[5] Putnam County is part of the Cookeville, TN Micropolitan Statistical Area.

Contending, however, that the formation of Putnam was illegal because it reduced their areas below constitutional limits, Overton and Jackson counties secured an injunction against its continued operation.

Putnam officials failed to reply to the complaint, and in the March 1845 term of the Chancery Court at Livingston, Chancellor Bromfield L. Ridley declared Putnam unconstitutionally established and therefore dissolved.

White Plains, near modern Algood, acted as a temporary county seat.

[6] The act specified the "county town" be named "Cookeville" in honor of Richard F. Cooke, who served in the Tennessee Senate from 1851 to 1854, representing at various times Jackson, Fentress, Macon, Overton and White Counties.

The first County Court chose a hilly tract of land, then owned by Charles Crook, for the site.

Saltpeter is the main ingredient of gunpowder and was obtained by leaching the earth from several local caves.

As of the 2020 United States census, there were 79,854 people, 31,778 households, and 19,395 families residing in the county.

27.10% of all households were made up of individuals, and 10% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older.

[citation needed] Putnam County is extremely conservative for a county anchored by a college town (Cookeville, the county seat, is home to Tennessee Technological University); formerly a reliable Solid South county, Putnam has voted Republican in nearly every presidential election since Richard Nixon narrowly did so in 1968, making exceptions for Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton (both of whom are former governors of a neighboring state, namely and respectively Georgia and Arkansas).