The Grundy County Historical Society’s Heritage Center in downtown Tracy City consists of a museum and a library and research center. The Heritage Center’s museum galleries, which are open from 10 am to 4 pm Monday through Saturday, are organized under eight historical themes that highlight the impact this region has had on our country’s history. The library focuses on local genealogy, cultural and historical research.

The first gallery of the museum shows how this region developed through geologic eras with an emphasis on the formation of coal during the Pennsylvanian period.

The second gallery portrays the Chickamauga Native Americans, their alliance with the British during the Revolutionary War in 1775, and their development of five towns along the Tennessee River.

The third gallery tells the story of Summerfield, where Lilian Johnson developed an agricultural cooperative in 1915 known as KinCo., described by her as “a co-operative association of city and mountain folk with a kindred purpose”.

The fourth gallery tells the story of Monteagle Sunday School Assembly. Southern leaders in the Sunday School movement selected Monteagle in 1882 for a southern Chautauqua patterned after the one established in 1874 at Lake Chautauqua, New York. The Monteagle Sunday School Assembly programs have been held every summer since 1883. 

The fifth gallery is a mural of Beersheba Springs. It was the first European settlement oin this region. A chalybeate spring was discovered there in 1833 by Beersheba Cain. John Armfield, a retired slave trader, in 1854, purchased 1,000 acres and made the village into a summer resort for southern plantation owners in the lower south.

The sixth gallery tells the story of the development of the southern steel and iron industry, beginning in Tracy City at the Wooten Coal Mine. It includes the creation of the University of the South at Sewanee, the result of Sewanee Mining Company’s offer of 5,000 acres of land unsuitable for the mining of coal to trustees of the Southern Dioceses of the Episcopal Church.

Gallery 7 tells the story of the Swiss Colony in Gruetli-Laager, created when the government of Switzerland, facing chronic economic depression and overpopulation during the mid 1800s, conceiving the notion that if it could depopulate itself, its economic plight might improve. Swiss emigrants flowed here from Switzerland from 1869 to about 1920.

The eighth gallery tells the story of the timber industry, a major economic driver of the region, and its impact on area from 1880 through 1920. Lumber mills were established and provided employment for local people. The region’s three state parks, Savage Gulf, Fiery Gizzard and Head of the Crow [river], were created over the past half-century, in large measure from some of the former timber companies’ holdings.