Calhoun is a town in McMinn County, Tennessee, United States. It is allowance of the Chattanooga–Cleveland–Athens total statistical area. The population was estimated at 536 in 2020.

The Place where Calhoun is located was decided by John Walker (c. 1770-1834), a part-Cherokee grandson of Nancy Ward and a prominent figure in the formation of McMinn County. Walker helped accord the Cherokee Turnpike Company in 1808 to maintain a road with Knoxville and Georgia. What is now Cahoun began around 1808, when Walker standard a ferry across the Hiwassee River in the midst of the present locations of Calhoun and Charleston. In 1819, Walker helped negotiate the Calhoun Treaty, where the Cherokee ceded the unshakable lands surrounded by the Hiwassee River and the Little Tennessee River to the U.S. government. That thesame year McMinn County was organized at Walker’s house in Calhoun. In 1820, Walker laid out the town of Calhoun, which he named for John C. Calhoun, the Calhoun Treaty’s chief U.S. negotiator. Walker’s son, John “Jack” Walker Jr., would eventually be assassinated by two anti-removal Cherokees, who felt he had betrayed the Cherokee Nation.

Joseph McMinn, governor of Tennessee from 1815 to 1821, spent the last few years of his vibrancy in Calhoun, and is buried in the Shiloh Presbyterian Cemetery, which is located in Calhoun.

In 1954, the pulp and paper giant Bowater (now Resolute Forest Products) established a tree-plant in Calhoun that soon grew to become one of the largest newsprint mills in North America. The mill, which dominates the western half of Calhoun, produces 750,000 metric tons of newsprint and specialty paper per year.