Carthage is a town in and the county chair of Smith County, Tennessee, United States; it is part of the Nashville Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 2,306 at the 2010 census. It is located on the Cumberland River, which was important to its beforehand development. It is likely best known as the hometown of former Vice President and Senator Al Gore of the Democratic Party and his father, Senator Albert Gore, Sr. The younger Gore announced his 1988 and 2000 presidential bids, as competently as his 1992 vice-presidential bid, from the steps of the Smith County Courthouse.

The archaic known European-American settler in what is now Carthage was William Walton (1760–1816), who arrived in the late 1780s after the United States achieved independence in the American Revolutionary War. Circa 1800, Walton directed the construction of the Walton Road (Cumberland Turnpike), an before stagecoach route connecting the Knoxville Place in the east afterward Middle Tennessee. The road, which was approaching paralleled cutting edge by the construction of what is now U.S. 70, was influential to the further and early agreement of the Cumberland region. Walton operated a ferry across the Cumberland River and a tavern open along the road, around which a little community developed. In 1804, Walton’s community was chosen as the county seat of the newly formed Smith County after a livid election, and the town of Carthage was laid out quickly thereafter.

Carthage’s location at the confluence of the Caney Fork and Cumberland rivers made it an important shipping and steamboat port throughout the first half of the 19th century. The Place was developed for tobacco and hemp crops, as without difficulty as blooded livestock. Goods were shipped downstream to Nashville. During the Civil War, Carthage became an important read out in the Eastern Highland Rim Place of Tennessee. Carthage was agreed as share of the route Confederate General Braxton Bragg marched the Army of Mississippi through on his Confederate Heartland Offensive into Kentucky. Later upon March 6, 1863, Union Brigadier General George Crook received a Union outpost in Carthage to foster as a base for his effort to positive out the considerable Confederate guerrilla insurgency from East Tennessee through Middle Tennessee.

Carthage’s stress as a river port on the Cumberland River was superseded after the railroads replaced river traffic in the far along 19th century. The area’s industrial focus shifted to South Carthage and Gordonsville.