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Tazewell is an incorporated town and the county seat of Claiborne County in northeastern Tennessee.

The town was incorporated in 1801, three years before it became the county seat.

Tazewell is named for Tazewell, Virginia, which was itself named for Henry Tazewell, a United States senator from Virginia.

In 1804 Tazewell was chosen as the county seat, aided by settler John Hunt, who became the county's first sheriff; local legend holds that voters from rival Springdale were too intoxicated to vote on selection day.

Early settlers protected themselves at a line of small forts along the Powell and Clinch valleys, including Fort Butler just west of present-day Tazewell, after Dr. Thomas Walker publicized Cumberland Gap in 1750.

Confederate troops occupied Tazewell in 1862 during the struggle for Cumberland Gap, and a fire that followed their evacuation that November destroyed much of the town.

Tazewell's historic jail, built in 1819, survives among the town's mostly Victorian-era historic structures.

When the railroad was routed several miles west of town around 1890 despite residents' protests over a depot, the settlement that grew around the depot became the separate city of New Tazewell, and proposals to merge the two communities in the 2000s were rejected.

The town sits on the northern slope of Wallen Ridge, and Big Barren Creek flows through its western side toward the Norris Lake impoundment of the Clinch River.

U.S. Route 25E and State Route 33 meet at Tazewell, linking it with Morristown, Middlesboro in Kentucky, and the upper Clinch Valley.