The Old Federal Road was northwest Georgia’s earliest vehicular route. It began on the Cherokee boundary in the direction of Athens, Georgia, and led this way to Tennessee. Permission to open the trace was granted informally by the Indians in 1803 and formally by the 1805 Treaty of Tellico, Tennessee. This location on the old thoroughfare was a Cherokee settlement known as Sanderstown. It was an early post office and the site of Carmel or Taloney Station, a missionary establishment founded here among the Cherokees in 1821.