Tennessee Early History Monument

In June 1673, James Needham and Gabriel Arthur, the first English-speaking men to tread the soil of Tennessee, passed this site while following a great buffalo trail from the Watauga River by way of Buffalo Creek, Buffalo Mountain, and the waters of the Nolachucky to the Indian towns on the Little Tennessee River in search of trade with the Cherokee for Col. Abraham Wood of his trading post at the site of present Petersburg, Va. Needham returned to report to Wood and then set out again to the west, but was killed by an Indian guide. In the 1760’s, Daniel Boone followed the same trail, passed this site, erected a rude hunting camp near the bold spring on the premises, and hunted on nearby Boone’s Creek, where his friend Wm. Beam established the first permanent white settlement in Tennessee in 1768-9. In 1791, Jacob Tipton, son of Col. John, led a company raised in this vicinity as part of Major Matthew Rhea’s battalion under Brig. Gen. John Sevier through Cumberland Gap and across the Ohio into the western Ohio country, where he was killed in a gallant counterattack at St. Clair’s defeat against the Indians of the Northwest Territory. His younger brother, John Tipton, Jr., served under General Jackson at the battle of New Orleans in 1815, later became a Colonel of Militia, served in several sessions of the Tennessee Legislatures, was elected Speaker while a State Senator in 1829, and after his early death in that session received a state funeral and burial in the Old City Cemetery in Nashville; his home at the time stood on this site.

Johnson City, Tennessee · United States