Forts housed troops who guarded Cherokees as they were rounded up prior to the Trail of Tears in 1838.
Forts bear witness to Cherokee roundup
Much has been written about the history of the removal of the Cherokee as a result of the 1835 Treaty of New Echota. However, the actual mechanisms used to gather approximately 16,000 residents of the Cherokee Nation in preparation for removal has rarely been detailed. A major element used to facilitate that roundup were stockades or forts used as holding areas for gathering the thousands of Cherokees prior to their being marched to Tennessee removal camps, the starting points for the 800-mile journey west of the Mississippi on what we know as the Trail of Tears.
As stated in the Treaty of New Echota, the Cherokee people were required to begin their journey west prior to May 23, 1838. Chief John Ross and other Cherokee leaders spend over two years in Washington, D.C., attempting to overturn the unauthorized treaty, assuring their people that they would not have to give up their homes and land. Thus, most members of the Nation made no preparation for leaving. When their leaders failed in Washington and the deadline occurred, they were unprepared for the soldiers who appeared at their doors, ordering them to vacate their property immediately.
Major General Windfield Scott led 7,000 U.S. troops and members of the Georgia Militia in the roundup of Cherokees which lasted around 20 days. General Scott’s orders to his men were to capture women and children first, as they would serve as hostages for bringing the men to the forts. According to the memory of a young Cherokee, “The soldiers came and took us from our home. They first surrounded our home and took the mare while we were at work in the fields, and they drove us out of doors and did not permit us to take anything with us, not even a second change of clothes. They drove us off to a fort that was built at New Echota.”
Evan Jones, a Baptist missionary, recorded the following observations in a letter on June 16: “The Cherokees are nearly all prisoners. They have been dragged from their houses and encamped at the forts and military posts all over the nation. In Georgia especially, multitudes were allowed no time to take anything with them except the clothes they had on. Well-furnished houses were left a prey to plunderers, who, like hungry wolves, follow the train of the captors. These wretches rifle though the houses and strip the helpless, unoffending owners of all they have on earth. Females, who have been habituated to comforts and comparative affluence, are driven on foot before the bayonets of brutal men. Their feelings are mortified by vulgar and profane vociferations. It is a painful sight……The poor captive, in a state of distressing agitation, his weeping wife almost frantic with terror, surrounded by a group of crying, terrified children, without a friend to speak a consoling word, is in a poor condition…..Many of the Cherokees, who, a few days ago, were in comfortable circumstances, are now victims of abject poverty. Some, who have been allowed to return home, under passport, to inquire after their property, have found their cattle, horses, swine, farming tools and household furniture all gone. And this is not a description of extreme cases. It is altogether a faint representation of the work which has been perpetrated on the unoffending, unarmed and unresisting Cherokees.”
The captured Cherokees were marched for miles from their homes to the holding areas where they slept on bare ground adjacent to the stockades, located in areas of dense Cherokee population to make the roundup more efficient. The buildings inside the forts were constructed to accommodate the soldiers assigned there, not to house the Cherokee prisoners. Most of the forts were hastily constructed stockades consisting of pine slabs forming a palisade or fenced wall and a few buildings inside for storage of equipment, food, and personnel. Fourteen forts were built in Georgia with six in North Carolina, three in Tennessee, and three in Alabama, where smaller portions of the Cherokee Nation were located.
Dr. Charles Walker’s drawing of a removal fort is based on descriptions in military records.
No traces of those removal forts remain today; however, the blockhouse at Fort Marr in Benton, Tennessee, still exists. Aparently blockhouses were built at most forts in case the structures were attacked from outside. The blockhouses were constructed of massive hewn logs about twenty feet square and eight or ten feet high. Portholes or embrasures were cut so that a squad of soldiers could stand inside and fire their weapons at approaching attackers.
The Fort Marr blockhouse is the only existing piece of a removal fort.
According to various military records of the removal, these protections were unnecessary because the Cherokees submitted to their captors peacefully and offered no organized resistance. Despite the fact that Cherokee captives far outnumbered the soldiers, according to one soldier, “I experienced no difficulty in getting them [Cherokees] along other than what arose from fatigue…..it was pitiful to behold the women and children, who suffered exceedingly, as they were obliged to walk [to the removal fort], with the exception of the sick.”
Once the Cherokees had been rounded up and marched to area forts, they only remained there for a few days before they walked up to 100 miles to removal camps in Tennessee, where they were supposed to begin their journeys on flatboats to the West. Unfortunately, extreme summer heat and low water levels in the rivers resulted in the majority of the captives having to remain in deportation camps in Tennessee until late autumn. The camps were death traps. A doctor who treated the sick and dying prisoners reported “a high grade of diarrhea, hazardous dysentery, and urgent remittent fever prevailing to a great and deplorably fatal extent. Measles and whooping cough appeared epidemically among the Cherokees about the first of June which diseases more generally much aggravated by the circumstances connected with the assemblage.” Deplorable lack of sanitation, scarce or contaminated water, poor quality of food, exposure to the elements, being huddled together in packed camps, and limited medical care were all reasons for common diseases’ becoming epidemics.
Dr. Elizur Butler, a Methodist missionary, wrote home that he had heard it claimed that as many as two thousand Cherokees had died in the camps. Few records enumerate deaths among the detainees, so it is impossible to estimate the number of fatalities; but the numbers were incredible, according to claims made by people who were present at the time. And these people died before the actual Trail of Tears began.
Once the Cherokees were marched to Ross’ Landing in Tennessee, the 14 removal camps in Georgia were no longer needed, so they were closed and the soldiers and militia were dismissed. The abandoned forts with their raw pine construction were pillaged by locals, who helped themselves to the lumber for their own building purposes. Thus, most vestiges of the removal forts disappeared in time.
Because of the temporary use of the forts, little is left of them, even when archeologists and historians comb the records and potential sites to pinpoint the exact locations of the structures. Existing records have led to marking he sites where the forts may have been located. For example, Ft. Hetzel in Gilmer County is marked by a Georgia-shaped slab of marble beside I-515 in East Ellijay, Georgia.
Ft. Hetzel “evacuation” site is marked as a result of an educated guess.
A Pickens County, Georgia, resident recalled seeing the remains of Fort Newnan when he was a child. In 1848 the Antioch Baptist Church was organized in one of the old buildings remaining in the Fort Newnan location and met there for several years. A cemetery was located outside the walls of the fort, but the grave markers have long since disappeared. No one knows if those were the graves of Cherokee captives held at Fort Newman.
There is no longer a possibility of locating the site of the Camp at Chastain’s. The stockade has long been submerged beneath Lake Blue Ridge.
Fort Means has been the subject of intense research by members of the Georgia Trail of Tears Association for over twenty years. A recent breakthrough has determined the exact location of the Bartow County stockade. Early documents describing the fort’s position near various roads and private properties led researchers to overlay current maps and the early descriptions and have finally found the exact spot. Pinpointing the site of this and other removal forts is crucial for their being accepted as destinations on the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail. The National Park Service has created 19 historic trails in various U.S. locations, and the Trail of Tears is number 19. Stringent requirements by the Park Service for historical proof of authenticity of locations makes this Fort Means discovery a cause for celebration for members of the Georgia Trail of Tears Association, whose responsibility it is to verify sites within the state of Georgia to be included on the national trail.
The location of Fort Cummings has been indicated by a bronze marker attached to a bolder. The marker contains the following words:
On this site stood Fort Cummings
Known as the old Cherokee Indian stockade
Built 1838
Capt. Samuel Farris, Commanding the Georgia Volunteers
Here they guarded the Indians until their removal West
Erected 1915
by the William Marsh Chapter
Daughters of the American Revolution
Unfortunately the Ft. Cumming bronze marker has been stolen.
An 1895 article in the Savannah Morning News detailed the removal of one of the Georgia forts:
“The old fort at Buffington in Cherokee County is soon to be removed to Grant Park in Atlanta, and put upon exhibition as one of the relics of the past. It is one of the last remainders of the Indians, and will be preserved and treasured as a memento of the history of the country. The old weather-beaten building has stood the storm of more than half a century alone, and neglected, but now is to be vested with historic interest and gazed upon by thousands as one of the wonders of the age. Already research is being made concerning the past history of ‘the old fort,’ as everything connected with it is of interest to the public.” The article goes on to say that a history of the fort and others like it would be written, based on “reliable authority” and placed within the build to preserve its “true history” and “the use made of it [the fort] in the removal of the Indians from this country.” One of the reliable authorities for the history was an elderly Cherokee County resident who served as a guard at Fort Buffington when the Cherokees were held captive there.
What became of the old fort after the fanfare of moving it to Grant Park is unknown.
North Carolina has designated general locations of removal forts with state historical markers such as the one pictured above.