As Andy Warhol knew, Campbell’s Soup is iconic. Regionally, Campbell’s Station is also very familiar. But what is the station’s connection to the Fork, the land between the French Broad and Holston rivers?

I once heard that a developer named the streets of a West Knoxville subdivision after railroad terms, because he thought that Campbell’s Station had to do with trains. However, the kind of station related to that local Campbell name refers to the places where travelers could find shelter and protection back during the frontier days. Such stations were usually about 10 miles apart, because a wagon could comfortably travel about 10 to 20 miles in a day, depending on the weather. During those days, these farmsteads were similar to forts, where travelers and surrounding families also could gather when under threat of attack.

That’s why the Alexander and Mary Lockhart Campbell family from the Fork took shelter at cousin David Campbell’s station in 1793, when a Native American uprising threatened Knoxville. Both men were Revolutionary War veterans of the 1780 Battle of King’s Mountain.

At their early home at Campbell Branch in Riverdale, which was noted as a community in the Tennessee Gazetteer newspaper in 1792, Mary sometimes took their children into the dense rivercane along the French Broad to hide from the Cherokee when Alexander was away. As the Campbell family grew, they built (c.1800) and expanded (c.1841) a fine home, now owned and beautifully preserved by descendants of their extended family, the Kellys, who came from the Seven Islands community of the Fork.

Alexander and Mary’s son John and his wife Elizabeth (Armstrong) eventually owned the earlier Campbell house described in the January 21 article. John’s son Hugh later sold that house to James Kennedy, who married Elizabeth’s sister, Martha.

Alexander and Mary’s son James and his wife Charlotte (Dardis) had 10 children. Their 1,200 acres included the original rich river bottom land, as well as the hilltop that locals now call “the bluff” on Thorn Grove Pike. Because James carried Sam Houston off the battlefield in the War of 1812, Houston’s widow later gave him Houston’s gold-tipped cane when he visited her while exiled in Texas during the Civil War.

James was known for his agricultural experiments with orchards, tea plants, grasses and grapes on what the family called Vineyard Hill, which was terraced. When he ran the local post office, he temporarily called the Riverdale community “Vinedale.”

James and Charlotte’s son Thomas Rogers Caldwell Campbell ran the family’s mill at the end of what is now Berry Lane behind the Alexander Campbell house. The mill no longer stands.

James and Charlotte are buried atop the bluff in their family plot, just one more site forgotten in the Fork.

Jan Loveday Dickens is an educator, historian and author of Forgotten in the Fork, a book about the Knox County lands between the French Broad and Holston Rivers, obtainable by emailing ForgottenInTheFork@gmail.com.