Charleston is a city in Bradley County, Tennessee, United States. The population was 664 at the 2020 census. It is included in the Cleveland Metropolitan Statistical Area.

The house now occupied by Charleston and Bradley County was home to the Cherokee long in the past European settlers arrived. What is now Charleston began concerning 1808 as soon as Major John Walker Sr., a part-Cherokee grandson of Nancy Ward, established a ferry across the Hiwassee River along with present-day Charleston and Calhoun. As a result, the community was initially known as “Walker’s Ferry.” The Hiwassee Purchase of 1819 resulted in the cession of Cherokee lands amid the Hiwassee and Little Tennessee rivers to the Federal Government, and as a result, the Hiwassee River became the boundary in the company of the Cherokee Nation and the United States, where it remained until the Cherokee removal in 1838. In 1821, the Cherokee Agency— the recognized liaison with the U.S. government and the Cherokee Nation— was moved to the location of present-day Charleston. The agent to the Cherokees was first Colonel Return J. Meigs Sr., who had served in the American Revolutionary War, and forward-looking Joseph McMinn, who served as Governor of Tennessee from 1815 to 1821. Lewis Ross, the brother of Chief John Ross, constructed a house nearby in 1820, and usual a trading herald and gathering in the city the afterward year. Between 1832 and the Cherokee removal in 1838, the Red Clay Council Grounds in southern Bradley County, now a let in park by the similar name, served as the unquestionable eastern capitol of the Cherokee Nation.

In the 1820s and 1830s, many white settlers began to pretend to have into the area anticipating a superior forced removal of the Cherokee by the Federal Government. At times, these settlers came into act with the Cherokee, who resisted settlers who tried to accept over their territory. After the path of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Fort Cass was build up in Charleston as the headquarters of the Cherokee removal, which was initiated by the Treaty of New Echota in December 1835. During the summer of 1838, thousands of Cherokees from various locations were held in internment camps at the fort under the running of federal troops previously starting their journey westward, which became known as the Trail of Tears. Several other internment camps were located in the valleys amid Charleston and present-day Cleveland, Tennessee higher than a disaffect of 12 miles (19 km), including one at user-friendly Rattlesnake Springs.

During the Civil War the Henegar House, the oldest long-lasting brick structure in Bradley County, was used as headquarters by both Union and Confederate generals including William T. Sherman, Oliver O. Howard, Marcus J. Wright, and Samuel Bolivar Buckner. The Charleston Cumberland Presbyterian Church building was used as a hospital by Confederate Forces in 1863. The railroad bridge over the Hiwassee River in Charleston was destroyed as ration of the East Tennessee bridge burnings in November 1861.