Fifteen minutes from our site at Anchor Down, on a slow and pretty drive that hugs the shoreline of Douglas Lake most of the way, sits the small town of Dandridge. . We rolled into town figuring on a quick lunch and a look around. We left a few hours, three stops, and a couple hundred years of history later.
The town named for a First Lady
Dandridge is the second-oldest town in Tennessee, chartered back in 1783, and it has a claim no other town in the
country can make: it's named for Martha Dandridge Washington — using her maiden name. That's right, the only town in America named for a First Lady, and it doesn't even use her famous married name.
That bit of trivia ends up mattering more than you'd think. Most of downtown sits below the high-water mark of Douglas Lake, which means that when TVA dammed the French Broad River in the 1940s, the historic district was slated to go under right along with the farmland. The town fought back, and the story goes that residents wrote to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt herself, making the case that you couldn't very well drown the one town in the nation named for a First Lady. It worked. TVA built an earthen dike to hold the lake back, and to this day downtown Dandridge goes about its business behind a wall, with the water sitting higher than the streets on the other side. Walk the historic district — a working National Historic District, where a handful of the original taverns are still standing and in use, and where Davy Crockett took out his marriage license back in 1806 — and you'd never know the lake is right there over your shoulder, politely held at bay.
Lunch at Tinsley-Bible
We'd read about Tinsley-Bible Drugs in a couple of places before we came, so it was the first stop. It's an honest-to-goodness old-time drugstore and soda fountain on Gay Street. The place has been a working pharmacy since 1911, which makes it one of the oldest continuously running businesses in town, and the soda fountain came along in 1942 when the family bought the store next door and expanded. They have had the same booths, same counter, same idea ever since.
The whole staff wears Tennessee orange — which I assumed was just because we were in Volunteer country, but it turns out it's a tribute to co-founder "Doc" Bible, a UT pharmacy man. The woman who waited on us was as friendly as they come —
she had a dry, perfectly timed sense of humor. That's Peggy Fain, who's been working this soda fountain for the better part of thirty-six years and is a bona fide local legend — the Appalachian Channel has filmed her more than once, the town threw her a surprise 80th birthday party for thirty years of service, and come Christmas she rides in the parade as Mrs. Claus.
I went straight for the classics. The hot dog all the way is the genuine article — a Southern dog with slaw piled on top, and if you've never had it that way, you are missing out. Then the Bible Burger, the house signature, which we were told that the secret ingredient is "Holy Cow". We chased all of it with an old-fashioned hand-dipped milkshake and a root beer float, both excellent. The experience felt like we were stepping into a time machine to the way things used to be.
A beer at Dandridge Brewing Company
A few doors down on Gay Street is Dandridge Brewing Company, and here's the fun catch: despite the name, they don't brew any beer. It's a casual pub and restaurant that pours a rotating lineup of other breweries' craft beers — about the only thing they actually brew themselves is the coffee. The building itself is part of the appeal, one of the oldest on the square, dating to around 1820. The kitchen leans into deli-style sandwiches, giant Bavarian pretzels with a house beer cheese, and charcoal-grilled steaks on the weekends, with live music to go with them. I grabbed a Hippies & Cowboys from Tennessee Brew Works off the tap list. I'm an IPA guy, so it was right in my wheelhouse on paper — this particular one just didn't land for me, and next time I'll work my way through the rest of that rotating lineup.
(Bush's Beans gets its own post)
From there we made the short hop over to the Bush's Beans Visitor Center in Chestnut Hill — and that one earned its own write-up, because there's far too much going on there to cram in here. Read about Bush's Beans →
Douglas Dam
On the way back, we drove past our RV Park, Anchor Down, and out to the Douglas Dam overlook, and it's worth the detour for the view alone: a hillside picnic area with a wide-open panorama of Douglas Lake and the Smokies stacked up behind it — on a clear day you can pick out Mount LeConte. There are picnic tables, a big pavilion, restrooms, and eagles and osprey working the water below the dam. You can take it in from up top at the overlook or down below by the powerhouse.
But the view is only half of it. The other half is the story, and it's a doozy. Douglas Dam was thrown up in 1942–43 in a world-record 382 days — twelve months and seventeen days — on an all-out wartime crash schedule. The legend has it
that after FDR signed off on the project, TVA got back a one-line teletype: "START DIGGING." Six thousand people worked it around the clock, and the power it generated didn't just light up the valley — it fed the aluminum plants and, more secretly, the uranium enrichment work at Oak Ridge that went into the Manhattan Project. Sit with that for a second: the same placid lake that gives Anchor Down its million-dollar views exists because of the atomic bomb.
And that view came at a cost. Filling the reservoir put more than 40 square miles of Jefferson County's most fertile bottomland under water, displaced hundreds of families, and forced the relocation of cemeteries. Some of that drowned farmland had been growing produce for a little canning operation down the road in Chestnut Hill — Bush Brothers. So the very dam that gives this whole area its lake also reshaped the bean company we'd just driven over to see.
More from this trip: Our stay at Anchor Down RV Resort → · Bush's Beans Visitor Center →
