Treaty of Holston

Cherokee leaders came to the Holston with grievances: they had wanted settlers off their land, and Blount instead proposed buying the settled ground. Bloody Fellow, a Lower Towns chief, is reported to have said the $1,000 annuity would not buy a breechcloth for each member of the Nation, yet he signed under pressure. He then led a delegation to Philadelphia without consulting Blount, and the annuity rose to $1,500 a year. The treaty barred settlers from living or hunting on Cherokee land and let the Cherokee punish those who did.

What the plaque says

Treaty of Holston 250 yards east, near the mouth of first Creek, William Blount, Governor of the Territory South of the River Ohio, on July 2, 1791, signed a treaty with 41 chiefs of the Cherokee. It ceded a tract of land east of clinch river extending approximately from Greeneville, 80 miles southwest and included the present Knox County.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blount Mansion — steps away
  The 1792 frame house of William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory, Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, where the people he enslaved are named.
• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 1.3 mi
  Knoxville's Black history museum and archive, opened in 1975 in the 1912 Dandridge Avenue house the community bought for $22,500.
• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 16 mi
  The 1935 school in Clinton that sent twelve Black students down Foley Hill to desegregate Clinton High School in August 1956, now a museum with bronze statues of the Clinton 12.
• Museum of Appalachia — 17 mi
  John Rice Irwin's 65-acre collection of moved log cabins and mountain objects north of Knoxville, opened in 1969, with a cabin believed to be Mark Twain's father's.

More markers nearby

• Old Knox County Courthouse — steps away
• Staub's Theatre — steps away
• James Park Home — steps away
• Blount Mansion — steps away