Jacob Brown

Brown came to the Nolichucky as a trader, leasing land from the Cherokee and working as merchant, gunsmith and blacksmith. His 1775 deals went well beyond the Watauga purchase made days earlier: two private purchases, one for ten shillings and one for 700 pounds Virginia money, covering what one estimate puts above 536,000 acres. North Carolina treated such purchases as invalid, and after the Revolution he lost his court challenge over the land. He died in 1785, by tradition on a bear hunt, leaving his widow Ruth and their son to fight the estate's lawsuits.

What the plaque says

Jacob Brown About one mile S.W., this pioneer from S.C. settled on Nolichucky River in 1771. Brown's purchase of 2 tracts of land from the Cherokee on March 25, 1775, was made beneath a great oak tree still standing nearby. His sandstone marker reads "Jacob Brown, d. Jan. 25, 1785." The brick house nearby was built by his grandson, Byrd Brown, about 1800.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Unicoi County Heritage Museum and the Erwin Rail Yard — 5.6 mi
  A museum in the old fish hatchery superintendent's house in Erwin, a Clinchfield railroad town where the elephant Mary was hanged in 1916 and Black residents were driven out in 1918.
• Jonesborough Historic District — 6.1 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.
• Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park — 15 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.
• Rocky Mount Museum — 16 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.

More markers nearby

• Keystone Pottery — 1.0 mi
• Blue Ridge Pottery — 5.4 mi
• Unicoi County / Town of Erwin — 5.4 mi
• Alfred Martin Ray, Buffalo Soldier — 5.7 mi