page_title: Fountain City, Knoxville
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Fountain City, Knoxville / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Tennessee Historical Commission marker and DAR monument recalling the site of Fort Adair (built c. 1791) in the Fountain City neighborhood of Knoxville, Tennessee, in the southeastern United States.
context_page_description: Fountain City is a neighborhood in northern Knoxville, Tennessee, in the southeastern United States. Although not a census-designated place, the populations of the two ZIP codes that serve Fountain City— 37918 and 37912— were 36,815 and 18,695, respectively, as of the 2000 U.S. census. At the time of its annexation by the city of Knoxville in 1962, Fountain City was the largest unincorporated community in the United States.
context_section_description: Euro-American settlement in what is now Fountain City began with the completion of Fort Adair (sometimes called Adair's Station), a supply depot built by Captain John Adair (1732–1827) around 1791 to protect westward-bound migrants from hostile Cherokee in the waning years of the Cherokee–American wars.  The fort's exact location is unknown, but it was likely located in the vicinity of the modern Lynnhurst Cemetery, near the confluence of Adair Creek and First Creek.  Adair and his wife are buried atop a hill overlooking the cemetery.
  The community that developed around Fort Adair, originally called "Grassy Valley," eventually became known as "Fountain Head."  In the mid-1820s, a circuit rider named E.F. Sevier (a grandson of John Sevier) helped establish the Fountain Head Methodist Church (the predecessor of the present Fountain City United Methodist Church), a meeting house which was completed just north of the Adair holdings in 1828.  Within a few years, the Fountain Head Campground had developed on land adjacent to the meeting house, which was fed by a large spring.  The campground was a popular place for religious revivals, some of which hosted as many as 2,000 people, until it was moved to the Inskip area (which was closer to the railroad) in the 1880s.  Today, the old campground is home to Fountain City Park.
  The Fountain Head Campground property was sold to land developers in 1885, and the following year the three-story, fifty-room Fountain Head Hotel was completed, overlooking the campground's spring.  With the completion of the hotel, the community began expanding.  In 1890, a post office was established, and since the name "Fountain Head" had already been claimed by another town in Tennessee, the community settled on the name "Fountain City."  That same year, the heart-shaped Fountain City Lake was completed, and a railroad known as the "Dummy Line" was constructed to connect the community to Knoxville (its southern terminus was at Emory Place).  The Dummy Line remained in operation until 1905, when it was replaced by a trolley.
caption: THC marker and DAR monument recalling the site of Fort Adair
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