Davy Crockett, frontiersman and future congressman, came to the Franklin County area sometime around 1809. Settling at first on Mulberry Creek in adjoining Lincoln County, he moved a couple of years later to Bean's Creek near Huntland. (A historical marker noting the homeplace of his first wife Polly Finlay can be seen along Rt. 64 west toward Salem.) At that time, Franklin County largely forested and had very few white settlers. Crockett had come to the area because of the good hunting it afforded. The period from 1810 to 1830 would see tremendous change all across the upper south. As more and more settlers arrived, Tennessee's population would swell from 261,727 (1810) to 681,904 (1830). This nearly threefold growth in twenty years transformed every section of the state. In Franklin County, most of the change was seen in the area around Winchester as forests were cleared to make fields, crops were planted, and stores, houses, and mills were built.
On the plateau there were a few settlers who continued to hunt the still ample game of there, and in the coves the settlers were already beginning to run hogs in the mast-rich bottoms. In the valley, the farmers would grow the corn that fed these hogs as they were driven out to markets from Philadelphia to New Orleans. Around Huntland and back toward Lexie Crossroads, the cleared fields were being used not only for corn but for cotton. The harvested cotton was brought to Bean's Creek where it was baled and loaded onto flat-bottomed boats built there for this purpose. Later in the winter as the waters rose, the boat loads of cotton were floated. Then began a long trip: Bean's Creek to the Elk River, Elk River to the Tennessee River, along the Tennessee through Alabama and then back across Tennessee to the Ohio River. Finally the boats turned into the Mississippi river for the journey down to New Orleans where the cotton was sold.
By the 1840's it was clear that this method of transport was too risky to be reliable for growing businesses and strong support developed for a railroad that would reach from Nashville to Chattanooga and onto the then tiny village that would become Atlanta. By 1848 crews were working to drill and blast a tunnel through narrow neck in the plateau behind Cowan. By 1850 the railroad advancing from Nashville had reached Decherd and Franklin County was quickly drawn into the new commercial world of railroad trade and travel. Eventually spurs from this mainline would link Huntland and Winchester as well as Sewanee and Tracy City to the great railroad network then developing in the South. In the late 1850's a major donation of land from the Sewanee Coal Company--later incorporated into United States Steel--would create a homeland on the plateau for what would become the University of the South. Founded in 1857, the University did not actually begin to function until 1869.
The early 1860's saw the bitter division not only of the nation, but of many local communities as well. Franklin County was divided in its loyalties and some parts of the county were strongly southern while other areas were strongly unionist. The county sent men to fight on both sides of the war. With the end of the war and the restoration of civil normalcy at the end of the Reconstruction period in 1877, Tennessee began a long journey toward modernization. The landscape of the county was increasingly domesticated. More and more fields were cleared. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the great devastation of the remaining stands of virgin timber. Only a few cove pockets like Thumping Dick Cove escaped the saw and the ax as the best trees were cut to supply a national demand for lumber. This period was the period of great railroad expansion and much of the timber was cut into crossties for railroads. Across Franklin County sawmills were a common feature of the landscape and a common rural occupation.
By now the economy of Franklin County had shifted from the livestock-grain basis it had before 1850 toward a lumber and mercantile base. Although the number of farms would continue to grow from 1875 to 1925, the basis of our national life was shifting as America became more industrial and as life in Franklin County began to shift its focus from the farm to the town. By World War I, it was clear that the political and economic life of the county centered in and revolved around Winchester as the county seat. Winchester would hold this dominant position until the 1980's when new economic forces associated with industrial development and county-wide residential development would challenge its role in county leadership. In the years after World War II, another dimension would be added to county life by the influence of TVA, AEDC, and NASA. Now to the old pattern of farms and business was added the dimension of high technology. The county of farmers and storekeepers became also a county of machinists, technicians and engineers.