Native people lived in the upper Hiwassee River Valley for hundreds of generations before the first European travelers reached the area in the sixteenth century. Thousands of places where they lived, worked, and played lay along the river and creek valleys, and Cherokee names remained across the landscape. The valley at present-day Hayesville was once Quanassee, a thriving village in the Valley Towns division of the Cherokee nation. In the early 1700s, its core stood around Spikebuck mound on the Hiwassee River, with the Quenassee townhouse atop the mound serving as a town hall, council house, and temple, a public plaza at its base for ceremonies, dances, and games, and family homesteads nearby with winter and summer houses and corn houses. Orchards, gardens, and fields filled the bottomlands, and farmsteads scattered along the river were probably also part of Quanassee. The town stood on the Overhill Trading Path, a main route across Cherokee territory used by English traders from Charles Town, and in 1717 South Carolina established a trading factory there. Quanassee fell to Coosa raiders in 1725, and many nearby settlements were abandoned for a time. By the 1770s, communities had returned near the head of the Hiwassee, though as more scattered farming settlements, and American raids during the Revolution razed many of them. After the Revolution, Tusquittee and Shooting Creek became the primary towns in the area, with surrounding communities tied to them, and Cherokee farming communities increasingly resembled those of southern mountain whites. Stores such as N.B. Hyatt's near present-day Hayesville along the Unicoy Turnpike supported these westernizing ways, and in 1820 the first churches and schools opened while the Cherokee Nation formally organized a national court system and administrative districts, placing the upper Hiwassee Valley in the Aquohee District. Despite these changes, Americans pressed for Cherokee lands, and in 1835 the Cherokees were forced to cede their homeland. In June 1838, most Native people in the upper Hiwassee River Valley were arrested by federal and state troops stationed at Fort Hembree and marched to Fort Cass in Tennessee, from where thousands of Cherokees began the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma.