Indigenous Heritage of the Nacoochee Valley

Long before Bavarian storefronts, this valley was Native land. The oldest visible piece of that history is the Sautee Nacoochee Indian Mound, and the story it tells is a layered one: people who lived here centuries before the Cherokee, then Cherokee towns, then removal. Most visitors drive past the mound without knowing any of it, so it's worth stopping.

According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, Nacoochee Mound was a late prehistoric earthen platform mound beside the upper Chattahoochee River. An expedition sponsored by the Museum of the American Indian (the Heye Foundation) and the Bureau of American Ethnology excavated it in 1915, one of the earliest scientific excavations of its kind in Georgia. The dig found at least two mound stages and 75 human burials. About a third of those burials held objects that point to high social standing: hammered copper celts and sheet ornaments, stone tools, conch-shell beads and cups, and elaborate pottery. Some later burials held European glass beads and sheet brass from the 1600s, which shows that trade reached the valley in the contact era.

The encyclopedia says the mound and a nearby site called Eastwood probably served as local administrative centers in the late 1400s and early 1500s, with earlier occupation three centuries before that. The village around the mound hasn't been excavated, and it may have been occupied much later. It's possibly the site of Nacoochee or Chota, two Cherokee villages recorded in this valley during Colonel George Chicken's 1715 expedition, and both appear on maps until the middle of the 1700s. The mound seen today is a reconstruction. Georgia State Parks describes it as a burial site probably used long before the Cherokee lived in the area.

By the 1700s this was Cherokee country, with towns in the Nacoochee and Sautee valleys. The route that connected them was the Unicoi Turnpike, which began as a trail Wikipedia says has existed for more than 1,000 years. It ran from near Toccoa through the Nacoochee Valley, over Unicoi Gap and into present-day North Carolina and Tennessee. Today's Georgia 17 follows much of it, and Helen sits on the old route.

In 1813, after requests from Tennessee and Georgia, the Cherokee agreed to a treaty allowing a toll road along the trail. A company led by Russell Wiley built it into a wagon road by about 1817, with inns called stands roughly every 15 miles. Under the treaty the tribe was to be paid $160 a year; Wikipedia notes the payments were reportedly never made. The one surviving inn, Traveler's Rest in Toccoa, is a National Historic Landmark. See our Travelers Rest page.

Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830. A small faction of the Cherokee signed the Treaty of New Echota in late 1835, which the Senate ratified in May 1836, and the great majority of the Nation bitterly opposed it, according to the National Park Service. In May 1838 U.S. Army troops and state militia forced more than 16,000 Cherokee people out of their homes in Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Georgia. They were held in round-up camps, then sent west in fourteen detachments between August and December 1838, mostly along existing roads.

The park service says more than a thousand people, particularly the old, the young and the sick, died on the trip itself, and perhaps several thousand more died from its consequences. The New Georgia Encyclopedia puts the total at least 4,000, about one-fifth of the Nation. The Cherokee Nation today is headquartered in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and the Cherokee Nation's own site is the best place to learn about the living culture. For how gold figured in this story, see our gold rush page.

Hours and prices are from the Georgia State Parks pages for Hardman Farm and New Echota as of October 2026. Hardman Farm's phone is 706-878-1077; New Echota's is 706-624-1321.

New Echota is where the Cherokee national legislature set its capital in 1825. Georgia State Parks describes it as the site of the first Indian-language newspaper office, a court case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and the assembly of Cherokee people for removal. You'll find 12 original and reconstructed buildings, including the Council House, the Court House, the print shop and the home of missionary Samuel Worcester, plus a 17-minute film in the visitor center.

Closer to Helen, the petroglyphs at Track Rock Gap are another piece of the area's Native history; see our Track Rock Gap page. For the Mississippian site at Etowah Indian Mounds near Cartersville, plan a longer day trip.