Early History

Early History. Tennessee Agricultural Museum. Indigenous populations lived in the Cumberland Valley of Middle Tennessee in large villages such as Mound Bottom in present-day Cheatham County. They were the first farmers of Tennessee and grew corn, beans, and squash for their own sustenance and for trade., In the eighteenth century, the Shawnee, Chickasaw, and Cherokee Nations used Middle Tennessee for hunting and gathering. Trade with the French and English centered in the Nashville area, then known as Big Salt Springs, or French Lick., Permanent colonial migration dates to 1779-1780 when James Robertson and John Donelson led a group of families and 30 enslaved persons to the former French Lick site. This area along the Cumberland River was named Fort Nashborough, which later developed into Nashville in Davidson County. Native American groups resisted these encroachments. Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe led blockades and attacks in the 1780s and early 1790s. His death and the 1794 Treaty of Tellico Blockhouse opened Middle Tennessee to a wave of settlement two years before Tennessee earned statehood., After the American Revolution, the state of North Carolina, which then included much of present-day Tennessee, compensated war veterans with land grants. In 1788 William Ewing received a land grant encompassing the area that would become the Ellington Agricultural Center., Photo captions: , Top: "Engraving of the Donelson Party Descending the Tennessee River, 1779.” Courtesy of the Tennessee State Library and Archives. , Bottom: "A map of the Tennessee government, formerly part of North Carolina” published by John Reid, 1795. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.