Source:Red Clay State Historic Area

The visitors center at Red Clay illuminates nineteenth century Cherokee life in the early republic and details the federal removal policy and the 1838 military removal of Cherokees from eastern Tennessee. "The Cherokee Days" festival in August brings members of the Eastern Band here to demonstrate crafts and perform.

The Red Clay hub also provides access to nearby sites in the Chattanooga area: Ross' Landing and the Brainerd Cemetery. At Ross's Landing, Cherokee Principal Chief John Ross and his brother Lewis maintained a ferry and warehouse that became one of three major emigration depots during the Trail of Tears. Just downstream, Moccasin Bend, a National Landmark site, was important during the Civil War, the Trail of Tears, Dragging Canoe's campaigns, and has been used by people for more than ten thousand years. Brainerd Cemetery remains witness to the mission and school of the same name.

Sites in Red Clay

Red Clay State Historic Park

This state historic area has been developed to preserve and commemorate the council grounds that served as the defacto capital of the Cherokee Nation from 1832 until 1837. The 260-acre park includes an interpretive center, reconstructions of the council building and a Cherokee farmstead, hiking trails, a picnic area, an overlook tower, and a 500-seat amphitheater. The focal point of the Red Clay park is the Council Spring, a large blue spring that issues more than a half-million gallons of water a day. In the early nineteenth century, the Council Spring was located in the midst of a dispersed community of Cherokee farmsteads known as Red Clay or Elawohdi, home to Charles Renatus Hicks, assistant principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. Beginning in 1816, Hicks hosted a series of national council meetings at Red Clay, establishing precedent for its later use. These general councils were often huge affairs; thousands of Cherokee citizens attended sessions and socialized at meetings that lasted days or weeks.

Visitors to the last capital of the Cherokee Nation in the east can learn more about Red Clay and its role in nineteenth century Cherokee life at the James F. Corn Interpretive Center. The center features a brief video presentation that details the Cherokee Nation's struggle for its homeland and eventual forced removal to the west. The military removal and subsequent Trail of Tears emigration are also depicted by a series of stained glass images in a new addition that overlooks the Council Spring area. Interpretive exhibits in the center describe nineteenth century Cherokee government, economy, recreation, and religion; these exhibits vividly depict Cherokee assimilation of western lifeways and the cultural pluralism of Cherokee society.

Contact: Red Clay State Historic Park, 1140 Red Clay Park Road, SW, Cleveland, TN 37311 Phone:(423) 478-0339

Sites Near Red Clay

The Heritage Trail

The heritage trail in southeastern Tennessee emphasizes themes of Cherokee life and culture in the early nineteenth century, and examines the tragic forced removal of the Cherokee people in 1838. Visitors traveling north from Red Clay cross the rolling hills and broad bottom lands of the old Amohee District to find Nancy Ward's grave at Womankiller Ford, the Fort Marr blockhouse at Benton, and Tennessee Old Town and Hiwassee Old Town at the Hiwassee River. Visitors may also travel to Charleston, 25 miles north of Red Clay, to tour the sites of the old Cherokee Agency, the Lewis Ross Home, Fort Cass and the Cherokee internment camps where thousands of Cherokee prisoners spent the summer of 1838, awaiting their deportation over the Trail of Tears. The camps extended twelve miles southward from Fort Cass, up the valley toward Cleveland. Twenty miles west of Cleveland is the Cherokee Memorial Park at Blythe's Ferry across the Tennessee River, where Cherokee prisoners left their old homeland and crossed the river on their westward trek. On the way back to Red Clay, visitors can stop at the Museum at Five Points in Cleveland, where exhibits depict the native heritage of Bradley County from the late Mississippian period up to the 1838 removal.

Another trip northeastward from Red Clay leads visitors through the old Cherokee settlements of Turtletown and Coker Creek in the Chilhowee and Unaka mountains. This two and a half hour trip leads through Cleveland, Tennessee, then eastward on U.S. 64 through the Ocoee River Valley and through the Ocoee River Gorge to wasted mining district of Ducktown, Tennessee. North from Ducktown is Turtletown, where a Cherokee community hung on after removal until the late nineteenth century. Sixteen miles north of Turtletown, is Coker Creek, site of removal era Fort Armistead on the old Unicoi Turnpike. From Coker Creek, visitors can descend the Chilhowee Mountains to Tellico Plains and access other interpretive hubs at Vonore (via, TN 68 and US 411) or Robbinsville, North Carolina (via the scenic Cherohala Skyway). Travelers may also backtrack to Ducktown and follow US 64 eastward to the interpretive hub at Murphy, North Carolina.

Nancy Ward Grave Site

Nancy Ward, the famed Beloved Woman of Chota, rests in a small hilltop cemetery overlooking the Ocoee River, where U.S. Highway 411 crosses near the ancient ford of the Warrior's Path and the old Federal Road. Ward, an important councillor and diplomat for the Cherokee Nation, spent her last days at a nearby inn within sight of this cemetery. During her long life (ca. 1738 - 1822), Ward witnessed profound changes in Cherokee culture, and was herself both innovator and conservator of Cherokee tradition. Oral tradition indicates that Nancy Ward was born in the Overhill settlement of Chota around 1738, a niece of the ascendant leader Attakullakulla. She married Kingfisher (Tsula) around 1752, and bore two children before Kingfisher was killed in the 1755 battle of Taliwa against the Creeks. She was with Kingfisher when he fell, and picked up his gun to continue the fight until the Cherokees had won a decisive victory. For her courage and tenacity, she was awarded the title of "War-Woman," a distinction that gave her an influential voice in the Chota council.

Contact: Hiwassee River State Park, Spring Creek Road P.O. Box 5, Delano, TN 37325 Phone: (423) 263-0080

Contact: Tennessee Overhill Heritage Association, P.O. Box 143, L. & N Depot, Etowah, TN 37331 Phone:(423) 263-7232

Fort Marr

The last surviving blockhouse of Fort Morrow (locally known as Fort Marr), a removal era military post built on the old Federal Road near the Conasauga River, now stands on the southern outskirts of Benton, Tennessee, next to the Polk County jail on the east side of U.S. Highway 411. This cantilevered, hewn-log building is the last physical vestige of the forts that state and federal troops occupied during the infamous Cherokee removal of 1838. The blockhouse originally stood at Old Fort, Tennessee, where it was constructed in 1814 to serve as a supply depot for Tennessee troops serving in Jackson's Creek War campaigns. This long-abandoned post was re-garrisoned in 1837 by troops preparing for the forced Cherokee removal. Initially designated Camp Lindsay, the post was rechristened Fort Morrow after the addition of three blockhouses and a palisade enclosure. By May, 1838, the fort housed one mounted company and two infantry companies under the command of Captain John Morrow. These troops were assigned the duty of collecting Cherokees from communities in the Tennessee mountains and the eastern edge of the Tennessee Valley, then transporting the Cherokee prisoners to the internment camps at Fort Cass where they would await deportation.

After the 1838 removal, Fort Morrow and its grounds passed into private ownership. The fort buildings gradually deteriorated until the single blockhouse remained, used as a chicken house. In 1922, the owners donated the old blockhouse to Polk County; it was moved twice before reaching its present location in Benton. Today, visitors to the blockhouse will find only this inconspicuous structural remnant as the sole physical reminder of the military operation that swept the Cherokee Nation from eastern Tennessee.

Contact: Hiwassee Ocoee State Parks, Spring Creek Road, P.O. Box 5, Delano, TN 37325 Phone: (423) 263-0080

Sites near Charleston, Tennessee

A number of sites important to Cherokee history during the era of the military removal are located in and around Charleston, Tennessee, situated on the south side of the Hiwassee River along U.S. 11, twenty-five miles north of Red Clay. Here once stood the U.S. federal agency to the Cherokee Nation (1819-1838) and its successor, Fort Cass, the Army headquarters for the Cherokee removal of 1838. Still standing is Lewis Ross's house, once one of the finest homes in the Cherokee Nation, and the Cherokee government's headquarters during the Nation's forced internment in the summer of 1838. The notorious internment camps, now fields and pastures, extend over 10 miles southward from Charleston to the northern edge of Cleveland. To access this area from Red Clay State Historical Park, return to TN 60

The Cherokee Agency

When the Cherokee Nation ceded the Hiwassee District to the United States in 1819, the federal Cherokee Agency relocated from Agency Creek in Meigs County to present-day Charleston, in Cherokee territory on the south side of the Hiwassee River. The agency functioned as an embassy; this was where the business of day-to-day relations between the United States and the Cherokee Nation was conducted. Official correspondence passed through the agency, as did annuity payments and federal aid linked to the "civilization" program. White businessmen and travelers applied at the agency for permits to pass through or trade within the Cherokee Nation. Cherokee citizens petitioned the agent for redress against American citizens and vice versa. First and foremost, the federal agents to the Cherokees were the representatives of American policy, and these agents fronted the push for land cessions and eventual removal of the Cherokee people. Agents who served at the Charleston agency were Return J. Meigs, Joseph McMinn, and Hugh Montgomery; after passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the notorious Major B.F. Curry was stationed here as emigration agent. After Curry's death in 1837, Nathaniel Smith served as Superintendent of Removal.

The Cherokee Agency was situated along the east side of present-day U.S. 11 near the intersection with Walker Valley Road. This location was well chosen; from Walker's Ferry landing emanated the main roads to Alabama, Georgia, and New Town, and the area around the new agency quickly developed as a center for Cherokee commerce. There remains no trace of the old agency, nor is there modern on-site interpretation for the place that was so important to the florescence and demise of the Cherokee Nation in the east.

Contact: Cleveland/ Bradley County Convention and Visitors Bureau, P.O. Box 2275, Cleveland, TN 37320 Phone:(423) 472-6587

Lewis Ross Home

Lewis Ross, a Cherokee businessman, Supreme Court justice, and constitutional convention delegate, established his home, store, warehouse, and other enterprises across a small creek from the Cherokee Agency. From this base, Ross operated stores and other businesses within and beyond the Cherokee Nation, and grew to be one of the wealthiest men in eastern Tennessee. While much of the Cherokee Nation was held captive at Charleston in the summer of 1838, Lewis Ross's home was a center of operations for the tribal government, and most of the final arrangements for Cherokee emigration to the west were concluded here. Ross's former home, now privately owned, still stands at ** Market Street in Charleston, one half mile east of U.S. 11. The original weather boarded log structure is encased by early twentieth century renovations that completely mask what was once the most elaborate Cherokee house in Tennessee.

Contact: Cleveland/ Bradley County Convention and Visitors Bureau, P.O. Box 2275 Cleveland, TN 37320

Phone: (423) 472-6587

Fort Cass and the Cherokee Internment Camps

"We your prisoners wish to speak to you. We wish to speak humbly for we cannot help ourselves. We have been made prisoners by your men, but we do not fight against you. We have never done you any harm. Sir, we ask you to hear us. We have been told we are to be sent off by boat immediately. Sir, will you listen to your prisoners. We are Indians. Our wives and children are Indians and some people do not pity Indians. But if we are Indians we have hearts that feel. We do not want to see our wives and children die. We do not want to die ourselves and leave them widows and orphans. We are in trouble. Sir, our hearts are very heavy. The darkness of the night is before us. We have no hope unless you will help us. We do not ask you to let us go free from being your prisoners, unless it should please yourself. But we ask that you will not send us down the river at this time of the year. If you do we shall die, our wives will die or our children will die. Sir, our hearts are heavy, very heavy.... We cannot make a talk, our hearts are too full of sorrow. This is all we say..." Petition of Cherokee leaders from the Aquohee Camps to General Winfield Scott, Fort Cass, June **, 1838.

In 1835, the U.S. Army established Fort Cass at the Cherokee Agency. This post, founded at the suggestion of Emigration Superintendent B.F. Curry and named for Secretary of War, Lewis Cass, was intended to intimidate the Cherokees into a total cession of their eastern lands. The fort was established along what is now Market Street in Charleston, less than two blocks from the Ross house; Curry aimed to force Lewis Ross away from his home and farm.

Contact: Cleveland/ Bradley County Convention and Visitors Bureau, P.O. Box 2275 Cleveland, TN 37320 Phone: (423) 472-6587

Blythe's Ferry- Cherokee Memorial Park

The site of Blythe's Ferry, where thousands of Cherokee emigrants crossed the Tennessee River during the Trail of Tears deportation, is now home to the Cherokee Memorial Park, a commemorative and interpretive area where visitors can view outdoor exhibits which chronicle the Cherokee experience across the rift of the 1838 removal. The park features a memorial on a bluff top overlook of the former ferry crossing; this overlook provides a vista of Chickamauga Lake, Hiwassee Island, and the Hiwassee River Wildlife Refuge. The park is located at the old TN 60 crossing (recently bypassed by a new bridge installation) of the Hiwassee River between Cleveland and Dayton, Tennessee.

After the Cherokee removal, Blythe's Ferry developed as a primary link across the Tennessee River between the towns of Cleveland and Dayton, and the ferry continued in use as part of Tennessee Highway 60 until 1997, when it was replaced by a new four-lane bridge. Thanks to the efforts of a local citizens group, the eastern ferry landing and the adjacent bluff are now preserved as part of the Cherokee Memorial Park, a facility devoted to the memory of the thousands of Cherokee emigrants who crossed the Tennessee River at Blythe's Ferry to leave their homeland forever.

Contact: Meigs County Executive's Office, P.O. Box 156, Decatur, TN 37322 Phone: (423) 334-5850

Chattanooga

The Chattanooga area, a short, 45-minute drive west of Red Clay, was once the stronghold of the Chickamauga band of Cherokees, a militant faction driven from the Overhill Towns by the 1776 Virginia expedition. Above the treacherous "Suck" and other rapids in the Tennessee River, Cherokee refugees established new settlements such as Chickamauga, Bull Town, Citico, Tuskeegee, and Toqua. Under the leadership of The Dragging Canoe, and later, John Watts and Doublehead, these Chickamauga Cherokees ferociously contested American encroachment on tribal lands for almost 18 years. Their struggle became the hub of a pan-tribal alliance that united Shawnees, Creeks, Miamis, Wyandots, and other nations in the fight to stem the American tide from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. During the 1780s and 1790s, the Chickamauga Cherokees moved their towns further down river to more secure locations near the present-day Tennessee-Alabama state line; these settlements became known as the "Five Lower Towns," the center of Cherokee political and military power.

Among the businesses and institutions that sprang up in the old Chickamauga country during the early nineteenth century were Ross's Landing, a commercial port owned by Cherokee leaders John and Lewis Ross, and Brainerd Mission, a Congregationalist boarding school for Cherokee children. These early endeavors formed a nucleus around which Chattanooga later grew; visitors can still find vestiges of the early landmarks of the Cherokee renascence amid the bustle of cities commercial districts.

Brainerd Mission Cemetery

Northeast of Chattanooga, at the northern edge of the Eastgate Mall parking lot, stands the shady, wrought-iron-fenced Brainerd Cemetery, the last physical trace of a Congregationalist (Presbyterian) mission to the Cherokees that operated between 1817 and 1838. Within the fence are dozens of graves, some marked, most unmarked, of the Cherokee students and their white instructors who died in the service of Brainerd Mission. Among the graves is that of John Arch (Atsi), a celebrated Cherokee convert, teacher, and interpreter who walked from the remote mountains of North Carolina to become part of the Brainerd Mission family.

Contact: Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce, 1001 Market Street Chattanooga, Tennessee 37402-2690 Phone: (423) 756-2121 E-mail: info@chattanooga-chamber.com

Ross's Landing

The modern city of Chattanooga grew up around a busy Cherokee river port known as Ross's Landing. In 1815, Cherokee entrepreneur and future chief John Ross, and his business partner, Timothy Meigs, established a landing, ferry, and warehouse on the bluffs of the Tennessee River to take advantage of the traffic that plied the waters between the Cherokee Nation and the state of Tennessee. Flatboats, keelboats, and later, steamboats, unloaded their cargoes at Ross's; teamsters with wagons hauled these mercantile goods to stores throughout the western portion of the Cherokee Nation. After Meigs died in 1817, Lewis Ross entered the thriving business, and the Ross brothers grew wealthy as merchants with commercial interests in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama.

Ross's Landing is now the centerpiece of Chattanooga's revitalized downtown waterfront. Ross's Landing Plaza, an urban park surrounding the Tennessee Aquarium, features a walkway with inscriptions of historic quotations by and about Cherokee people. The words of leaders such as The Old Tassel, The Dragging Canoe, and John Ross chronicle the Cherokees' struggle to preserve their homeland against inexorable American expansion. The actual landing is submerged beneath the waters of Nickajack Lake between the Walnut Street and Market Street bridges; visitors can reach this waterfront via pedestrian walkways leading from the Market Street Bridge. Near the riverbank stands a bronze monument to the meteoric rise and tragic downfall of the Cherokee Nation in the east.

Contact: Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce, 1001 Market Street Chattanooga, Tennessee 37402-2690 Phone: (423) 756-2121 E-mail: info@chattanooga-chamber.com

Side Trip

A scenic day trip eastward from Red Clay will lead visitors into the Chilhowee and Unaka Mountains, the most rugged terrain of southeastern Tennessee. At the eastern edge of the Tennessee Valley, lush valleys and rolling hills strike the steep front of the Chilhowee Mountains; beyond the Chilhowees rise the Unakas, then range after range of mountains in the Appalachian Summit. During the nineteenth century, these mountains were home to some of the most conservative enclaves of the old Cherokee Nation.

Despite long decades of logging, mining, road building, and hydroelectric development, the landscapes of the Chilhowee and Unaka mountains still retain a wild character that hearkens back to the heyday of the old Cherokee Nation. A drive through the Turtletown and Coker Creek localities will take visitors through these rugged lands into former strongholds of Cherokee tradition.

Turtletown- Zion Hill Baptist Church

After the Cherokee removal of 1838 and the Trail of Tears emigration, the Cherokees who remained in the east faced an uncertain future in a land that rapidly filled with the very whites who had demanded their removal. The largest of the post-removal Cherokee settlements in the east were at Qualla (Cherokee), Buffalo Town (now Snowbird, near Robbinsville), and Valley River (near Marble, NC), but a number of smaller enclaves were scattered over southwestern North Carolina, southeastern Tennessee, and northern Georgia.

One of the best known of these smaller, isolated Cherokee communities was Turtletown, located astride the North Carolina - Tennessee state line south of the Hiwassee River. Although Turtletown (Saligugi'hi) existed prior to the 1838 removal, the post-removal community was established by Cherokee families who evaded the troops or escaped the Trail of Tears. The Cherokee families of Turtletown helped found the Turtletown Baptist Church (now Zion Hill Baptist Church) in 1845, and worshipped there as part of a mixed Cherokee-white congregation for the next 40 years.

Contact: Tennessee Overhill Heritage Association, P.O. Box 143, L & N Depot, Etowah, TN 37331 Phone: (423) 263-7232

Coker Creek

Coker Creek, the site of a small, early nineteenth century Cherokee community and a removal-era Army fort (Fort Armistead) on the Unicoi Turnpike, is located just sixteen miles north of Turtletown along TN 68. Visitors to this mountain community will find interpretive exhibits at Coker Creek Baptist Church and Coker Creek Village (both situated adjacent to TN 68) that describe the roles of the community, the fort, and the road in the Cherokee removal of 1838.

Fort Armistead once stood on a low knoll now on the east side of TN Highway 68, 300 yards southeast of the Coker Creek Baptist Church. This privately owned site still bears vestiges of the Unicoi Turnpike, the fort and the stock stand. Local tradition asserts that a nearby hilltop just south of the church contains the graves of soldiers who died at the fort; this cemetery may also include the graves of the Cherokees who died on the trail at Coker Creek in 1838.

Contact: Coker Creek Ruritan Club, Coker Creek Village, 12528 Highway 68, Coker Creek, TN 37314 Phone: (865) 261-2310

Editorial Note: For an in-depth look at each one of the interpretive centers along the Cherokee Heritage Trails, including complete articles and quotes, detailed information on all the historical sites, amazing full color photography depicting the land and its people, stories from many of the Cherokee Elders and much more about the wonderful Cherokee culture, make the Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook a part of your personal library.

Link to the Cherokee Heritage Project Page