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Feature article
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Sullivan County Courthouse
By
BLOUNTVILLE — Which would you be more likely to find in the Sullivan County Courthouse: a judge holding court, or a story about buried treasure?
If you said a judge, then you obviously haven’t been reading this series.
The same building that hasn’t been home to a court in more than a decade was the focus of Sullivan County’s own, albeit brief, gold rush in September 1882.
At that time, workmen had not long before restored the courthouse of 1853 to its condition before the Civil War (or Recent Unpleasantness, depending on who you ask).
But the job wasn’t yet done, and the county’s leaders wanted to see if any of the old records were still intact in the rubble in the basement.
A day laborer named “Sifty” John Hicks was hired to clean out some of the debris under the circuit court clerk’s office — old burned wood and paper from the courthouse fire in 1863, wrote historian Oliver Taylor in his 1907 book “Historic Sullivan.” (Click here to order this book from Amazon!)
As Hicks dug through the trash and dirt floor, he struck an iron box — containing more than $2,000 in gold coins and melted silver bullion.
Hicks ran from the courthouse basement screaming, telling everyone he could find of his discovery in the basement.
That probably wasn’t the smartest thing Hicks ever did since half the town showed up in short order to claim their share of the treasure.
In the melee that followed, the gold coins and melted silver were scattered all over the basement and around the courthouse grounds.
People sifted through dirt, debris and trash alike — eventually picking the place clean.
“Few went there whom were not rewarded for their trouble,” Taylor wrote. Some even walked away with more than $100 — a princely sum in post-Reconstruction Sullivan County.
The scavenging continued for some time, but with rapidly declining success.
“Now and then a gold coin was picked up that served to renew interest and the search resumed,” Taylor wrote.
Eventually all the money was taken away, but no explanation has ever been given as to how the money got there.
Historians have speculated that the money could have been buried anytime from 1825 to 1863 — from the time the first brick courthouse was built on the site to the time of the Battle of Blountville, which saw the courthouse burned to the ground, likely melting the silver in the box.
Now you know about the gold rush. But what about the courts?
According to County Attorney Dan Street, the courts picked up and moved to their new homes on Blountville Boulevard in 1989 for one reason — space.
More and more county offices eventually filled the old courthouse and subsequent expansions until the one old courtroom wasn’t enough.
Legislators in Nashville would from time to time spin off some of Blountville’s caseload to sister courts in Kingsport or Bristol, but with only one courtroom, the old courthouse just couldn’t handle the load.
“They were building the new Justice Center — it just got too crowded,” Street said.
But in another sense, the courthouse is still home to one court.
The old courtroom at the top of the stairs now hosts the meetings of the County Commission — a body that not long ago was called the Sullivan County Court.
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