Southwest Point

The soldiers here also ran a Cherokee agency. From 1801 to 1807 Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs, Indian agent and military agent for the federal troops in Tennessee, worked from the post, and the Fourth Regiment of Infantry under Lt. Col. Thomas Butler had been headquartered here in the late 1790s. The fort stood on the only east-west road linking Knoxville and Nashville. In 1807 the agency and the trade factory moved to the Hiwassee Garrison, and the buildings served mainly as a supply depot until about 1811.

What the plaque says

Southwest Point On the hill to the S.W., a fort was built in 1791-92 and garrisoned by the regular Army. It was a noted place on the frontier, visited by many travers and emigrants.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Southwest Point State Historic Park — 1.1 mi
  A reconstructed 1797 federal fort on a knoll at the meeting of the Clinch and Tennessee rivers, headquarters of Cherokee agent Return J. Meigs, a state park since July 2026.
• Historic Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary — 16 mi
  The coal-mining prison opened in 1896 after the Coal Creek War ended convict leasing, where James Earl Ray escaped in 1977, now a tourist site and distillery.
• Frozen Head State Park — 18 mi
  A 24,000-acre Cumberland Mountains park around a 3,324-foot peak, made from Brushy Mountain prison lands and the CCC, and home to the Barkley Marathons.
• American Museum of Science and Energy — 18 mi
  The Oak Ridge museum that opened in 1949, when the Manhattan Project city's gates opened, in a town whose Black workers were housed in the Gamble Valley hutments.