Blount County, Tennessee

Blount County, Tennessee
Blount County Courthouse in Maryville
Location in the U.S. state of Tennessee
Tennessee's location in the U.S.
Founded	1795
Named for	William Blount
Seat	Maryville
Largest city	Maryville
Area
• Total	567 sq mi (1,469 km2)
• Land	559 sq mi (1,448 km2)
• Water	7.8 sq mi (20 km2), 1.4%
Population (est.)
• (2015)	127,253
• Density	220/sq mi (85/km²)
Congressional district	2nd
Time zone	Eastern: UTC-5/-4
Website	www.blounttn.org

Blount County is a county located in the U.S. state of Tennessee. As of the 2010 census, the population was 123,010. It had an estimated population of 126,339 in 2014. The county seat is Maryville, which is also the county's largest city.

Blount County is included in the Knoxville, TN Metropolitan Statistical Area.

What is today Blount County was for many thousands of years Indian territory, passed down to the Cherokee tribe that claimed the land upon the arrival of white settlers in the late 18th century. Shortly thereafter, on July 11, 1795, Blount County became the tenth county established in Tennessee, when the Territorial Legislature voted to split adjacent Knox and Jefferson counties. The new county was named for the governor of the Southwest Territory, William Blount, and its county seat, Maryville, was named for his wife Mary Grainger Blount. This establishment, however, did little to settle the differences between white immigrants and Cherokee natives, which was, for the most part, not accomplished until an 1819 treaty.

Like many East Tennessee counties, Blount County was opposed to secession on the eve of the Civil War. In Tennessee's Ordinance of Secession referendum on June 8, 1861, Blount Countians voted against secession by a margin of 1,766 to 414. Residents of pro-Union Cades Cove and pro-Confederate Hazel Creek (on the other side of the mountains in North Carolina) regularly launched raids against one another during the war.

Throughout its history the boundaries of Blount County have been altered numerous times, most notably in 1870 when a large swath of western Blount was split into Loudon and portions of other counties. Also, the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1936, while not affecting the legal boundaries of Blount County, has significantly impacted the use of southeastern Blount County.