Sycamore Shoals and its adjoining Flats was a center of the Watauga Settlement, the first permanent settlement west of the thirteen original colonies, and one of the most significant areas in Tennessee history. During the struggle for American independence, this ground witnessed the organization of the Watauga Association in 1772, the Transylvania Purchase in 1775, the Siege of Fort Watauga in 1776, and the Overmountain Muster in 1780. Established near the Shoals in 1772, the Watauga Association was for all practical purposes independent of the British Crown more than four years before the Declaration of Independence. When settlers who thought they had settled within Virginia learned they were under the royal government of North Carolina and beyond the Indian treaty line, they formed their own government. In May, a meeting of all adult freemen approved the Watauga Compact, the first constitution west of the Appalachians, one of the most democratic documents drafted in America, and a model for similar frontier associations. The Transylvania Purchase, provided for in the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals and signed on March 17, 1775, was the largest private real estate deal in American history. Judge Richard Henderson of North Carolina formed a stock company in 1774 to found a new colony, Transylvania, and persuaded Cherokee chiefs led by Little Carpenter to sell his company 20,000,000 acres. The purchase included land between the Kentucky River and the Highlands south of the Cumberland, which the Cherokee did not own, and a Path Deed between the Holston River and the Cumberland Mountains. Though illegal under British and colonial law, the purchase opened most of Kentucky to settlement. More than 1,000 Indians and at least 600 Wataugans attended the conference.