In 1700, the river bottoms around present-day Hayesville were home to Quanassee, a thriving Cherokee community whose center was a townhouse atop the mound now called the Spikebuck Mound on the bank of the Hiwassee River. Beside it lay an open plaza for ceremonies, dances, and games, ringed by family homes that included a circular winter house, a rectangular summer house, and one or two small corn houses. Orchards, gardens, and fields of corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, tobacco, and other crops surrounded the town, with a half acre for each person. Archaeological evidence indicates Quanassee was already a substantial settlement by 1550, and most of Spikebuck Mound had been built before the first English explorers reached the area in the 1690s. In 1716, South Carolina officials Col. George Chicken and Major John Herbert met Cherokee leaders there to secure a Cherokee alliance in the Yamassee War, and in 1717 South Carolina established a public trading factory at Quanassee, helping make the town a busy center on the main route between South Carolina's English settlement and the Cherokee towns in Tennessee. Although several hundred people lived there in its heyday, by 1721 Quanassee had only 104 inhabitants as the long Creek-Cherokee War drove many residents to safer places. In 1725, a Coosa war party destroyed the town and killed or enslaved most of its inhabitants. After years of abandonment, a new community was established there before the American Revolution, and in 1776 Rutherford expedition forces camped at Quanassee before razing the Cherokee Valley Towns. When Benjamin Hawkins passed through in 1797, he found nothing left of the old town except open flats where corn fields had once been, though the area continued to be known as Quanassee into the 1820s, when Baptist missionaries came to preach to families living at "Quansee."