Fort Watauga (Elizabethton, Tennessee)
Elizabethton · Tennessee · American Revolutionary War
History & Significance
Fort Watauga, also known as Fort Caswell, was a fortification located in the Watauga River's Sycamore Shoals near Elizabethton and was constructed from 1775 to 1776 by the Watauga Association to defend settlers against attacks from British-allied Indians. It was originally named Fort Caswell after the governor of North Carolina, Richard Caswell.
The fort's construction occurred amid escalating frontier tensions following the 1775 Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, in which Richard Henderson's Transylvania Company purchased a large part of modern Kentucky and part of Tennessee from the Cherokee. In January 1776, Dragging Canoe and the British forged an alliance, and in April of that year British agents supplied the Cherokee with a large cache of weapons to use in attacks against American colonists and sent a message giving settlers twenty days to leave Cherokee lands or face attack.
In July 1776, Old Abram of Chilhowee led a group of Cherokees in an attack on the Watauga settlement, the Cherokee besieged the fort for two weeks, but by the time reinforcements arrived from the Holston settlement, the Cherokees had already abandoned the siege. In 1780 the Overmountain Men gathered at the Sycamore Shoals of the Watauga before marching to the battle of Kings Mountain. In the 1970s, as part of the United States Bicentennial celebrations, the government of Tennessee authorized a reconstruction of Fort Watauga, with archaeologists conducting excavations that uncovered trenches believed to have been part of the fort's walls, and the fort was rebuilt based on information gained from the excavation, descriptions of the fort in historical sources, and the general design of typical Appalachian frontier forts.
Key Facts
Map
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🧳 Visiting
What you’ll see when you visit:
- Reconstructed 18th-century palisade and log structures
- Site of July 1776 Cherokee siege and defense
- Watauga River valley setting in East Tennessee
- Revolutionary War frontier settlement history
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Watauga
- https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/fort-watauga/
- https://tnstateparks.com/parks/sycamore-shoals
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sycamore_Shoals
- https://friendsofsycamoreshoals.org/the-park/