Davidson County is a county located in the U.S. state of Tennessee. As of the 2010 census, the population was 626,681, making it the second-most populous county in Tennessee. Its county seat is Nashville, the state capital.
Elizabethton is a city in, and the county seat of Carter County, Tennessee, United States. Elizabethton is the historical site of the first independent American government located west of both the Eastern Continental Divide and the original Thirteen Colonies.
Clarksville is the county seat of Montgomery County, Tennessee, United States. It is the fifth-largest city in the state behind Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. The city had a population of 132,929 at the 2010 census, and an estimated population of 153,205 in 2017.
Middle Tennessee is a distinct portion of the state of Tennessee, delineated according to state law as the 41 counties in the Middle Grand Division of Tennessee.
Dragging Canoe was a Cherokee war chief who led a band of disaffected Cherokee against colonists and United States settlers in the Upper South.
The Nickajack Expedition was a long-running battle fought from late summer to fall of 1794 between American frontiersmen and the Chickamauga Cherokee. The military expedition was a decisive success for the American settlers of the Southwest Territory and surrounding regions, eventually becoming known as the "Last Battle of the Cherokee".
The Cumberland Compact was both based on the earlier Articles of the Watauga Association composed at present day Elizabethton, Tennessee and is a foundation document of the Tennessee State Constitution. Signed on May 13, 1780, by early settlers led to the Cumberland River area by James Robertson and John Donelson, where they settled Fort Nashborough, which would later become Nashville, Tennessee.
The Overmountain Men were American frontiersmen from west of the Appalachian Mountains who took part in the American Revolutionary War. While they were present at multiple engagements in the war's southern campaign, they are best known for their role in the American victory at the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780. The term "overmountain" arose because their settlements were west of, or "over", the Appalachians, which was the primary geographical boundary dividing the 13 American colonies from the western frontier. The Overmountain Men hailed from parts of Virginia, North Carolina, and what is now Tennessee and Kentucky.
The Watauga Association was a semi-autonomous government created in 1772 by frontier settlers living along the Watauga River in what is now Elizabethton, Tennessee. Although it lasted only a few years, the Watauga Association provided a basis for what later developed into the state of Tennessee and likely influenced other western frontier governments in the trans-Appalachian region. North Carolina annexed the Watauga settlement area, by then known as the Washington District, in November 1776. Within a year, the area was placed under a county government, becoming Washington County, North Carolina, in November 1777.
Fort Nashborough was the stockade established in early 1779 in the French Lick area of the Cumberland River valley, as a forerunner to the settlement that would become the city of Nashville, Tennessee. The log stockade was square in shape and covered 2 acres (8,100 m2). It contained 20 log cabins and was protection for the settlers against wild animals and Indians. Today, a reconstructed fortification, maintained by Nashville Parks and Recreation, stands near the site of the original structure.
Kasper Mansker or Gaspar Mansker also, spelled Mäintzger and Minsker (1750–1820) was a longhunter and one of Middle Tennessee's first European explorers and settlers.
The Sycamore Shoals of the Watauga River, usually shortened to Sycamore Shoals, is a rocky stretch of river rapids along the Watauga River in Elizabethton, Tennessee. Archeological excavations have found Native Americans lived near the shoals since prehistoric times, and Cherokees gathered there. As Europeans began settling the Trans-Appalachian frontier, the shoals proved strategic militarily, as well as shaped the economies of Tennessee and Kentucky. Today, the shoals are protected as a National Historic Landmark and are maintained as part of Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park.
A longhunter was an 18th-century explorer and hunter who made expeditions into the American frontier wilderness for as much as six months at a time. Historian Emory Hamilton asserts that "The Long Hunter was peculiar to Southwest Virginia only, and nowhere else on any frontier did such hunts ever originate" although the term has been used loosely to describe any unofficial American explorer of the period. Most long hunts started in the Holston River Valley near Chilhowie, Virginia. The hunters came from there and the adjacent valley of the Clinch River, where they were land owners or residents. The parties of two or three men usually started their hunts in October and ended toward the end of March or early in April.
The Cherokee–American wars, also known as the Chickamauga Wars, were a series of back-and-forth raids, campaigns, ambushes, minor skirmishes, and several full-scale frontier battles in the Old Southwest from 1776 to 1795 between the Cherokee and American settlers on the frontier. Most of the events took place in the Upper South. While the fighting stretched across the entire period, there were times of little or no action, at times spanning several months.
Fort Watauga, more properly Fort Caswell, was an American Revolutionary War fort that once stood at the Sycamore Shoals of the Watauga River in what is now Elizabethton, Tennessee. The fort was originally built in 1775–1776 by the area's frontier government, the Watauga Association, to help defend Watauga settlers from Native American attacks, which were in part instigated by the British. Fort Watauga was originally named Fort Caswell after North Carolina Governor Richard Caswell.
Sycamore Shoals State Historic Area is a state park located in Elizabethton, in the U.S. state of Tennessee. The park consists of 70 acres (28.3 ha) situated along the Sycamore Shoals of the Watauga River, 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, the Carter Mansion and Sabine Hill . 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 governments 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.
Bledsoe's Station, also known as Bledsoe's Fort, was an 18th-century, fortified, frontier, white settlement located in what is now Castalian Springs, Sumner County, Tennessee. The fort was built by long hunter and Sumner County pioneer Isaac Bledsoe in the early 1780s to protect Upper Cumberland settlers and migrants from hostile Native American attacks. While the fort is no longer standing, its location has been verified by archaeological excavations. The site is now part of Bledsoe's Fort Historical Park, a public park established in 1989 by Sumner County residents and Bledsoe's descendants.
Bledsoe Creek State Park is a state park in Sumner County, Tennessee, in the southeastern United States. The park consists of 169 acres (0.68 km2) managed by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation. The park spans much of the west shore of the Bledsoe Creek embayment of Old Hickory Lake, an impoundment of the Cumberland River created with the completion of Old Hickory Dam by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1954.
