Echoes of the High Country

The Cherokee homeland covered the northern third of what became Georgia, including the mountains around Helen. The sites that best tell the story of the Cherokee Nation's final years here are farther west, around Calhoun, Chatsworth and Cartersville, and all three are run by Georgia State Parks. They're worth the drive if you want to understand what happened in the places you pass through in the Georgia mountains.

The story has layers. The mounds at Etowah were built by people of the Mississippian culture between 1000 and 1550. The New Georgia Encyclopedia notes that ancestors of both the Cherokee and the Muscogee (Creek) were part of the Mississippian chiefdoms, and that those chiefdoms collapsed after Spanish contact and Old World disease. Much later, in the early 1800s, the Cherokee Nation built a written constitution, a capital and a newspaper, and then lost its land to Georgia and the federal government. For the Cherokee's own account and current life, see the Cherokee Nation website.

Distances from downtown Helen by road: about 140 minutes to the Vann House and Etowah, about 150 minutes to New Echota. Leashed pets are allowed on trails but not in buildings. Annual passes are available at each site.

New Echota is where the Cherokee national legislature set up its capital in 1825, at the headwaters of the Oostanaula River. In its short life it had the first Indian-language newspaper office, a court case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and one of the earliest experiments in national self-government by an Indian tribe. It was also where the Treaty of New Echota was signed and where Cherokee were assembled for removal on the Trail of Tears.

Today you can walk among 12 original and reconstructed buildings, including the Council House, the Court House, the Print Shop, the home of missionary Samuel Worcester and an 1805 store, with outbuildings such as smokehouses, corn cribs and barns. The visitor center has exhibits and a 17-minute film, and a 1.5-mile nature trail leads to New Town Creek and a small beaver pond. The print shop recalls the Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper in the United States, printed here in English and Cherokee starting in 1828.

The Vann House is Georgia's best-preserved historic Cherokee home, a two-and-a-half-story brick house that the state calls the most elegant in the Cherokee Nation when it was finished. James Vann, a Cherokee leader and wealthy businessman, built it on a plantation in what is now Murray County. Visitors tour the house with a guide and see hand carvings, a 12-foot mantel and the cantilevered "floating" staircase, which the New Georgia Encyclopedia calls the oldest example of cantilevered construction in Georgia.

The history here includes hard facts. The 800-acre property had 42 dwellings for enslaved people, according to the encyclopedia. Vann was shot and killed in 1809; his son Joseph inherited the estate. In 1834, under the Georgia land lottery, Joseph Vann and his family were dispossessed of the house, and a fight over who would claim it started a fire on the staircase. Charred flooring from that fire is still in the house. The grounds also include a 19th-century Cherokee farmstead, a kitchen and workhouse exhibit, and the former site of the Springplace Moravian mission and cemetery. Exhibits inside the house change through the year.

Etowah Indian Mounds is a 54-acre site on the Etowah River that protects six earthen mounds, a plaza, a village site, borrow pits and a defensive ditch. Georgia State Parks calls it the most intact Mississippian culture site in the Southeast. Several thousand people lived here between 1000 and 1550, and the largest mound stands about 63 feet high. The mounds are far older than the Cherokee Nation of the 1800s, though the encyclopedia notes that Cherokee and Muscogee ancestors were both part of the Mississippian world.

A nature trail follows the river past a V-shaped fish trap. The state has posted a museum notice about repatriation efforts and renovation, so read it on the site page before you go and expect the museum to look different from older descriptions.

The New Georgia Encyclopedia's account of Cherokee removal traces how cotton agriculture, the discovery of gold on Cherokee land and racial prejudice drove Georgia to push the Cherokee out, despite their own constitution, courts and newspaper.

Closer to Helen, see the Track Rock Gap page, our guide to the Cherokee history of the North Georgia mountains, and the Nacoochee Valley, where the Nacoochee Mound stands.