Robertson County, TN
History
The first white settlement in Robertson County was established by Thomas Kilgore, who came there in 1778 claiming land and building a station in 1779 near present-day Cross Plains. Prior to statehood this area was one of the counties in Mero District and called Tennessee County, located north of Nashville on the Kentucky border.One of the first acts of the new state was to appropriate Tennessee County’s name for its own use and to divide that county into Robertson and Montgomery Counties. Robertson County took its name from General James Robertson, often called the “Father of Middle Tennessee.” Robertson County, established by the general assembly on April 9, 1796, covered 477 square miles and contained 304,640 acres.
Residents began forming churches and schools almost as soon as they arrived in the area. Red River Baptist Church in Adams was constituted on July 25, 1791, and in 1798 Mt. Zion Methodist Church was organized. Both are active churches today. Tradition has it that Robert Black started the first school in the area on Sulphur Fork in 1789, and Thomas Mosby also taught a school in the area before 1796.
Over the first half of the nineteenth century, Robertson County grew from a sparsely settled frontier community of 4,228 to a society of over 16,000 people. Most of the early white settlers in the area were of English or Scots-Irish origin, although there were also contingents of people whose backgrounds lay in the German states and other western European countries. A few of the settlers brought slaves with them and a small contingent of free blacks lived in the county in the 1790s. The earliest reference to African Americans in the area was in 1789. However, the majority of the region’s inhabitants used no slave labor.
Source: https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/robertson-county/