Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga

Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga. . , Sycamore Shoals, a rapids on the Watauga River, and the Sycamore Flats were the hub of the Watauga settlements. These settlements were among the earliest permanent Anglo-American colonies beyond the Indian boundary line and the birthplace of Tennessee. The fertile Watauga Valley attracted pioneers from Virginia and North Carolina, beginning in 1768, when a Virginian, William Bean, cleared some land and built a cabin for his family on Boone's Creek on the lower Watauga. In 1771 James Robertson, who had scouted the Flats the year before, brought his family from the North Carolina Piedmont to the rich valley above the Shoals. The same year John Carter, a Virginia merchant, opened a trading post near here. Carter's store became so popular that the community around the Flats was sometimes referred to as "Carter's." Other frontiersmen from the Wolf Hills (Abingdon) settlement in Virginia and the Yadkin country of North Carolina followed. Some four hundred families -- mostly English and Scots Irish -- settled in the region by 1774. Sycamore Shoals was their rendezvous: Its shallow water and adjacent Flats made it one of the most useful river fords in the region., (Map captions) , A network of trails connected Sycamore Shoals to the other settlements in the region: Wolf Hills, Long Island on the Holston, Sapling Grove, Council Store, Rocky Mount, Jonesborough, and Jacob Brown's trading Post on the Nolichucky. Rocky Mount became the first territorial capital of the Southwest Territory in 1790., The Watauga Old Fields , Robertson and other settlers came to this stretch of the Watauga River in the 1770s, in part, because here they found farm fields cleared and abandoned years before by the Indians. These "Watauga Old Fields" extended six miles from the mouth of Stony Creek to the mouth of Buffalo Creek at the bend of the river. The prehistoric farmers - the Cherokee and others - left behind stone tools, broken pottery, stone mills of various sizes, kitchen middens, and cemeteries., (Photo caption) , "The Wataugans were scattered ... but the Flats at Sycamore Shoals provided the best gathering place for miles around for races and musters." Max Dixon (Sycamore Shoals State Historic)