The oldest county in Tennessee was never technically in Tennessee at all.

Washington County sits in the far northeastern corner of the state, tucked into a geography that makes a man feel like the mountains are being helpful. The Blue Ridge leans in from the east. The Unaka Range frames the south. The land drops and rises and folds back on itself the way ridge country does — nothing flat, nothing wasted, nothing without a view if you're willing to climb for it. The Nolichucky River cuts through here. Limestone Creek. Sinking Creek. Water finds its way out of these hills the way it always has.

Johnson City is the county seat now, a city of 70,000 that grew up around rail lines and tobacco warehouses and eventually a university and a veterans' hospital. But before there was Johnson City, before there was Tennessee, there was Jonesborough. America's oldest town west of the Alleghenies, sitting at the foot of the ridge like it knows exactly where it belongs.

Here is where Washington County gets strange and genuinely interesting. In 1784, when North Carolina decided it didn't want to deal with its western territories anymore, the settlers out here didn't sit around waiting for somebody else to make a decision. They made their own. They formed a government. They wrote a constitution. They called it the State of Franklin, elected John Sevier governor, and ran their own affairs for four years like they meant it.

The United States didn't recognize them. North Carolina wanted them back. The Spanish were making noises from the south. None of that stopped them, at least not right away. The State of Franklin minted no coins, had no formal army to speak of, and sometimes paid its governor and officials in animal skins because hard currency was scarce as hen's teeth. A circuit judge's salary was set at 500 deer hides per year. That is not a metaphor. That was the budget.

Franklin collapsed in 1788. Internal politics, Indian conflicts, pressure from North Carolina — it came apart the way most bold experiments do, from the inside out. Sevier eventually reconciled with North Carolina, got himself pardoned for treason charges that had accumulated, and went on to become the first governor of Tennessee when statehood finally came in 1796. The State of Franklin was gone, but Jonesborough and Washington County were still there. They've been there ever since.

Jonesborough also carries another distinction that people in the storytelling world know: it hosts the National Storytelling Festival, which has been drawing tens of thousands of people to this small town every October since 1973. The thing was started by a schoolteacher and a handful of locals who thought stories deserved a stage. Fifty-some years later, professional storytellers from across the country still come to this old courthouse town to stand on a stage and just talk. In the Appalachian tradition, that makes complete sense.

David Crockett was born in Washington County in 1786, two years after the State of Franklin tried to happen and two years before it fell apart. The specific spot was on the banks of Limestone Creek, and there's a birthplace site there now if you want to stand in the general vicinity and feel something. Crockett grew up poor and restless and ended up everywhere — frontier scout, state legislator, three terms in the U.S. Congress, and finally the Alamo in 1836 where he died at 49 with the rest of them. The coonskin cap mythology buried the actual man under a foot of legend, which is a shame. The actual man was a sharp-tongued politician who broke with Andrew Jackson on the Indian Removal Act, lost his seat for it, and went to Texas partly because he lost and partly because he was Crockett. The creek that runs past his birthplace site still runs cold and clear.

Tipper Gore was born in Washington City in 1948, which trips people up because they think of her as a D.C. political creature through and through. She grew up mostly in the Washington area, but she started here, and there's something fitting about that — a woman who spent decades between the hills of official Washington and some genuine East Tennessee roots. Her work on the PMRC in the mid-1980s made her famous or infamous depending on your record collection. She also did serious work on mental health advocacy that tends to get overlooked because the parental advisory sticker story was more interesting to the press.

Sam Venable was a man who decided that Smoky Mountain solitude was worth more than most things civilization was selling. Born in 1863, he eventually acquired a lease on Alum Cave Bluffs in what would become Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where he quarried saltpeter and ran cattle and lived by his own calendar. He's the man who sold — or more precisely, couldn't be forced to give — the last private lease in the national park. The government eventually had to wait him out. He stayed on Smoky Mountain until he died in 1949. Washington County didn't produce a lot of men like Sam Venable. Nobody did.

When you're in Jonesborough and the lunch hour comes around, you want to end up at the Parson's Table. It's in a 19th-century church building downtown, white clapboard and tall windows, and they've been feeding people there since 1979. The menu runs to Southern classics and regional food done with some care — country ham, local trout, the kind of cooking that understands this county. The building itself is old enough that the history of the place adds something to the meal, even if you never think about it consciously. Lunch or dinner, either way it's worth the stop.

Washington County today has the bones of a regional center — East Tennessee State University, a VA medical center, a strong arts presence in Jonesborough that punches well above the town's size. The National Storytelling Festival still runs every October. The mountains still sit where they've always sat.

The county was never technically part of Tennessee before it was. Everything it's done since then has been on its own terms anyway.

Come see your neighbors.

The Wayne Train visits all 423 Appalachian counties, one community at a time.