Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Spencer, TN

Spencer is an incorporated town and the county seat of Van Buren County, Tennessee.

The town is named after Thomas Sharp Spencer, a long hunter who passed through the Van Buren County area in the mid-18th century and died in 1794.

Spencer was established in 1850 and incorporated in 1909.

Burritt College operated in Spencer from 1848 until its closure in 1939; chartered by the Tennessee General Assembly and named for activist Elihu Burritt, the college introduced coeducation in 1850 under president William Davis Carnes, an unusually early step for a Southern college.

The college closed during the Civil War, when Union troops used its main hall as a barracks and its dormitories as stables, and its main building later burned in 1906 and was rebuilt.

In 1942, Spencer elected a full slate of women to its town offices.

Spencer is situated at the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau, just above the Caney Fork River valley, and is served by State Route 30 and State Route 111.

The town is associated with Fall Creek Falls State Park, a park of more than 26,000 acres whose namesake 256-foot waterfall is the highest free-fall waterfall east of the Mississippi River.

The 2020 census counted 1,462 residents in Spencer, down from 1,601 in 2010.

The 2020 census recorded 561 households and 363 families in the town.