Web Design in Harrogate, TN

About Harrogate, Claiborne County

Harrogate is the largest city in Claiborne County, Tennessee. It sits against Cumberland Gap National Historical Park at the point where Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia meet, covering 7.26 square miles of land with no water, at 1,253 feet of elevation. The 2020 census counted 4,400 people. The community has answered to the name Harrogate since the nineteenth century but only incorporated under it in 1993, and before that the Census Bureau treated it as a census designated place called Harrogate-Shawanee, which counted 2,865 in 2000.

History of Harrogate

• Harrogate was founded in 1888 as a speculation. Alexander Arthur, running a firm called American Association, Ltd. to develop iron ore and coal around the Cumberland Gap, had already founded Middlesboro, Kentucky for his company's employees and furnaces and built a rail line from there to Knoxville, expecting Middlesboro to become the Pittsburgh of the South. He laid out Harrogate as the suburb where that city's elite would live, and American Association spent some two million dollars on it. The centerpiece was the Four Seasons Hotel, a 700 room building believed to have been the largest hotel in the United States at the time, with a lavish dining hall, a casino and a separate sanitarium. The panic of the early 1890s collapsed Arthur's London backing, and the hotel was sold and dismantled. What the failure left behind became the town's second act. In 1896 General Oliver O. Howard, the former Union officer behind Howard University, spoke at the Harrow School at Cumberland Gap, and Reverend A. A. Myers asked him to help found a college for the region. Howard recalled Lincoln's stated wish in 1863 to do something for the people of East Tennessee, most of whom had stayed loyal to the Union, and agreed. Myers bought the Four Seasons property, by then reduced to the sanitarium building alone, and Lincoln Memorial University was chartered on February 12, 1897, Lincoln's 88th birthday. When the sanitarium burned in 1902 its surviving blocks were built into Grant-Lee Hall, which is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Harrogate grew fast enough by 1974 to need a new middle school shared with the adjoining town of Cumberland Gap, incorporated as a city in 1993 with roughly 2,700 people, and grew by annexation into the county's largest city. It built a municipal sewage treatment system in the later 2000s to replace reliance on septic systems.

Landmarks and Places in Harrogate

• Cumberland Gap National Historical Park runs along the city's edge, covering 24,000 acres across Bell and Harlan counties in Kentucky, Claiborne County in Tennessee and Lee County in Virginia, and it is among the largest national parks in the eastern United States. It contains the Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee tripoint, reachable on foot by trail, along with 24 known caves ranging from about 20 feet to more than 16 miles long, and the 500 foot cliffs of White Rocks. Elevation inside the park runs from 1,100 to 3,500 feet, and the Wilderness Road crossing of the Gap is the reason any of this history happened here. In the city itself the landmarks are Lincoln Memorial University's campus, Grant-Lee Hall built from the burned sanitarium's stone and listed on the National Register, the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum, and the Daniel Boone Arboretum.

The Harrogate Economy

• The university is the economy in any practical sense. Lincoln Memorial University holds a 1,000 acre main campus bordering Cumberland Gap National Historical Park and enrolled 1,668 undergraduate and 4,413 graduate and professional students as of fall 2023, a graduate body several times the size of the resident city population. It is the parent of the DeBusk College of Osteopathic Medicine, the first osteopathic medical school in Tennessee, and is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Adjacency to the national park puts the city on the tourist route through the Gap.

Community Life in Harrogate

• Lincoln Memorial University's Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum holds a large collection of material on the school's namesake and on the Civil War, which is an unusual concentration of Lincoln scholarship for a town of this size in a former Confederate state, and follows directly from why the university exists. The Daniel Boone Arboretum holds over 50 labeled species of native trees. The university has run a partnership with Japan's Kanto International Senior High School. Schools serving the city are Ellen Myers Elementary, H. Y. Livesay Middle School and Forge Ridge Consolidated School, with Cumberland Gap High School and Tri-State Christian Academy also inside the city. Harrogate is twinned with Harrogate in the United Kingdom.

Local reference: en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org