Donelson's Flotilla

Donelson's own boat, the Adventure, carried several families, and a second party joined at the Clinch River to make a fleet of about thirty canoes, flatboats and dugouts crowded with women and children. His household included about thirty enslaved Black people and his thirteen-year-old daughter Rachel, later Andrew Jackson's wife. The four-month voyage brought smallpox, hunger, cold, swift water and attacks, and Donelson kept a journal. The party reached the Big Salt Lick, now Nashville, on April 24, 1780. Donelson was shot and killed in 1785 on the Barren River, returning from a business trip.

What the plaque says

Donelson's Flotilla Early in 1779 Col. John Donelson's group arrived here and built 30 flatboats for 300 people to make the 1000-mile journey to settle Middle Tennessee. They embarked on their boating adventure on December 22, 1779. With an hour they wrecked at the mouth of Reedy Creek, resuming the voyage in February 1780. They arrived in Nashville the following April.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Long Island of the Holston — 2.7 mi
  A four-mile island in the Holston at Kingsport, Cherokee council and treaty ground, the start of Boone's Wilderness Road in 1775, and in part returned to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in 1976.
• Warriors' Path State Park — 4.5 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.
• Rocky Mount Museum — 15 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 — 17 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.

More markers nearby

• Douglass High School — 0.5 mi
• Battle of Island Flats — 2.1 mi
• Suffering and Survival — 3.1 mi
• Gov. McMinn's Home — 5.3 mi