Yoakum's Station

The answer came at Great Tellico in October 1798, in John Adams's only Indian treaty. Thirty-nine Cherokee leaders, Little Turkey, Doublehead and Bloody Fellow among them, ceded a large district of East Tennessee for $5,000 down and $1,000 a year. They kept the right to hunt on the ceded land until settlement made hunting there improper, and agreed that the Kentucky road crossing a corner of their country would be open to Americans. The station remained a Powell Valley landmark: by 1820 it had a school, whose teacher, Michael Miles, wrote textbooks with Walter Evans of Tazewell.

What the plaque says

Yoakum's Station The 1791 Holston Treaty prohibited settlers from entering the Cherokee lands in the Powell Valley, but Tennesseans holding North Carolina land grants moved into the area. President Washington directed the pioneers to leave the valley. Captains Richard Sparks and John Wade read the executive order to the settlers at Yoakum's Station, 1 mile southeast, in February 1797. The Treaty of Tellico (1798) resolved the controversy.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, and the Wilderness Road — 10 mi
  The Claiborne County town below the notch in Cumberland Mountain where Daniel Boone's axmen widened the Warriors' Path into the Wilderness Road in 1775, now bypassed by a tunnel.
• Norris Dam and Norris Dam State Park — 25 mi
  TVA's first dam, finished in 1936 on the Clinch River, and the state park beside it with the 1798 Rice Grist Mill, built for a valley whose families were moved out.
• Museum of Appalachia — 26 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

• J. Will Taylor — 8.3 mi
• Lincoln and Cumberland Gap — 10 mi
• Lincoln Memorial University — 10 mi
• Barren Creek Dam Failures — 10 mi