SUMNER COUNTY

County Seat: Gallatin
As you learned (or will learn) in fourth grade, the "long hunters" were explorers, adventurers, and professional hunters who came into Tennessee in the 1760s and 1770s, who were armed with "long" guns and who stayed a "long" time. The most famous long hunter was Daniel Boone. Another important long hunter was Kasper Mansker, who is considered the first white settler of Sumner County.

Mansker was tough, resourceful, and persistent. In 1780 he built a fort called Mansker's Station along the banks of the creek now named for him. Settlers had to abandon that fort because of Native American raides, but he returned and built another fort about a mile north of that first one. This second Mansker's Station was an important staging post in early Middle Tennessee.

Today there is a replica of Mansker's Station in Goodlettsville open for visitors. Click here to be taken to its web site and to learn about some of its many living history events.
 

Also in Sumner County you will find Rock Castle, the home of Daniel Smith. Smith, born in Virginia in 1748, was a surveyor – an important job to have when most of what we now call the United States wasn’t even mapped. In the winter of 1779-1780, which is the exact time that people were coming to settle Nashville, he was trying to survey what is now the border between Tennessee and Kentucky (which at that time was the border between North Carolina and Virginia.) He liked what he saw so much that he came back a few years later and built Rock Castle. Smith later became secretary of the territory south of the Ohio River (now commonly referred to as the Southwest Territory) and a senator.

Today, Rock Castle still exists in Sumner County. Like Mansker's Station, it has living history events.
 

And here's the Sumner County Courthouse, which, by the way, looks very similiar in architectural style to the courthouses in Davidson, Obion and Polk counties.