BRISTOL  , a

city of Sullivan county, Tennessee, and Washington county, Virginia, U.S.A., 13o m . N.E. of Knoxville, Tennessee, at an altitude of about 1700 ft . Pop . (r88o) 3209; (1890) 6226; (1900) 985o (including 1981 negroes); (1910) 13,395, of whom 7148 were in Tennessee and 6247 were in Virginia . Bristol is served by the Holston Valley, the Southern, the Virginia & South-Western, and the Norfolk & Western railways, and is a railway centre of some importance . It is near the great mineral deposits of Virginia, Tennessee, West Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina; an important distributing point for iron, coal and coke; and has tanneries and lumber mills, iron furnaces, tobacco factories, furniture factories and packing houses . It is the seat of Sullins College (Methodist Episcopal, South; 1870) for women, and 6f the Virginia Institute for Women (Baptist, 1884), both in the state of Virginia, and of a normal college for negroes, on the Tennessee side of the state line . The Tennessee-Virginia boundary line runs through the principal street, dividing the place into two separate corporations, the Virginia part, which before 1890 (when it was chartered as a city) was known as Goodson, being administratively independent of the county in which it is situated . Bristol was settled about 1835, and the town of Bristol, Tennessee, was first incorporated in x856 .