1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bristol (Tennessee)

BRISTOL, a city of Sullivan county, Tennessee, and Washington county, Virginia, U.S.A., 130 m. N.E. of Knoxville, Tennessee, at an altitude of about 1700 ft. Pop. (1880) 3209; (1890) 6226; (1900) 9850 (including 1981 negroes); (1910) 13,395, of whom 7148 were in Tennessee and 6247 were in Virginia. Bristol is served by the Holston Valley, the Southern, the Virginia & South-Western, and the Norfolk & Western railways, and is a railway centre of some importance. It is near the great mineral deposits of Virginia, Tennessee, West Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina; an important distributing point for iron, coal and coke; and has tanneries and lumber mills, iron furnaces, tobacco factories, furniture factories and packing houses. It is the seat of Sullins College (Methodist Episcopal, South; 1870) for women, and of the Virginia Institute for Women (Baptist, 1884), both in the state of Virginia, and of a normal college for negroes, on the Tennessee side of the state line. The Tennessee-Virginia boundary line runs through the principal street, dividing the place into two separate corporations, the Virginia part, which before 1890 (when it was chartered as a city) was known as Goodson, being administratively independent of the county in which it is situated. Bristol was settled about 1835, and the town of Bristol, Tennessee, was first incorporated in 1856.