ACTIVITY - Sycamore Shoals State Historic Area - Watauga Lake Expeience

Sycamore Shoals State Historic Area

Sycamore Shoals State Historic Area is a state park located in Elizabethton, Tennessee. The park consists of 70 acres situated along the Sycamore Shoals of the Watauga River. It is a National Historic Landmark where a series of events critical to the establishment of the states of Tennessee and Kentucky and the settlement of the Trans-Appalachian frontier in general took place. Along with the historic shoals, the park includes a visitor center and museum, the reconstructed Fort Watauga, and the Carter Mansion (at a satellite location in Elizabethton).

History

For over a thousand years before the arrival of European explorers, Sycamore Shoals and adjacent lands had been inhabited by Native Americans. The first permanent European settlers arrived in 1770, and established the Watauga Association— one of the first written constitutional government west of the Appalachian Mountains— in 1772. Richard Henderson and Daniel Boone negotiated the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals in 1775, which saw the sale of millions of acres of Cherokee lands in Kentucky and Tennessee and led to the building of the Wilderness Road. During the American Revolution, Sycamore Shoals was both the site of Fort Watauga, where part of a Cherokee invasion was thwarted in 1776, and the mustering ground for the Overmountain Men in 1780.

After surveyors placed the Watauga settlement and the other "south-of-Holston" settlements officially within the domain of the Cherokee tribe in 1771, Robertson negotiated a 10-year lease for the Watauga lands. Being outside the authority of any of the British colonies, the Watauga settlers established a regional constitutional government known as the "Watauga Association." Tragedy struck as the lease was being celebrated, when a Cherokee warrior was murdered by a white man. Robertson's skillful diplomacy made peace with the irate Cherokee, who threatened to expel the settlers by force if necessary.

The flatlands around Sycamore Shoals have been sporadically inhabited by Native Americans for thousands of years, and were probably cultivated during the Mississippian period (ca. 1000-1600 A.D.). When the first European explorers arrived in the area in the early 18th century, the Cherokee were using the flats as a gathering place for hunting expeditions. In the 1760s, long hunters and traders established stations and hunting camps in the Watauga Valley in the vicinity of Sycamore Shoals. These early explorers called the flats the Watauga "Old Fields" due to their resemblance to once-cultivated lands that had been left fallow.

In 1770, James Robertson (a later founder of Nashville) made an excursion into the Watauga Valley, possibly to locate settlement sites for families fleeing the turmoil of the Regulator Movement in his native North Carolina. A trader pointed Robertson to the Old Fields, which Robertson later described as a "Promised Land," and planted a corn crop and built a cabin and corn crib. Robertson then departed for North Carolina, but returned to the Old Fields a few months later with several families to establish what became known as the Watauga settlement.