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At the very edge of our college campus, a few crumbling 300-year-old oak trees marked the site of the old Cherokee Council House.
In October of 2019, concerned citizens called me, fearing the drought was killing them. I photographed one, obviously dying and wrote a column about them.
Early white visitors had written about the open-sided council house, circle of posts holding up a thatch roof. Dances were held there; council meetings, too. Official visitors welcomed there. Also politics.
Fall of 1835 saw two commissioners come to Peachtree from Washington to sell the local Indians on the government’s Removal idea. They failed, Cherokee simply not attending the conferences either at the council house or nearby Baptist mission.
So the government men took their scheme to Rome, Ga., in front of a hand-picked audience and got their treaty signed. Back in Washington, the U.S. Senate passed it by only a single vote, and the Trail of Tears happened in 1838.
The very next year Cherokee vigilantes, saying no one had authority to sell tribal land, hunted down the Indian signers of the deal and killed them all, often in full view of their families.
School building project
Today, a fine new high school building project is underway on the spot, politics involved in the issue in the past and may well be visible again.
As the young editor for the Cherokee Scout, I covered county school board meetings in the 1970s, when the subject of possible high school consolidation came up 50 years ago. Today, they’re using the term “unified” to try to take some of the sting out.
For people are passionate about their individual community, its identity and its school. Social life is important, generated by school and church.
A group of Hiwassee Dam High School parents who lived along U.S. 64 West first asked for a change. Give us one bus that goes to the Tennesse line and back. Any students who want to go instead to Murphy High School can get on that bus each morning.
School board said no, Hiwassee Dam will lose teachers because maybe half the enrollment will get on bus to Murphy.
Then one of the main buildings at Andrews burned, and the insurance payoff was more than $300,000. Dr. Chuck VanGorder, who represented Andrews on the school board, said, “Maybe we ought to take that money as a start for a new consolidated high school at Murphy.”
Years later he chuckled when he told me that Andrews folks “nearly ran me out of town when you printed that in the paper.”
Strong feelings
When I had left the Scout and was a sales rep for billboard advertising or mobile homes or real estate, I read that a school board member’s house here was deliberately burned by anti-consolidation forces.
I remembered the scene in the Daniel Boone/Yadkin River country, where I went to a crossroads high school, Class of 1958, last group of seniors to graduate because our little school was being consolidated with another down the road. Elementary school still there but high school gone.
Family man who lived next to high school was smoking, steaming furious. He and his wife were from early settler families, she was my eighth-grade teacher.
He sold their house and land, picked the kids up and moved 5 miles to town, madder than an old wet
hen and probably died that way. All because of the school.
Change, they say, is pain.
Wally Avett first wrote for the Cherokee Scout as editor in 1969. His books are available as signed copies at the Scout office in Murphy. Call him at 837-5531 or email wallyavett@gmail.com.