Blount County, Tennessee
Blount County is a county located in the East Tennessee Grand Division of the U.S. state of Tennessee. As of the 2020 census, its population was 135,280.[2] The county seat is Maryville,[3] which is also the county's largest city. Blount County is included in the Knoxville metropolitan area.
Blount County
United States
1795
Maryville
567 sq mi (1,470 km2)
559 sq mi (1,450 km2)
7.8 sq mi (20 km2) 1.4%
135,280 
141,456
242/sq mi (93/km2)
History[edit]
What is today Blount County was for many thousands of years Indian territory, passed down to the Cherokee tribe that claimed the land upon the arrival of White settlers in the late 18th century. Shortly thereafter, on July 11, 1795, Blount County became the 10th county established in Tennessee, when the Territorial Legislature voted to split adjacent Knox and Jefferson Counties. The new county was named for the governor of the Southwest Territory, William Blount, and its county seat, Maryville, was named for his wife Mary Grainger Blount. This establishment, however, did little to settle the differences between White immigrants and Cherokee natives, which was, for the most part, not accomplished until an 1819 treaty.[4]
Like a majority of East Tennessee counties, Blount County was opposed to secession on the eve of the Civil War. In Tennessee's Ordinance of Secession referendum on June 8, 1861, Blount Countians voted against secession by a margin of 1,766 to 414.[5] Residents of pro-Union Cades Cove and pro-Confederate Hazel Creek (on the other side of the mountains in North Carolina) regularly launched raids against one another during the war.[6]
Throughout its history, the boundaries of Blount County have been altered numerous times, most notably in 1870, when a large swath of western Blount was split into Loudon and portions of other counties. Also, the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1936, while not affecting the legal boundaries of Blount County, has significantly impacted the use of southeastern Blount County.[7]
Blount County has been served by The Daily Times, currently published in Maryville, since 1883.[8]
On July 2, 2015, a freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed. About 5,000 residents were displaced from their homes within a two-mile (three-kilometer) radius.[9][10][11][12][13]
Like most of East Tennessee, Blount County has been a Republican bastion for decades. The last non-Republican to carry the county was Theodore Roosevelt, during his third-party run in 1912. In 1976, Jimmy Carter took 46% of the vote. In 1992, George H. W. Bush was held to 48.9% of the vote—the only time in over a century that a Republican has failed to win a majority in Blount County.
The current elected members of the Blount County government are:[28]
Economy[edit]
Most of the early European-American settlers were of little means; they were subsistence farmers throughout the early years of the county's establishment. The first industry to make its mark on Blount County, as in other neighboring counties, was that of lumber.
It was the massive development of this industry in the mountains of east Blount that, in part, led to the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It includes the southeastern portion of the county. Today, manufacturing has replaced lumber in importance, with over 100 manufacturing plants located in the county.[4]
Denso Manufacturing Tennessee Inc., a division of Denso Global, is the county's largest employer, with about 3,000 employees.[29][30]
Transportation[edit]
Paratransit[edit]
Blount County is served by the East Tennessee Human Resource Agency's Public Transit system. ETHRA operates in about 16 counties in eastern Tennessee, and is headquartered in the nearby city of Loudon. The service offers residents of any of the counties covered by ETHRA door-to-door pickup transportation across its service area by request only.[34] ETHRA provides a large variety of services in Blount County and other parts of East Tennessee.[35]
Airports[edit]
TYS - McGhee Tyson Airport
In addition to the federally operated Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which draws many visitors to the county each year, Blount County operates numerous smaller community parks and recreation centers, primarily in the cities of Alcoa and Maryville. Some of these facilities include:[36]
An integral part of keeping the parks and other parts of Blount County beautiful is the organization called Keep Blount Beautiful.[37] This organization works in coordination with other companies including The City of Alcoa Residential Recycling Pick Up Service[38] and Blount County HGS Trash and Recycling Same Day Residential Pick Up Service,[39] as well as many other recycling resources in Blount County,[40] to work towards the community goals of reducing air, water, and land pollution in order to reduce particulate matter and smog,[41] and to improve the overall health of local parks and preserved ecosystems in Blount County, as well as surrounding areas, of East Tennessee. These organizations and companies are appreciated by thousands of East Tennesseans due to their honorable work in the Blount County community.