The Indigenous Heritage of the Nacoochee Valley

People often call the Nacoochee Mound a Cherokee site. The mound is older than that. According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, it's a late prehistoric earthen platform mound, and the nearby sites probably served as administrative centers in the late 1400s and early 1500s. Georgia State Parks says the mound is a burial site that was probably used long before the Cherokee lived here. Cherokee villages are documented in the valley by 1715, though, and the valley stayed an important Cherokee place until removal.

For the Cherokee's own story and present-day life, see the Cherokee Nation and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina.

The Hardman Farm page has current details. Our Hardman Farm guide and the Helen to Hardman Heritage Trail page cover the rest.

The mound was excavated in 1915 by an expedition sponsored by the Museum of the American Indian, the Heye Foundation and the Bureau of American Ethnology, making it one of the earliest scientific excavations of its kind in Georgia. The team found evidence of at least two mound stages and 75 human burials, some from a later time.

About a third of the burials came with objects that point to high social status: hammered copper celts and sheet ornaments, stone celts, conch shell beads and cups, and elaborate pottery. Some later burials held European glass beads and brass ornaments, which place them in the 17th-century contact era.

The encyclopedia adds that the village around the mound hasn't been excavated, and that it may be the site of the Cherokee villages of Nacoochee or Chota recorded during Colonel George Chicken's 1715 expedition. Those towns appear on maps until the mid-1700s and were abandoned soon after. The Chota in the Nacoochee Valley is not the better-known Overhill Cherokee capital of that name in Tennessee.

Georgia State Parks describes the Unicoi Turnpike as a 200-mile road from Toccoa to western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee that began as a buffalo trail and then became a Native American trading route. The tree-lined road from the Hardman Farm visitor center to the house is a remaining portion of it. It's one of the easiest places in the valley to walk on a route that carried traders and travelers for generations.

Local stories often say gold was first found on Duke's Creek in the Nacoochee area in 1828. The New Georgia Encyclopedia is careful here: one anecdote has John Witheroods finding a three-ounce nugget on Duke's Creek in what is now White County, but no one is certain who made the first discovery or when, and the first documented notice of gold is dated August 1, 1829.

By late 1829 thousands of prospectors had flooded into what was then the Cherokee Nation, an influx known as the Great Intrusion. See our Georgia gold rush guide for more.

Gold was one of the pressures that led to Cherokee removal, along with the demand for farmland and racial prejudice. In 1838 and 1839 U.S. troops expelled the Cherokee from their homeland; scholars estimate 4,000 to 5,000 died on the Trail of Tears. The valley's story from the Mississippian period to removal:

Locals tell a romantic story of two lovers, Sautee and Nacoochee, tied to the valley's two names. It's a legend, and it's part of the valley's culture of storytelling, but the sources above don't document it as Cherokee history. Some local tradition also connects the valley with the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto's 1540 route; historians disagree about where his expedition actually went, so treat that as tradition too. Related: Nacoochee Valley history and Cherokee heritage sites in northwest Georgia.