Crow Town

Crow Town was one of the Five Lower Towns established by the Chickamauga Cherokees in 1782 under the leadership of Dragging Canoe. In 1792, Territorial Governor William Blount reported that Crow Town lay on the north side of the Tennessee River, half a mile from the river up Crow Creek, thirty miles below the Suck. It was the lowest town in the Cherokee Nation, contained thirty huts in 1790, and served as a crossing place for the Creeks and northern tribes. All five Lower Towns stood on the extreme Cherokee frontier: Running Water was near Chattanooga, Nickajack near Haletown, Tennessee, Long Island Town twenty miles below the Suck east of Bridgeport, Alabama, and Lookout Mountain Town near Trenton, Georgia. By the early 1800s, Crow Town encompassed an area of several miles as increasing numbers of Cherokee families settled there. After the creation of Jackson County in 1819, many Cherokees moved to the south side of the river, and some nineteenth-century maps placed Crow Town near the southeast end of Snodgrass Bridge, where Highway 117 crosses the Tennessee River east of Stevenson. The 1782 site of Crow Town, one-half mile from the confluence of Crow Creek and the original channel of the Tennessee River, was flooded when the spillway gates at Guntersville Dam were closed in 1939.

Stevenson, Alabama · United States