TENNESSEE VALLEY, TEXAS. Tennessee Valley was on the Leon River five miles northwest of Belton in northwestern Bell County. The community was founded in 1851 by a party of settlers who originated in the Tennessee valley and named the new settlement for their former home. The Tennessee Valley school had some seventy-two pupils in 1896. There was a commercial pecan orchard at Tennessee Valley in the 1920s, and in 1948 the community had two churches and two businesses. In the mid-1950s the site of the community was inundated by Lake Belton.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bertha Atkinson, The History of Bell County, Texas (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1929). George Tyler, History of Bell County (San Antonio: Naylor, 1936).

Mark Odintz