Marr's Fort

The post began in 1814 as Camp Lindsay, a depot guarding Andrew Jackson's supplies during the War of 1812. Before the removal it gained three blockhouses and a palisade and took the name Fort Morrow, after Captain John Morrow, whose Tennessee militia companies held it by May 1838. Their job was to seize Cherokee families nearby and take them to Fort Cass at Charleston to await deportation on the Trail of Tears. Polk County received the last blockhouse in 1922, and after several moves it now stands at the Gee Creek ranger station of Hiwassee/Ocoee State Park.

What the plaque says

Marr's Fort This fort was built 0.4 miles south in 1837, to facilitate assemblage of the Cherokee Nation for its enforced removal westward. A blockhouse, one of its corner bastions, survives. It was removed in 1932 and re-erected in the yard of the high school at Benton, about 10 miles north.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Red Clay State Historic Park — 13 mi
  The last seat of the Cherokee Nation before removal, where eleven general councils met from 1832 to 1837, now a state park with a council house replica, a sacred spring and an eternal flame.
• Ocoee Whitewater Center — 15 mi
  The Forest Service site on the Ocoee River in Cherokee National Forest that hosted the 1996 Olympic canoe slalom, on a river that TVA dams and releases by schedule.
• Cherokee Trail of Tears State Park — 29 mi
  The Blythe Ferry landing at the mouth of the Hiwassee, where Cherokee and Muscogee people camped in 1838 to cross the Tennessee River, made a state park in June 2026.

More markers nearby

• Nancy Ward — 8.1 mi
• Civil War in Polk County — 9.3 mi
• Cherokee History — 10.0 mi
• Union IV Corps at Blue Springs — 10 mi