Before They Were Presidents

Three men who would become President of the United States passed through Sullivan County, Tennessee, slept at the same frontier inn, and traveled the same road through the Appalachian mountains. Their stories intersect here — on the Great Stage Road, at the Old Deery Inn in Blountville — in ways that illuminate both the men and the place.

Before he was Old Hickory, before he was the Hero of New Orleans, before he reshaped the American presidency, Andrew Jackson was a young frontier lawyer riding the circuit through East Tennessee. Born in the Carolina borderlands in 1767, Jackson moved to the western frontier as a young man, practicing law in the new settlements that were rapidly filling the trans-Appalachian territory.

Jackson traveled the Great Stage Road repeatedly in the late 18th century, the very years when William Blount was organizing the Southwest Territory from Rocky Mount. The frontier world Jackson moved through — rough, ambitious, violent, and full of possibility — was the same world that Sullivan County was building. The Deery Inn in Blountville was a natural stopping point on the road that connected the eastern courts to the western settlements.

Jackson would go on to become the seventh President, but the man who slept at the Deery Inn was not yet a president. He was a frontier lawyer, a product of exactly the kind of place Sullivan County was: raw, new, and convinced that the future belonged to the West.

James Knox Polk, the eleventh President, was born in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in 1795 — just one year before Tennessee achieved statehood. His family moved to Tennessee when he was eleven, and Polk grew up in the young state that Sullivan County had helped create.

Polk's political career took him along the Great Stage Road repeatedly. As a Tennessee congressman, governor, and ultimately president, he traveled the road that connected Tennessee's political centers. The Deery Inn in Blountville, positioned on the state's primary east-west corridor, was among his stops.

Polk would become the president who expanded America to the Pacific — annexing Texas, acquiring Oregon, and winning the Mexican-American War. But the road that carried him to those ambitions ran through Sullivan County first.

Andrew Johnson's connection to Sullivan County is perhaps the most direct. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808, Johnson moved to Greeneville, Tennessee — just 40 miles from Blountville — as a young man. He set up a tailor shop, married Eliza McCardle, and began the political career that would take him from Greeneville alderman to President of the United States.

Johnson traveled through Sullivan County frequently. Greeneville's proximity to Blountville meant the Old Deery Inn was a familiar waypoint. As a congressman, governor, senator, vice president, and ultimately Lincoln's successor, Johnson's career was geographically rooted in the very landscape where these presidential paths converge.

Johnson is the most complicated of the three — a Unionist from Confederate Tennessee, a president who fought Congress over Reconstruction, the first president to be impeached. But in Sullivan County, he was simply another traveler on the Great Stage Road, stopping at the same inn where Jackson and Polk had rested before him.

What makes Sullivan County's presidential story remarkable is not just that three presidents passed through — it's that they all used the same infrastructure. The Great Stage Road, the Deery Inn, the Blountville county seat — these were the connective tissue of frontier political life. The road didn't just carry presidents; it carried the commerce, communication, and ambition that produced presidents.

Today, the Old Deery Inn still stands in Blountville, undergoing careful restoration by Sullivan County. The road has been paved and renamed, but the route is the same. And the three presidential stories — the frontier lawyer, the expansionist, and the tailor — still converge at a stagecoach inn in Tennessee's oldest county seat.