Knoxville has become the kind of place people discover, move to, brag about, and sometimes complain about in the same week.
That is not new.
Knoxville has been changing since the beginning. The city was founded in 1791, after James White, a Revolutionary War veteran from North Carolina, arrived in the area around 1785 and established one of its first permanent structures. William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory, later chose the area around White’s homestead as the territorial capital. Knoxville became the place where Tennessee’s first state constitution was drafted, and it served as Tennessee’s first capital for more than 20 years…