[8] Wartburg was founded in the mid-1840s by Georg Friedrich Gerding (later anglicized as George Frederick), a land speculator who bought up large tracts of land in what is now Morgan County and organized the East Tennessee Colonization Company with plans to establish a series of German colonies in the Cumberland region.

[10] The new settlement, which had already been platted by East Tennessee Colonization Company agent Friedrich Guenther, was named after Wartburg Castle in Germany.

[10][12][2] Gerding and the retired German officer Friedrich Karl Georg Freiherr von Forstner (1800–1861), who arrived with his family in 1847 and bought 1,500 acres, were the largest landowners.

While Morgan County was generally pro-Union during the Civil War, Wartburg was bitterly divided over the secession issue.

In June 1863, Union General William P. Sanders marched through Wartburg and captured 104 Confederate soldiers in the vicinity.

Bird Mountain dominates the area east of Wartburg, rising from its base at the edge of the city and stretching for some 10 miles (16 km) to its 3,142-foot (958 m) summit at Frozen Head State Park.

The Emory River, its source near the summit of Bird, flows westwardly along the mountain's northern base, passing just north of Wartburg, and turning south before dropping off the plateau and emptying into the Watts Bar Lake impoundment of the Tennessee River.

The Obed River flows eastwardly from Cumberland County through a scenic gorge before emptying into the Emory just west of Wartburg.

Wartburg is situated around the junction of U.S. Route 27, which connects the city to Kentucky to the north and Harriman and Interstate 40 to the south, and State Route 62, which connects Wartburg to Oak Ridge to the east and the rural areas of Morgan County and Fentress County to the west.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 1.0 square mile (2.6 km2), all of it land.