FPC Knoxville Youth Group

Knoxville’s First Presbyterian Church, the city’s first church, was organized in 1792 and is still located on its original site. James White, Knoxville’s founder and a devout Presbyterian, came from North Carolina to the Fork of the River, where the Holston and French Broad Rivers meet to form the Tennessee River. He later moved downriver and settled near First Creek. He built a fort and a mill and planted his garden — for turnips in the fall and corn in the spring. When he asked his son-in-law, Charles McClung, to lay out a town, part of White’s instructions were “to reserve my turnip patch for a church and a burying ground.”