Red Clay State Historic Park

From 1832 to 1837 Red Clay was the seat of the Cherokee (Tsalagi) Nation. Georgia had stripped the nation of its government and made it illegal to meet except to sell land, so the council moved across the line into Tennessee and held eleven general councils here, some attended by as many as five thousand people. A removal treaty put to the council in 1832 was rejected unanimously. Delegations went to Washington, the people divided, and in 1835, while Principal Chief John Ross was in Washington, the Ridge party signed the Treaty of New Echota.

No council met here in 1838. Soldiers collected as many as seventeen thousand Cherokees and held them in camps, and historians estimate that more than four thousand died in the camps and on the road the Cherokees call Nunahi-Duna-Dlo-Hilu-I, the Trail Where They Cried. That March a young Cherokee, Jane Bushyhead, wrote from Red Clay of her fear that "we Cherokees are to be driven to the west by the cruel hand of oppression."

The council ground is now a 263-acre state park. An interpretive center covers the history, and outdoors are replicas of an 1830s council house, sleeping huts and a farmstead. Blue Hole Spring, which supplied water during the councils, still flows into Mill Creek. An eternal flame returned to Red Clay in April 1984, when the Cherokee met in council here for the first time in almost 150 years. The Cherokee honor the ground as sacred, and the park is a certified site on the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail.