century. Each place reflects a different moment in the county's long shift from iron to rail to road.

From isolated county to commuting country

For most of its history Dickson County was rural and self-contained, its people farming, cutting timber, working the small factories, and minding their own business. The arrival of Interstate 40 in the 1960s, slicing across the county within easy reach of Dickson and Burns, began to change that. Suddenly Nashville was a short drive rather than a half-day's journey, and over the following decades the eastern half of the county — Dickson, Burns, White Bluff — became increasingly a commuting and bedroom country for the metro. Growth has been steady rather than explosive, and the county has held onto a good deal of its rural character even as subdivisions and chain stores have gathered along the highway corridors.

Dickson County today

Today Dickson County is a blend of all its eras. The courthouse still sits in Charlotte where it has for two centuries. The old furnace sites are quiet, preserved in parks and woodlots. The railroad still runs, though it carries freight now rather than passengers. Dickson is the busy center, the place people come for the hospital, the courthouse annex, the shops, and a meal. And the smaller communities still define the county's character — a place where the answer to "where are you from?" is often a wide place in the road that has its own post office, its own history, and its own pride.

That pride is the through-line of this history. Dickson County was named for a man who never saw it, built up by men who bent its iron and timber to their will, reshaped by the rail and the interstate, and carried forward by people who, generation after generation, chose to stay in these hills and hollows and make something of them. This directory is a small part of that long story — a record of the businesses that keep these communities going today.

Have a story or a correction about Dickson County history? Get in touch — we'd like to hear it.

Read about each community: Dickson, Charlotte, White Bluff, Burns, Vanleer, Slayden.

Compiled from widely published Dickson County histories and Tennessee state records. If you spot an error, we'd welcome a correction — see “Get in touch” above.