Concept

Spencer, Tennessee

Summary
Spencer is a town in Van Buren County, Tennessee, United States. The population was 1,683 as of the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Van Buren County. It is home to Fall Creek Falls State Park. Spencer is named after Thomas Sharp Spencer (d. 1794), a long hunter who passed through the Van Buren County area in the mid-18th century. The town was established in 1850 and incorporated in 1909. Burritt College was located in Spencer from 1848 until its closure in 1939. In 1937, the U.S. government began purchasing the badly eroded land around Fall Creek Falls. The following year, the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps began the work of restoring the forest and constructing park facilities. The National Park Service transferred ownership of the park to the State of Tennessee in 1944. Millikan's Overlook is named after Glenn Millikan, who was head of the Department of Physiology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and son of Nobel Laureate Robert A. Millikan. Millikan was killed by a falling rock on May 25, 1947, while rock climbing "Buzzard's Roost," the cliff beneath the overlook. In 2006, the State of Tennessee purchased 12,500 acres (51 km2) of land along the White-Van Buren County line, in the vicinity of Bledsoe State Forest. The purchase was part of an effort to create an unbroken corridor of publicly owned land between Fall Creek Falls State Park and Scott's Gulf, a few miles to the north in White County. The Fall Creek Falls Inn and Conference Center offered 144 guest rooms and over 5,000 square feet (460 m2) of banquet space in five conference rooms, which accommodated up to 400 people. The buildings were designed with a brutalist architecture, having a combination of dark brick, and gray concrete with an exposed aggregate of smooth white, beige, tan, and brownish river stones. Built in the 1960s, with a rooms-only annex in the 1970s, they were closed in early April 2018 and demolished later that year, after Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam pushed for privatization and potential concessionaires refused to bid on serving the older facilities at the state's resort parks.
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