Elizabethton, Tennessee

Drive into Elizabethton on US-321

The road from the lake to Elizabethton is one of the better drives in this corner of Tennessee. You take US-321 west out of Hampton, the highway squeezes through the Doe River Gorge for ten minutes with rock walls on one side and the river on the other, and then the gorge opens up and you’re rolling into the east side of Elizabethton along Elk Avenue. The first thing you see is the river running through town. The second thing you see is the bridge.

Elizabethton is the county seat of Carter County and the largest town you can get to in under half an hour from the property. Population 14,546 at the 2020 Census. It’s where guests come when they want a coffee shop that isn’t a gas station, a sit-down restaurant, a Food City for the weekly grocery run, or any of the actual history that this corner of the state is built on.

The bridge

The Elizabethton Covered Bridge is the photo everyone takes. Built in 1882, 154 feet long, spanning the Doe River where it bends through downtown. A local doctor named E. E. Hunter served as contractor and hired an engineer from the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad to build it. Hunter called it his “five dollar bridge” — his profit margin on the contract was five dollars.

The 1901 flood took out every other bridge in town. The covered bridge survived because of the way Matson designed the trusses to handle the flow of debris. It’s been closed to cars for decades but it’s open to pedestrians and bikes year-round.

The bridge sits at the bottom of a park that runs along the Doe River. There are benches, picnic tables, walking paths, ballfields, and on a summer afternoon there’s usually a kid with a fishing rod on the bank. It’s the most walkable green space in town.

Sycamore Shoals

If you have any patience for early American history, Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park is worth an hour. It sits along the Watauga River on the west side of town, free admission, with a museum, a 450-seat amphitheater, a reconstructed log fort, and a 2-mile trail along the river.

The short version of what happened here:

• 1772: A group of settlers organized the Watauga Association, generally considered one of the first constitutional governments west of the Appalachian Mountains.
• 1775: Richard Henderson met with the Cherokee leaders Attakullakulla and Oconastota and negotiated the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals — the purchase of roughly 20 million acres that became most of Kentucky and parts of Tennessee. The legality has been debated since the day it was signed.
• 1776: The Cherokee attacked Fort Watauga and were repelled on July 21.
• 1780: The Overmountain Men mustered at Sycamore Shoals and walked from here over the mountains to the Battle of Kings Mountain in South Carolina — a turning point of the southern campaign of the Revolution.

The museum tells all of it. There’s a documentary in the small theater that plays on a loop. In summer, the park stages an outdoor drama called Liberty! The Saga of Sycamore Shoals in the amphitheater. Check the park’s schedule before you drive over.

A short drive from the main park is the Carter Mansion, built between 1775 and 1780 and called the oldest frame house standing in Tennessee. Limited hours; ask at the Sycamore Shoals visitor center for the schedule.

Downtown East Elk Avenue

East Elk Avenue is the historic main street, four or five walkable blocks of restored brick storefronts. It’s not Asheville and it’s not pretending to be. It’s a real small-town downtown that’s been slowly coming back over the last decade.

What’s actually here changes year to year, so this is where we tell guests to walk it themselves and pick a place. As of when we last walked it:

• A couple of independent coffee shops
• The Bonnie Kate Theater, a restored 1920s movie house that hosts films and live events
• A few restaurants worth a stop — call ahead for hours, especially Sunday and Monday
• Antique stores, a bookshop, the kind of small businesses that keep a downtown alive
• Carter County Tourism’s office at 615 East Elk, a good place to grab a current map

We won’t list specific restaurants by name here. Small-town restaurants open and close, and we’d rather you walk East Elk on a Saturday morning, look in the windows, see what’s busy, and pick somewhere that looks right than show up with a list from a year ago. Sunday and Monday are the slow days; most places are open Tuesday through Saturday.

What to skip

Two things we don’t send guests to:

• The chain restaurant strip on the west side of Elk Avenue. Olive Garden, Applebee’s, the usual. You can eat those at home. The downtown places are better and the prices are similar.
• Driving downtown on the day of a parade. Elizabethton does several parades a year, mostly along Elk Avenue. They close the road. If you see a barricade, take a side street.

Practical errands

This is also the town for things that aren’t tourism:

• Food City on West Elk Avenue (the full-service grocery)
• Walmart Supercenter on West Elk
• Sycamore Shoals Hospital, the closest hospital to the lake
• A handful of pharmacies, a couple of urgent cares, gas stations everywhere
• The Elizabethton Municipal Airport for general aviation (the bigger Tri-Cities Airport is 30 minutes farther in Blountville)

If you’re stocking up for a week or filling a prescription, this is where to do it. Mountain City has a Walmart too, in the other direction, but Elizabethton is the bigger town and the better grocery run.

How to spend half a day here

Park near the covered bridge — there’s a small lot at the south end on the park side. Walk across the bridge. Walk along the Doe River for fifteen minutes. Cross back. Walk up Hattie Avenue to East Elk and pick somewhere for lunch. After lunch, drive five minutes west to Sycamore Shoals, do the museum and the river trail, and you’re back at the townhouse by mid-afternoon.

That’s the standard Elizabethton day. We’ve done it with every set of family that’s come up to stay.

How to get there from the townhouse

TN-67 west off the hill, then west on US-321 through the Doe River Gorge, into Elizabethton along East Elk Avenue. About 25 minutes door to downtown in normal traffic. Add ten minutes if there’s a high school football game on Friday night in fall — the town moves to Citizens Bank Stadium and the streets around it get busy.

The Watauga connection

Elizabethton is on the Watauga River, the same river that’s dammed up the road to form Watauga Lake. Sycamore Shoals sits on the same water you’re looking at from the deck, just thirty miles downstream and on the free-flowing side of the dam. There’s a continuity to it. The first settlers stopped at this bend in the river because the shoals were shallow enough to cross. The dam went in 170 years later because the gorge upstream was deep enough to hold a lake. Same water. Different uses. Worth thinking about when you’re walking the trail at Sycamore Shoals and looking at the river that fills the lake you came here for.

Related on the lake

• The covered bridge downtown
• Sycamore Shoals — major TN history
• Restaurants by drive time