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Established in March 1856, Roane County was named for Virginia jurist Spencer Roane. The town of New California was selected as the county seat, and in 1858, the name was changed to Spencer to further honor the judge. The courthouse built in 1859 was destroyed by fire in 1887. A new county courthouse was completed in 1889, and the railroad arrived in Spencer in 1892. New businesses and industry flourished as Spencer became the county hub. Summer normal schools were established throughout the county to prepare young teachers for state certification. In 1914, Spencer High School graduated one pupil in its first class. The early recognition for education expanded with the construction of one- and two-room schools within each community. Timbering began as people moved westward and established new homes and farming lands. The development of the gas and oil industry soon followed, and Roane County became a major producer by the early 1900s.
Bishop's "History of Roane County" is the standard work on its subject, but its chief appeal to the genealogist can be found in the hundreds of genealogical and historical essays of pioneer families of Roane County that comprise the second half of the work. Those essays, which, in most cases, are based upon interviews conducted by the author with a surviving family member, generally go back to the early nineteenth century and pertain to migrants from Virginia and the middle states possessing British, Irish, or Scotch-Irish stock.
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The men and women of Appalachia are strong and self-sufficient. In Roane County, Tennessee they most often have lived on and between the foothills of the Great Smokey Mountains. Times changed and as they did in this story, those who had become clearly isolated in their long-standing culture took change personally. They didn't like it. Leon and Rocky Houston are two such men, along with a large group of sympathetic followers. In the end that sympathy portrayed years of self-styled, anti-government lawsuits as well as the death of a sheriff's deputy and his retired, disabled ride-along officer. To believe the fifteen to twenty years of this rising storm ended in death for two men patrolling the public road "reserved" for the Houston clan came only as somewhat of a surprise. To believe that the storm clouds descended due to a school zone traffic violation five years before the killin's was at first a mystery. But a deep look at Rocky's 2001 courtroom "ticket tantrum" unveiled much more: Then and there he reportedly threw himself on the floor while yelling, "if you remember Waco you haven't seen anything yet." The comment's starkness unwinds within the book to explore the "sovereign citizens and militia mania" of the 90's and where that might have taken the brothers Houstons' thinking and need to kill "a few cops."