John Crockett claimed this 197-acre tract in 1780, and the Crockett family lived here circa 1792-1794 after leaving David's birthplace on the Nolichucky River, where Fort Lee had offered protection from raids led by Dragging Canoe during the 1770s and 80s. Late in 1794, the Crocketts moved 16 miles to the mouth of Cove Creek, where John's newly constructed mill was washed out in a flood immediately after it was completed, a disaster from which he never recovered. In the 1790s, while the family lived near this spot, Joseph Hawkins, David's uncle, accidentally shot a neighbor, Absalom Stonecipher, while hunting. Stonecipher, shot through the torso, was taken to the home of Samuel Humberd a mile away, where John Crockett treated him by passing a silk handkerchief through the wound with a ramrod. Stonecipher recovered and in 1796 married his nurse, Humberd's daughter Sarah; they had ten children, and Absalom was still alive in 1834 when Crockett wrote about the incident.