Daniel Boone

Boone moved his family to the Watauga settlements around 1771, perhaps as a convenient base while he scouted Kentucky for the land promoter Richard Henderson. In September 1773 he led settlers, many of them in-laws, toward Cumberland Gap, but an attack in Powell's Valley killed his son James and ended the attempt. Boone then played an important part in Henderson's 1775 purchase from the Cherokee (Tsalagi) at Sycamore Shoals, which included a corridor called the Path Deed running to Cumberland Gap. Virginia's legislature later invalidated the purchase, leaving his land titles in doubt.

What the plaque says

Daniel Boone 0.2 miles along this road is the waterfall under which Boone hid himself from raiding Indians; the falls were then about 4 feet high. 1.1 mile along the road, a marker indicates the site of the beech tree where "D. Boon Cilled a bar in year 1760."

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rocky Mount Museum — 4.3 mi
  William Cobb's log house at Piney Flats, where Governor William Blount ran the Southwest Territory from 1790 to 1792, now a living-history museum set in 1791 with a reconstructed cabin for the enslaved.
• Jonesborough Historic District — 6.8 mi
  Tennessee's oldest town, chartered in 1779, where Elihu Embree printed The Emancipator in 1820 and a hay wagon by the courthouse started the National Storytelling Festival in 1973.
• Warriors' Path State Park — 9.0 mi
  A state park around Fort Patrick Henry Lake on the Holston at Kingsport, named for the Great Indian Warpath, with an unfinished late-1800s railroad grade, mountain-bike trails and a marina.
• Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park — 9.1 mi
  A shoal on the Watauga River where the Transylvania Company bought about 20 million acres from the Cherokee in March 1775, Dragging Canoe refused, and the Overmountain Men mustered in 1780.

More markers nearby

• Langston High School — 5.2 mi
• Dr. Hezekiah B. Hankal — 5.3 mi
• Colored Christian Church and Colored School — 5.4 mi
• National Soldiers' Home — 5.5 mi