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The forts of the Cherokee removal from which many area towns spawned are no more, but they were the foundation for towns we know today as Murphy, Andrews and Robbinsville.
For Murphy, there was a town here even before the coming of a removal fort.
The Unicoi Path, little more than a footpath, passed through here for centuries. But in 1814, work began on a 150-mile long, 20-foot-wide road with bridges and designated rest stops every 12 miles. It was named the Unicoi Turnpike.
When A.R.S. Hunter established his trading post here in the late 1820s and created the small community of Huntington, he was not clearing wilderness, but in modern terms creating a big box store on the interstate, thanks to Unicoi Trail traffic that had been passing through for years. That also made Huntington a good location for a fort, situated near heavy Cherokee population centers with a good road in and out.
After the Treaty of New Echota authorizing Cherokee removal was ratified by a single vote in 1805, the removal was set – it was only a matter of when.
Western North Carolina was the most densely populated Cherokee locale, so special attention was given to the Army’s Eastern Division headquarters. In 1836, Gen. John Wool created Camp Huntington here, which became Fort Butler in 1837, named for Benjamin Butler, Andrew Jackson’s attorney general. It was here Gen. Winfield Scott came in June 1838 to direct the roundup of Cherokee in the region.
A secondary reason was the Fort Butler location was its proximity to Valleytown, the largest concentration of Cherokee who followed traditional ways. The Army reasoned if there was to be armed resistance, it would occur here. It didn’t.
Cherokee were held at Fort Butler until time to move them to Fort Cass (Charleston, Tenn., today), the final assembly point for their Oklahoma journey.
Satellite forts were established as outlying bases for the forced roundup, and those forts later became towns. Robbinsville arose from Fort Montgomery, Andrews from Fort Delany (and so situated as Valleytown was one of the major Cherokee towns) and Fort Hembree became Hayesville.
Other Cherokee removal forts ranged from Alabama into the outermost fort, Fort Lindsay near Almond and Franklin. A total of 33 forts would be garrisoned and would need names. It is easy to determine for whom some forts were named.
Fort Lindsay was named for Col. William L. Lindsay, in charge of the Western part of the removal process. Forts Winfield Scott and Wool were obvious. Fort Cass, the embarkation point on the Tennessee River in Charleston, was named for Lewis Cass, Jackson’s secretary of war.
Of all the Cherokee removal forts, there is only one town that retains the same name to this day, home of the country music legends Alabama – Fort Payne, Ala.
When gold was discovered in Coker Creek in 1831 (on Cherokee land), there was a gold rush of whites trespassing to dig Cherokee gold. Montford Stokes, the governor of North Carolina, petitioned Andrew Jackson to help disperse the prospectors from Cherokee land. Jackson sent Gen. Walker K. Armistead to the area with almost 100 men, where they started the expulsion of illegal prospectors.
The soldiers created Fort Armistead in Coker Creek in 1832. The fort would be abandoned, then reoccupied during the removal and became a way-point for the 3,000 Cherokee that would be moved between Fort Butler and Fort Cass.
With the boundaries of the Cherokee National Forest, in 2011 archaeologists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, U.S. Forest Service and Lee University excavated the fort’s site, as it was one of the few Cherokee removal fort locations that had not been disturbed or destroyed.
In researching the local forts, there are few sources that can tell exactly for whom those other forts were named. It required digging and at times deductive reasoning.
In N.C. Browder’s The Cherokee Indian and Those Who Came After, he records correspondence from Fort Butler, with many of the orders emanating from “Lt. A. Montgomery,” who also served in settling a dispute between A.R.S. Hunter and the garrison cavalry troopers who were taking down Hunter’s fences and allowing their horses to dine in Hunter’s cornfield. Robbinsville’s Fort Montgomery precursor solved.
Also in that correspondence are communications from Major John R. Delany at Ross’s Landing (Chattanooga, Tenn., today). The namesake for the fort in Andrews was likely him.
The person for which Fort Hembree in Hayesville was named proved more elusive, until I stumbled upon a 2006 report to the National Park Service by Brett Riggs and Lance Green titled “The Trail of Tears in North Carolina.” Created in October of 1837, Fort Hembree was garrisoned by a company of Tennessee volunteer militia. The commander was Capt. John Hembree.
While those forts are a part of our local history, the men after whom those forts were named have their rightful place in our history – and are worth remembering, too.
Bruce Voyles’ local history column runs every other week in the Cherokee Scout. Email him at RoadsLessTraveled@cherokeescout.com.