Before there was a Bradley County, there was a capital.

Not Nashville. Not Washington. The capital of the Cherokee Nation, moved to a patch of ground called Red Clay in 1832, after the stfate of Georgia stripped the tribe of every legal right it had — banned their meetings, took their land, dared them to object. 

So they came north. Just across the state line, into what's now southern Bradley County.

There was nothing there. A spring called the Blue Hole and a stand of trees. They built a council house and a few cabins and held eleven councils there between 1832 and 1838, trying everything a people can legally try. Appeals to the president. Appeals to Congress. Lawsuits in federal court. 

They did it all by the book.

The book lost.

The removal began in May 1838. The Cherokee agency up at Charleston, on the Hiwassee River, became the military headquarters for the whole operation. Fort Cass went up there to hold the detainees, and the camps stretched down through northern Bradley County between Charleston and Cleveland. Rattlesnake Springs was the gathering point where they started walking. 

We call it the Trail of Tears. That's the polite name.

Here's the part I can't shake. When the Cherokee left Red Clay, they scooped the coals from the last council fire into iron pots. Four men carried those pots on foot, all the way to Oklahoma, and rekindled the fire when they got there. 

Think about that. Everything taken. And somebody still said, we're not letting the fire go out.

There's an eternal flame burning at Red Clay today, at the state historic park, and the Blue Hole is still running cold and clear. Go stand next to it sometime. It'll quiet you down. 

The Tennessee legislature created Bradley County in February 1836 — while the Cherokee were still living on it, holding councils, hoping.

The county was named for Edward Bradley, a militia colonel who fought in the War of 1812. The legislature ordered that the county seat be called Cleveland, in honor of Col. Benjamin Cleveland — Revolutionary War hero, Kings Mountain.

If that name rings a bell, it should. He's the same enormous North Carolinian this column visited back in Cleveland County, N.C. The man was so admired they named towns after him in two states. Also so large they had to build him a special chair. History remembers what it wants to.

Then the war came, and Bradley County did something a lot of East Tennessee did.

It said no.

Like most East Tennessee counties, Bradley was largely opposed to secession. Its sons fought on both sides. Lincoln himself considered the railroad near Cleveland a key to winning the western theater, and the bridge at Charleston got burned more than once — a piece of infrastructure so important both sides kept setting it on fire.

After the war, a ruined man built an empire in his backyard.

Christopher Hardwick had backed the Confederacy and it left him penniless. In the 1870s he started casting iron stoves behind his house in Cleveland. Not a factory. A backyard.

By the late 1880s the foundry had 15 workers turning out 12 stoves a day. By 1894 the workforce had tripled and Hardwick stoves were selling all over the South.

It didn't stop for a hundred years. During World War II the plant quit making stoves and made aircraft components instead. Over its lifetime, Hardwick built more than nine and three-quarter million stoves.

Odds are decent your grandmother cooked Sunday dinner on a piece of Bradley County iron and never knew it.

Hardwick wasn't alone, either — Cleveland Woolen Mills came in 1880, the Cleveland Chair Company in 1884, and the town spent the next century as one of the stove capitals of America. Hardwick, Dixie-Magic Chef, Brown Stove Works — all Cleveland companies, and the first two eventually landed under the Whirlpool umbrella, which is still there making appliances today. 

A county that started with a council fire ended up heating half the country's kitchens.

I'm not saying that means anything. I'm just saying I noticed.

Now, the churches.

Cleveland doesn't just have churches. Cleveland has headquarters. Three denominations run their entire operations from Bradley County — the Church of God, the Church of God of Prophecy, and the Church of God Jerusalem Acres. 

The Church of God started a Bible school in 1918 that grew into Lee University, now one of the fastest-growing Christian schools in the country. That's a lot of gospel per square mile. Kay would feel right at home.

One more stop, and it's a sad one, so brace yourself.

Behind St. Luke's Episcopal Church in downtown Cleveland stands a mausoleum of white Carrara marble. Inside is Nina Craigmiles, seven years old, killed on St. Luke's Day, October 18, 1871, when the buggy she was riding in with her grandfather was struck by a switch engine at the Inman Street crossing. 

Her father built the whole church in her memory. The mausoleum too. Locals will tell you red stains keep appearing on that white marble, and that no amount of scrubbing keeps them gone. Folks say the stone weeps for her.

I'm a newspaperman. I don't print ghost stories as fact.

But I've also stood next to enough grief in my life to know that some of it doesn't wash out. Make of the marble what you will.

Bradley County today: around a hundred thousand people, 332 square miles tucked between the Georgia line and the Hiwassee, with Chattanooga just down the road. Stove money built the downtown. Church money built the colleges. And it gave the country Paul Huff, who won the Medal of Honor in Italy after advancing alone into heavy fire to find out where the enemy was.

But the heart of the place is still that quiet field at Red Clay.

A council house. A cold spring. A fire that got carried a thousand miles in an iron pot because letting it die was not an option.

Come see your neighbors.

Know Your Appalachian Neighbors appears weekly in The Wayne Train.