Chickamauga Mound

Many people knew this tree-covered earthwork as Roxbury Mound, after the textile plant that later covered most of the Woodland-period town around it. The Tennessee Division of Archaeology renamed it Chickamauga Mound in 2012 at the suggestion of Native Americans. Looters worked over it in the early twentieth century, yet it remains the best-preserved prehistoric earthwork in Chattanooga, and a small eighteenth-century Cherokee (Tsalagi) settlement is documented nearby. See it from the Tennessee Riverwalk near the Riverpoint Trailhead and Lost Mound Drive, as a sight and not as ground to climb or dig.

What the plaque says

Chickamauga Mound Standing 200' to the west, Chickamauga Mound is an earthen mound that comprised the center of a Woodland-period town between c. 350-900 CE. Indigenous people often built mounds during this period as sacred places to bury their dead. This town also contained households, gardens, public spaces, and additional mounds, most of which were destroyed in the early 1970s by construction of the Roxbury Southern Mills Textile plant. Artifacts and historical records show that indigenous people lived at the mouth of South Chickamauga Creek from c. 8000 BCE until the Removal of 1838.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Walnut Street Bridge — 3.5 mi
  An 1890 truss bridge now open to walkers, and the place where Alfred Blount in 1893 and Ed Johnson in 1906 were lynched, the case that led to the Supreme Court's only criminal trial.
• Tennessee Aquarium — 3.8 mi
  A river-themed aquarium that opened on May 1, 1992, on the Chattanooga bank where John Ross kept a trading post, tracing a raindrop from the Appalachians to the Gulf.
• Ross's Landing — 4.0 mi
  The Tennessee River landing where Chattanooga began and where Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee people were put on boats and ferried out in 1837 and 1838.
• Bessie Smith Cultural Center — 4.1 mi
  Chattanooga's African American museum and performance hall on the old Ninth Street, named for the Empress of the Blues, who started out singing for change on that same street.

More markers nearby

• Mary Walker — 3.1 mi
• Tennessee Valley Railroad and Museum — 3.4 mi
• Occupied Chattanooga (Northshore) — 3.5 mi
• Joe Engel — 3.5 mi