Appalachian History

Old Fort: the name says it. It is indeed one of the oldest towns in western North Carolina, and it was originally a fort, built by the colonial militia before the Declaration of Independence. Once called “Gateway to the West,” the settlement served as the westernmost outpost of the early Thirteen Colonies.

Frequent skirmishes between the Scots-Irish settlers and the Cherokee and Catawba tribes took place along the banks of Mill Creek, which runs through the center of town. There is an old law still on the books that requires any traveler between Marion and Old Fort to notify the Constable of their intended trip and expected arrival time.

If a traveler was late, it was assumed that they had run into trouble, and a search party would be dispatched from the fort to rescue them.

The Native Americans, for their part, were so alarmed by the incursion of pioneers into their lands that they allied themselves with their old enemies the British in 1776.

Reacting to particularly heavy attacks on Old Fort that year, in late July American General Griffith Rutherford led 2,400 men out of Asheville to invade Cherokee country. Rutherford was joined by Colonel Andrew Williamson, supplying South Carolina troops, and Colonel William Christian with Virginia troops. The army slashed and burned all the way to what is now Murphy, destroying 32 Indian towns and villages. This expedition broke the power of the Cherokee and forced them to sue for peace.

Rather than raise a victory monument commemorating these early battles, the early twentieth century town fathers of Old Fort, perhaps in awareness of the lingering pall cast by the Trail of Tears episode, saw fit to instead create a monument to honor the ‘peace’ between the pioneers and the Native Americans.

And so in 1930, on the same date General Rutherford had originally set out on his march, the Arrowhead Monument on Highway 70 near the Southern Railway Depot was presented, with appropriate ceremonies. 
Nine year old Margaret Marie Nesbitt, who unveiled the marker, was the great-great granddaughter of Mrs. Martha Burgin, the only white child born in the fort. 


Twenty Indians, representing the Cherokee and Catawba tribes, were seated on the speakers’ platform. The two tribes, at one time bitter enemies, formally smoked the pipe of peace while 6,000 persons looked on.

The arrowhead, which was chiseled out of a slab of pink granite at nearby Salisbury Quarries, stands 14-1/2 feet in height on a river rock and cement base of slightly more than fifteen feet. 
 One face of the arrow is adorned by crossed tomahawks, crossed muzzle-loading rifles, and a powder horn. The other side carries a profile of Chief Sequoia.

A brass tablet attached to the arrowhead bears the inscription: "This marks the site of the Old Indian Fort built A. D. 1756, the western outpost of the United States and North Carolina until 1776." 


Actually the arrowhead is not on the site of the original fort, which was located approximately where the Mountain Gateway Museum stands today. 



sources: http://ncmuseumofhistory.org/nchh/amerindian.html#18th
www.oldfort.org/History.htm
www.familyorigins.com/users/l/y/t/C-R-Lytle/FAMO1-0001/d13.htm
A Popular History of Western North Carolina, by Rob Neufeld, The History Press, 2007



Arrowhead+Monument Old+Fort+NC Cherokees Catawbas appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

The Carolina coast was the site of the earliest evidence of pottery making in North America, with pieces dated 4,500 BC and tempered with Spanish moss.

In 1540, when Hernando De Soto traveled through the Carolinas, the Catawba Indian Nation controlled 55,000 square miles of land including portions of North Carolina and Virginia, and most of South Carolina. The Catawba Nation has maintained the longest pottery making tradition in North America and was instrumental in keeping the Cherokee pottery making tradition viable.

The Catawba, who eluded forced removal to Oklahoma by the US Government during the 1830s, joined with their former enemies, the hold-out Cherokees, hiding in the hills, in the struggle to remain on their homelands. But by 1847 most of the Catawba left the Cherokee and returned to their original base in South Carolina (the 1760 treaty of Pine Hill and 1763 treaty of Augusta had established a fifteen mile square reservation for them along the Catawba River). Before they departed, they left behind a permanent influence on Cherokee pottery making.

The Native American Art Collection at the University of Houston - Clear Lake purchased this bowl by Cherokee potter Cora Wahnetah in 1969.

"The Catawba and Cherokee pottery families intermarried," says Michael Simpson, author of Making Native American Pottery. "A cross-fertilization of methods took place, with the final result being that the Cherokee adopted the Catawba method of firing in an open pit, abandoning forever the traditional mound firing method, which has been nearly forgotten in modern times."

Within both traditional Catawba and Cherokee culture, women were the potters, though that gender barrier was broken during the 20th century.

After pulverizing dried clay and mixing it with water, Cherokee craftswomen molded and coiled their earthen vessels. The coil building method more easily accommodated the production of large storage pieces.

Cherokee potters often used carved wooden paddles to imprint designs --- zigzag, crosshatch, feather and figure motifs---and smooth the surfaces to make them waterproof. Partly dry pottery may be burnished with a polishing stone to achieve its characteristic satin patina. Some pieces are deeply carved, some painted with slip (a liquid form of clay that may have color additives).

If clay preparation is not done correctly, or the pots are constructed incorrectly, they will crack upon simple drying. If stone polishing takes place at the wrong drying stage, or the friction of polishing is allowed to overheat and hence dry out the still damp clay, the pots will be rough- sanded, rather than smooth-polished.

This Cora Wahnetah wedding vase has been low-fired, burnished, and has an inscribed design.

The stone polishing procedure is a method that smooths by compressing the clay particles, not by sanding it, hence contributing to its strength, rather than weakening it.

The work is unglazed, and is fired in pits of burning bark and native woods, the subtle tones of red, cream, and soft grey to deep black determined by the kind of wood used in the fires. To further waterproof the insides, corncobs and bran were thrown into the fires while the pots hardened.

The vast tourist market in the North Carolina mountains that opened starting in the 1920s provided an important source of income for the Cherokee potters. Traditional wares were being produced in very small quantities, but pottery making was maintained through the creation of small decorative ware for sale.

The well known Cherokee potter Cora Wahnetah (b. 1907), whose work is shown here, tapped into that outside market starting in the 1940s. As a young girl, she had learned pottery making from her mother, in the traditional Cherokee manner: first forming the very simplest type of pot (pinched); next, the slab pot, and finally the coiled pot.

Wahnetah’s work varies from traditional pieces-- pit-fired, incised pots--which would have been used in ceremonies by her ancestors, to contemporary pieces. Her pieces are owned by the Department of the Interior and are on permanent display at Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual in Cherokee, NC.


sources: Catawba Indian Pottery: The Survival of a Folk Tradition; Thomas John Blumer; Univ of Alabama Press, 2004
www.cherokee-nc.com/index.php?page=30
www.carolinaarts.com/608ncpotterycenter.html
Making Native American Pottery, Michael Simpson, Naturegraph Publishers, Happy Camp, CA, 1991



Cherokees Catawbas native+american+pottery appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history