This volume explores culture change and persistence within a late seventeenth-century Cherokee community in eastern Tennessee.

This volume explores culture change and persistence within a late seventeenth-century Cherokee community in eastern Tennessee.

Winner of the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award Drawing on a rich trove of documents never before available to scholars, the author sketches the early pioneers, their daily lives, their beliefs, and their struggles to survive and prosper in this isolated mountain community, now within the confines of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In moving detail this book brings to life an isolated mountain community, its struggle to survive, and the tragedy of its demise. "Professor Dunn provides us with a model historical investigation of a southern mountain community. His findings on commercial farming, family, religion, and politics will challenge many standard interpretations of the Appalachian past." --Gordon B. McKinney, Western Carolina University. "This is a fine book. . . . It is mostly about community and interrelationships, and thus it refutes much of the literature that presents Southern Mountaineers as individualistic, irreligious, violent, and unlawful." —Loyal Jones, Appalachian Heritage. "Dunn . . . has written one of the best books ever produced about the Southern mountains." —Virginia Quarterly Review. "This study offers the first detailed analysis of a remote southern Appalachian community in the nineteenth century. It should lay to rest older images of the region as isolated and static, but it raises new questions about the nature of that premodern community." —Ronald D Eller, American Historical Review Not only is his book a worthy addition to the growing body of work recognizing the complexities of southern mountain society; it is also a lively testament to the value of local history and the variety of levels at which it can provide significant enlightenment." —John C. Inscoe,LOCUS

Nestled amid the western slopes of the Great Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee, bisected by the Little River, and including the community of Townsend, Tuckaleechee Cove is known today as "the peaceful side of the Smokies." Celebrated for its natural beauty, the area is also the site of human habitation dating back at least 13,000 years. Tuckaleechee Cove's rich past emerged from years of archaeological and historical research that began in 1999 when a state highway project uncovered a wealth of Native American and Euro-American remains, including burial mounds, fragments of tools, weapons, cooking vessels, and other evidence of past activity. This bountifully illustrated book combines details from that study with fascinating bits of history to tell the story of the cove and its disparate peoples. The earliest Native Americans to visit the area were hunters and foragers who moved in small bands through the cove setting up temporary camps. Over the millennia, foraging gave way to more settled farming practices, with the establishment of permanent settlements about 2,000 years ago. By the 1600s the area's residents were Cherokees who would soon encounter European explorers and traders. Displacing the Cherokees, Euro-Americans formed a number of small communities in the cove with colorful names like Frog Town and Needmore. They farmed the land; built churches, schools, and small businesses; and fought in the Civil War. In 1900, a northern investor named W. B. Townsend recognized the area's potential as a source of timber, and two years later the town bearing his name was literally abuzz with sawmill activity. By the Great Depression, however, the mills had closed, bringing hardship to cove residents. A measure of relief came in 1934 when the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established nearby, opening a new, still unfolding chapter in the area's history.

Missy Tipton Green and Paulette Ledbetter recall the rich past in this fascinating pictorial history. Situated in Tuckaleechee Cove, one of several limestone windows on the northern base of the Smoky Mountains, is Townsend, Tennessee, also known as the Peaceful Side of the Smokies. Native Americans were the first inhabitants of Tuckaleechee Cove. By the time the first Europeans arrived in the late 18th century, the Cherokee villages had been abandoned. In the 1880s, the lumber industry was in full swing thanks to two key innovations: the band saw and the logging railroad. With the coming of industrialization, the isolated farming community of Tuckaleechee Cove was transformed in the bustling mill town of Townsend. In 1894, E.J. Kinzel started a mountain retreat in Tuckaleechee Cove, which in later years turned into a mountain hotel with two healing mineral springs.

Discusses the settlement and later abandonment of the Tuckaleechee towns of Cherokees in the later 17th and earlier 18th centuries by examining the archaeological record of their everyday lives.

A compelling study into the history and lasting influence of enslaved Native people in early South Carolina. In 1708, the governor of South Carolina responded to a request from London to describe the population of the colony. This response included an often-overlooked segment of the population: Native Americans, who made up one-fourth of all enslaved people in the colony. Yet it was not long before these descriptions of enslaved Native people all but disappeared from the archive. In Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina, D. Andrew Johnson argues that Native people were crucial to the development of South Carolina's economy and culture. By meticulously scouring documentary sources and creating a database of over 15,000 mentions of enslaved people, Johnson uses a uniquely interdisciplinary approach to reconsider the history of South Carolina and center the enslaved Native people who were forced to live and work on its plantations. Johnson also employs spatial analysis and examines archaeological evidence to study Native slavery in a plantation context. Although much of their impact is absent from the historical record, Native people's influence persisted: in the specific technologies they brought to the plantations where they were enslaved; in the development of Creole culture; and in the wealth and power of the founders and early leaders of the colony. This book is an important corrective to our understanding of the colonization and development of South Carolina. By focusing on the Native minority of the enslaved population, Johnson recasts the colonial history of America, uncovering the importance of enslaved Native people to the colonial project and the complex historical connections between race and slavery.