Sycamore Shoals, a rapids on the Watauga River, and the Sycamore Flats were the hub of the Watauga settlements, among the earliest permanent Anglo-American colonies beyond the Indian boundary line and the birthplace of Tennessee. The fertile Watauga Valley attracted pioneers from Virginia and North Carolina beginning in 1768, when William Bean cleared land and built a cabin for his family on Boone's Creek on the lower Watauga. In 1771 James Robertson, who had scouted the Flats the year before, brought his family from the North Carolina Piedmont to the rich valley above the Shoals, and that same year John Carter opened a trading post nearby. Carter's store became so popular that the community around the Flats was sometimes called Carter's. Other frontiersmen from the Wolf Hills settlement in Virginia and the Yadkin country of North Carolina followed, and by 1774 some four hundred families, mostly English and Scots Irish, had settled in the region. Sycamore Shoals was their rendezvous because its shallow water and adjacent Flats made it one of the most useful river fords in the region, and a network of trails connected it to Wolf Hills, Long Island on the Holston, Sapling Grove, Council Store, Rocky Mount, Jonesborough, and Jacob Brown's trading Post on the Nolichucky. Rocky Mount became the first territorial capital of the Southwest Territory in 1790. In the 1770s Robertson and other settlers also came to this stretch of the Watauga in part because they found farm fields cleared and abandoned years before by Indians. These Watauga Old Fields extended six miles from the mouth of Stony Creek to the mouth of Buffalo Creek at the bend of the river, and prehistoric farmers, the Cherokee and others, left behind stone tools, broken pottery, stone mills of various sizes, kitchen middens, and cemeteries.